Why your life doesn't suck

The Women In Technology conference I went to last week was great. It's always good to remind oneself that there are other techie women out there, and even better, that they aren't all shut away in academia... The amount of support available to women in Cambridgeshire who want to set up businesses (geeky or otherwise) is also incredible. Must remember to do that myself some time!

At all-women conferences, there are always amazing examples of women who have overcome huge obstacles, particularly in their personal lives, and who manage to be happy and successful. At the amazing Grace Hopper Conference, there were women who had suffered terrible tragedies (such as the death of a husband) and who had managed to survive them, as well as maintaining brilliant leadership careers, and bringing up clutches of tiny children. Awesome. Their main message tends to be that you can't plan this stuff - life events just happen. It's all very well saying that you plan to achieve X in your career, and then have N babies in 5 years and return to work; but this doesn't work out for lots of people in practice. And that's without taking into account even less predictable occurrences, sudden illnesses, accidents, and so on.

So it's worth making sure your life is the best it can be all the time (at the same time as knowing you have some backup plans lined up for when it all goes pear-shaped). You never know what will happen next, for good or bad. Trying not to get loaded with regrets seems wise - I like Aimee Mann's Jacob Marley's Chain for expressing this.

GHC is only every other year, but definitely worth clearing your diary for. San Diego in 2006, here we come! The other notable feature of GHC is that it is the only place in the world where you can find a few hundred women in computing letting their hair down - really - and dancing. You just don't get that kind of atmosphere in mixed gender conferences.