Upcoming Presentations

Some good news on the presentation front. Rob Sanheim and I confirmed today that we will be presenting at a No Fluff Just Stuff tour stop in Chicago. We both attended that conference at it's Milwaukee stop earlier this year and were very impressed with the content and presentor's there, so it will be very good to join up for a bit. We'll be starting work immediately on defining what changes we need to make for a presentation to a group like this. Likely we'll be able to assume that the audience has quite a bit more background knowledge than at a Java User Group (JUG) meeting, so we'll be able to get into a lot more detail.

We also have a presentation coming up at the Fox Valley JUG, July 28. There we plan on delivering a presentation similar to the one we delivered in Madison (MADJUG) and Milwaukee (WJUG) earlier this year. It will provide an overview of Ajax and a little detail.

Best Places to work in IT

According to the annual ComputerWorld report, American Family Insurance (my current client) ranks #30 in the country for places to work in IT (#7 in the Midwest). Not bad, not bad at all.

Reading over what goes into the ranking process it seems like American Family is reading from the same script as ComputerWorld regarding 'what makes for a good IT environment'. Not to say that they are actually tailoring their business to this one survey... just saying that their HR guys and the AmFam HR guys probably see each other at a lot of the same conferences.

One thing I am curious about in these criteria is how having females and minorities figure into being one of the "best places to work"? Can I assume that this is because if I were a female or minority, I would feel better about my chance to succeed in a place where others in my profile have been able to succeed? Or is there something else that I am missing here? Being someone that considers himself far from racist/sexist, I would say that it is definitely good to have these people in prominent positions but I don't know that having a female boss would make me like working here more (or less).