Creative, brave, resilient, these are all words we cherish for our daughters, our best friends, our coworkers, all those who have faced any sort of technical or scientific challenge and wondered if they were up to it. Rackspace sponsored at table at the GirlStart Game Changers Luncheon yesterday and we managed to overflow one table to another. We had a great time!
Girlstart is an Austin-based organization that offers after-school and summer camps for girls to try science, technology, engineering, and math through fun experiments and solving real problems. We had a great time listening to Mythbuster’s Kari Byron talk about her journey to science ed TV from sculptor to tester of myths. One especially grabbing tale was a test for the smell of fear in a glass coffin trapped with a mass amount of crawling scorpions.
One story of hers that stuck with me was how she got her start with special effects work in the M5 studio, owned by Jamie Hyneman. A friend encouraged her to go see what special effects were all about, thinking there was more money in movie-making artisan work than other starving artist outlets. She was so inspired she went back to put together a portfolio and told him she’d work for free so she could learn as much as possible about making effects and movie props. Well as it turns out, Jamie’s a frugal guy, and definitely got returns on his not-too-much-investment!
In listening to her story I realized there’s a parallel to my journey to open source. I was interested in “how are wikis really working for technical documentation?” so I offered to work for free on one. Turns out, that volunteer effort launched me into the career I have now, working on a large open source documentation efforts for OpenStack, the open source cloud. I could identify with the need to be brave, creative, empowered, resilient, and all of those are offered to me while working on OpenStack and in open source. How about you, when have you volunteered for work just to learn as much as you could about the work?