There are several things I’ve been meaning to write about. They’ve been started, but then left half-written in Google Docs. So I’ve decided to take a short break and let them sit for a while.

Last Thursday I attended my first Girl Geek Dinner which was held at Google in London. It turned out to be a fun event, and I’m very glad I went: it was great to meet other girls who are geeks. Visiting Google was also exciting. Attendees had free reign at the bar, which offers every brand of chocolate, biscuit, ice-cream, and drink you can imagine. There were also some delightful stacks of Girl Geek Dinner-branded cupcakes to celebrate their third birthday/anniversary:


(There are a few more photos of the Google dinner on Flickr.)

(I learned the next day that I shared a cupcake from the same batch as Valleywag-belle Julia Allison (wait – who?), who had visited Google cafeteria earlier that same day. Exciting stuff!)

After the dinner – for the curious, I chose salmon layered with potato, and french beans; it was pretty good, but my expectations were unfairly high – there was a talk on mobile UX design from Google user experience designer Karen Groenink. She outlined basic challenges related to mobile design, which were: restricted input/output, network latency, data costs for users, different operating systems, lack of critical mass, small keyboard, and so on. It was unexpected that the talk would be focused on mobile, and it’s really interesting to see it becoming more widely discussed (though perhaps it’s not so surprising, as Google Android is being headed in London).

A busy fortnight approaches. On Friday I’m attending dConstruct, followed by BarCamp Brighton 3 (I am preparing something that resembles a presentation in Keynote), and then Helsinki for a Nokia workshop the following weekend. Yikes. Then I’m visiting Oxford, where I will do absolutely nothing for the duration.