Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners – Definitely Does Compute

By Kristyl Gomes (Senior QA, Citrix Online)

“When did you first know you were a Girl Geek?”

That was the million dollar question at the Perforce headquarters in Alameda on December 1, 2011. The event was a Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner and hosted by Perforce in style. The moment I stepped foot in to their space, I was surrounded by pink gleams of light, pink cocktails, pink candy and pink USB drives. Even the Perforce employees who came out in droves in support were ensconced in pink t-shirts. Discotheque meets technology. Quite fabulous.

Perforce is a software configuration management system.  I use it every day at my job to check in and check out code.

Kathy Baldanza, VP of Engineering, painted the bigger picture when she began to speak. Perforce was founded 16 years ago out of Christopher Seiwald’s garage and since then has grown to a 250 strong employee base with offices in the UK, British Columbia and Australia. “Versioning software is what built this company”. What that translates to is an impressive roster of diverse clients including Boeing, NVDIA, Nikon and Pandora. Amongst them is animation giant Pixar, who uses Perforce to version all their digital assets like sound files, art rendering, and story boards. It lends credence to her saying that “Perforce’s vision is for everyone to version everything”.

Curious to know more about the company behind the software, my interest was especially piqued when a couple of Perforce employees told me that they aren’t required or pressured to work late nights or weekends. As someone who’s been on the losing end of many Friday nights and even occasionally a Saturday, I wanted to know how they manage to avoid something that’s been a pitfall for many firms pushing software deliverables to production.

Jason G., a server developer who’s been with Perforce for over 7 years said that perhaps the answer lies in the fact that this company is comprised mainly of engineers. They started this firm, helped it grow and a significant number of engineers have remained with the firm over the years. Augmenting his theory is the fact that until very recently Perforce didn’t even have a Sales division. (So when you read on Wikipedia that as of a year ago, Perforce was licensed to more than 320,000 Perforce users at 5,000 organizations, the numbers look more impressive).

In true Girl Geek Dinner spirit, geekiness was the pervasive theme and Perforce propagated it by getting their own girl geeks to answer the “When did you first know you were a Girl Geek” question. Kathy Baldanza: “My first clue was that I was an overactive achiever as a girl scout”. (She provided physical evidence in the form of Girl Scout badges. Not that a girl geek would ever lie). Allison Banks, Director of HR: “When I woke up on a Saturday morning surrounded by 4 devices!” (It’s not what you think. She was referring to her Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, iPad and iPhone. All with pink covers no less).

Perforce took its evening out with Bay Area Girl Geeks very seriously. From branded USB bracelets and plushie doll giveaways, to networking tools like Bingo cards to product demos and a photo booth, it was buoyed by their girl (and guy!) geeks spreading the word about recent developments, current job openings and work life at Perforce.

I left the Perforce GGD after an entertaining few hours. I learnt something new (folder differences and timeline features via their Eclipse plug-in from a product demo), spoke to some very interesting people (Wendy, a developer who told me that after 10 odd years working for startups prior, Perforce has been nothing short of awesome to her) and I also left with my own answer: “I first knew I was a girl geek at age 8, when I took apart my sister’s Nintendo because I had to see what it looked like on the inside”.