Thu, 29 Aug 2002
My Presentation at CMU's GSIA
Today, I spoke at GSIA to a group of 40 Japanese people about software architecture. It was an interesting experience. There were two translators who would translate English to Japanese simultaneously as I spoke. That was a little unnerving at first but I got used to it and learned to tune out the translation. Our industry panel consisted of me and Felix Bachmann from SEI. We had different perspectives but a common theme ran through both sets of slides. It was curious and useful for the students to see two different perspectives on the same subject. Felix worked at Bosch in Germany and so the architecture requirements for an anti-lock brake system or an engine control unit were quite different than the web software that I work on.
One thing that I noticed was how everyone in the class had a totally cool shiny metallic slimline laptop and most had high end cell phones. Those technologies appear to be much more prevalent in Japan though I've never been there so this is a remote observation based on this small tech-savvy sample. Most of the technology that I saw did not look like it was available in the US. Another thing that I noticed was that there was only one woman out of 40 people. Judging from that, it seems that women occupy an even smaller portion of the IT business in Japan than in the US. I believe that the experience was mutually beneficial for me and the class. Now I can turn my attention to some other projects that I've had on the backburner while preparing for the speech.
Posted at: 19:00 | permalink
