# Navigating Conferences as an Unusual Attendee | USENIX

<https://www.usenix.org/blog/navigating-conferences-unusual-attendee>

- Host: [usenix.org](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/usenix.org/)
- Saved: October 5, 2014 (2014-10-05T17:19:30Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/b86ad5b28a52/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/b86ad5b28a52.json

## From the page (probably an excerpt, not Jamie's words)

The things that bothered me the most were the questions or statements implying that I didn’t belong at these sorts of events. “Are you here with someone?” Or, “You don’t look like an engineer/sysadmin/whatever.” People pointing out my uniqueness didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. One time I had someone say to me, “Wow, you’re a girl in the data center,” as if I had failed to notice both my gender and the rows of server cabinets around me - not a great way to try and strike up a conversation. While that wasn’t at a meetup, these kinds of comments can be heard anywhere in the industry, and they’re just as off-putting at a conference as they are in a data center.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Same host

- [To Wash It All Away](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/fe7665baf1f1/) (usenix.org, March 11, 2014)
- [Bcrypt at 25: A Retrospective on Password Security | USENIX](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/e705853351d9/) (usenix.org, June 1, 2023)

## Saved the same week

- [Dollar a Day](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/54f9028aa1b9/) (dollaraday.co, October 4, 2014)
- [Etsy’s Trying to Fix Tech’s Women Problem. Why Aren’t You?](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/e57a840bc1ce/) (medium.com, October 4, 2014)
- [The Elon Musk interview on Mars colonisation – Ross Andersen – Aeon](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/84fe0b035c9b/) (aeon.co, October 5, 2014)
- [CDN acceptance testing for GOV.UK](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/ee0f018abb25/) (gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk, October 5, 2014)
- [Aneel Lakhani's Ignite talk: "Unicorns and The Language of Otherness" (Velocity NY 2014)](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d09c8fbbfc50/) (youtube.com, October 5, 2014)

## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.usenix.org/blog/navigating-conferences-unusual-attendee