The Grace Hopper Conference (named after a United States Navy Officer and a pioneer and visionary in the field of computer science) draws the most talented female technologists from all around the world.

We can’t wait to mingle with an amazing crowd of current and future women leaders in technology, so if you’re attending the Grace Hopper Conference next week, please come by booth #218 to say hello and find out what we’re up to at Yahoo! and ask about our many great job opportunities.

Because Yahoo! believes that everyone can make an impact, we’re helping to host the event’s “Codeathon for Humanity” as part of its Open Source Day on Saturday, November 12th. This collaborative program is bringing female engineers together to create applications that will help a number of humanitarian causes around the world. We’ll be rewarding tech girls who code to support humanitarian initiatives and goals with Yahoo!’s famous “Code like a girl” t-shirts!

Also, if you’re in India, be sure to check out the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India that is happening next month! You’ll have a chance to meet Yahoos there too.

Participating in the Grace Hopper Conferences is just one of the ways that Yahoo! encourages women to engage and excel in our industry. We also advocate for women to participate in various hack events, we host open Girl Geek dinners, and we offer free leadership workshops for the ladies. So, if you’re a girl and you’re not already an active member of this rockin’ community – please follow our Women in Technology blog come and geek it out with us at an event soon!

On December 4 and 5, in over 20 locations around the world, Yahoo! will join forces with Google, Microsoft, and The World Bank to host Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) hack day events, the a progressive initiative that brings together volunteer software developers and experts in disaster risk management for a weekend-long “hackathon” to create software solutions that can help mitigate or respond to disasters around the world and ultimately, help save lives. During the event volunteers, both technical and non-technical alike, will work together in self organized teams to solve real-world humanitarian problems.

This is the third and largest, RHoK event the partners have hosted since 2009. This year hacking locations will include Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Seattle, in the United States and internationally in Toronto, Canada, Aarhus, Denmark, Berlin, Germany, Bangalore, India, Jakarta, Indonesia, Nairobi, Kenya, Lusaka, Zambia, Bogota, Colombia, and Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Yahoo!’s Chief Technology Officer, Raymie Stata, comments, “Yahoo! is proud to be a part of the Random Hack of Kindness effort and draw upon our history and knowledge in fostering collaboration and technological innovation among developers.  We are looking forward to seeing how technology can give people and organizations the tools to improve disaster relief efforts and help save lives.”

This humanitarian effort is right in line with Yahoo!’s year-end generosity campaign called, How Good Grows, where Yahoo! is encouraging its global community to come together and make a difference through simple acts of kindness..

To help encourage participation form women engineers at the event, Yahoo! and others threw down a 20% challenge at the recent Grace Hopper conference where Carol Bartz was the keynote speaker, requesting that women attend the RHoK events in force. Yahoo! even made a scholarship available to fund one female university student up to US$800 to attend the event.  To enter, participants were asked to write a short paragraph of no more than 250 words about why they want to change the world.

The winning essay is by Malveeka Tewari, a Computer Science graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. You can read Malveeka’s essay here. Meanwhile, here’s a short interview with Malveeka, who tells us she will be attending the RHoK event in Chicago.

What would you like folks to know about you?
I am a second-year graduate student in Computer Science from UCSD. I am working in the area of data centers and (really!) large scale networks. I am passionate about technology, good code, and good food. I strongly believe that in modern Internet-driven society, software engineers can play a very important role by helping to build a strong software infrastructure for technologies that can reach out in all parts of the world across geographic and cultural boundaries. I also am a big Calvin and Hobbes fan.

What got you interested in computer science?
I got interested in Computer Science during my undergrad. I love coding and building software. The thing that I like most about Computer Science is the excitement that it holds, the exponential pace at which teechnology improves and changes. There is always something new that you can learn about. I just find the pace and the rhythm in CS very compelling.

How did you learn of the Yahoo! Developer Network scholarship?

I had met Avni Khatri and Natalia Vinnik from Yahoo during the Sahana codeathon at Grace Hopper Conference this year. Natalia and I had worked together on some of the bugs and submitted a patch together. A few days back, Avni had sent out a post on devchix (which is a group of women software engineers, hackers, and coders) mentioning the RHoK challenge and also the Yahoo scholarship. That’s how I came to know of YDN scholarship for the RHoK challenge.

Then Natalia mailed me as well, insisting that I apply. And I am really glad that I took her advice and applied. I wasn’t really expecting to win the scholarship — I was really looking forward to the event and now I can be there. I am very confident that the women engineers would win the challenge hands down! There are also a lot of interesting project ideas that have been proposed for RHoK that I am looking forward to.

What YDN technologies do you find most useful?
I am a big fan of the YUI library and have played around with it for a couple of course projects — and just for fun as well. Of course, I use Y!Mail and am a member of a number of Yahoo! groups. I have also worked with Hadoop products (Map Reduce, HBase, and Hive). These may not be YDN technologies strictly but I know they are supported by Yahoo!

Yahoo! is thrilled and honored to work alongside Malveeka and all of the other inspiring socially-motivated coders that will come together at RHoK this weekend to make an impact on disaster relief efforts and make the world a better place.

By Yahoo! Women in Tech

Encouraging girls to consider careers in tech

Imagine that there was a technology program designed just for girls. Techbridge did, and developed a program to introduce girls to various applications of technology and to encourage them to consider careers in technical and scientific fields. The program offers a deep set of services including: after school and summer programs in girls-only environments, career exploration through field trips, interactions with role models, and academic and career guidance. Techbridge is an outreach program of the Chabot Space & Science Center.

Finding your inner geek through play

The day at Yahoo! was packed with activities, beginning with an encouraging welcome by Yahoo! Women-in-Tech volunteer role models. After an icebreaker on Yahoo! trivia, the girls divided into smaller groups for three fun and challenging technical activities.

The Internet Safety game taught the girls important information about how to safely navigate the Web. The Finding your Fish activity helped girls discover how search engines retrieve information. By playing a fishing game similar to Battleship, the girls were able to explore three different types of searching.

By the end of the Algorithm Work Out activity, our guests were able to write their own algorithms for doing a host of callisthenic exercises including jumping jacks, sit ups, leg raises and crab walks.

When I grow up, I want to work at Yahoo!

After a lunch break, the teams launched into a scavenger hunt of special Yahoo! landmarks.

Girls criss-crossed Yahoo!’s vast Sunnyvale campus to check email at the purple cow, learn about assistive technology at the Yahoo! accessibility lab, find Carol Bartz’s cube, discover Mario Land, and more. In addition to getting their run of the Yahoo! campus, the girls were able to meet a broad range of special Yahoos including: Yahoo! Chief Information Office (and K-12 event photographer) Mike Kirwan, Yahoo! Developer Network Managing Editor Havi Hoffman, President of Yahoo! Women-in-Tech Karolina Buchner, and Head of Yahoo! Labs Prabhakar Raghavan,

At the close of the day, the girls shared their favorite memories and let out a collective Yahoooooooo! yodel. Their energy, spirit, and enthusiasm made this event a blast for all. We sent the Lincoln girls home with personalized gold stars, reusable purple goodie bags, and a lifetime of Yahoo! love.

Julie Shin Choi & Shannyn Timrott
Yahoo! Women-in-Tech, K-12 Program