Author Archives: girlgerms

*tap tap* …is this thing still on?

Why hello there, intrepid internet denizen. It’s been an exceptionally long while since I last properly posted. Nearly 2 years. And *WOAH* has a lot happened in that two years…I don’t even know where to start with summing it up. So in order not to drag everything out, let’s do a quick summary of all the things that have happened… Read more »

Back to Basics – “THE CHECKLIST”

This was spurred by my “Back to Basics – why can’t we get this shit right?!” talk that I gave at CrikeyCon 2021 – in order to assist people fixing these things, I have put together a checklist of basic security items that we should be doing in order to further secure our environments! (Thanks for the idea Charlie!) This… Read more »

Landing the dream job – I went and DID THE THING!

As many of you may be aware, I was recently lucky enough to snag what I consider to be my ultimate dream job – as of 20th May 2019, I started working for Microsoft as a Premier Field Engineer (PFE) in Identity and Security. When I say dream job, I truly mean it. It’s probably been my goal, for at… Read more »

Careful, your contempt culture is showing…

I recently (I say recently…about 6 weeks ago…getting new blog posts out takes a while these days!) came across a tweet from someone I used to follow (who I’m now blocked by) that they thought was utterly hilarious: I, however, did not. I really really hate this kind of joke. And I’m probably more sensitive to it than most. I’ve… Read more »

Women’s stories from the tech trenches – and how *YOU* can help!

(Warning: this is post is LONG!) I gave a talk with this exact title at Ignite the Tour in Sydney, on 14th February 2019. It was a 15 minute lightning talk, and I barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to get through – but something is certainly better than nothing! So I then submitted it as a talk… Read more »

The two words an IT admin should *never* utter…

It’s mid-afternoon. The phone is silent. The job queue is pretty empty. You’ve done the project work you wanted to get done for today. “Jeez it’s quiet!” Don’t ever…EVER…say this. All you are doing is risking Murphy’s Law to come along and whack you up the back of the head with an unexpected hardware failure, or a VIP who’s managed… Read more »

Bring on 2019!

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…2018 (and, truth be told, 2017) was pretty full-on and hectic for me. Being on maternity leave, watching a tiny human continue to grow into the adorable (troublesome!) gremlin toddler she is now, navigating my return to work, going back part-time, balancing work and home… It’s been a fun time. Stressful as all hell, but fun nonetheless! And I haven’t… Read more »

PND, PPD, PDD…whatever you want to call it, it’s absolutely fucking abysmal

PND

Long time no write! My sincere apologies for being so lax on the blog posting, but as you should hopefully be aware, I went and spawned a child process! This explains, in part, why I haven’t been as active as I usually would be. Why I’ve been a bit quiet on here, on Twitter, on Slack, on Reddit, on IRC…I’ve… Read more »

Spawning a child process – from development to production!

      Hands free mum! Sitting at my PC with bub 🙂   A post shared by Jess Dodson (@jess_girlgerms) on Aug 26, 2017 at 8:58pm PDT A warning – this post isn’t going to be technical at all (despite the title!). It’s going to be quite confronting because it’ll go into (somewhat) gory details around pregnancy, birth and… Read more »