The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

Cybersecurity has been around for several decades. With technological advances also come more advanced attacks. Michele Guel, Distinguished Engineer and IoT Security Strategist at Cisco, has been in cybersecurity 20 years. She explained how the panorama has changed, the different types of attacks, and also what the security threats in IoT are. In this episode we were also joined by Mandy Galante, Cybersecurity Educator at Red Bank Regional High School. Mandy has been teaching cybersecurity since 2002. She explained how teaching cybersecurity has changed, the tools they use, and training competitions that kids can participate in. At the end we talked about Cyberstart, a program to educate young people about security through games and challenges.

Managing a large open source project comes with many challenges. Some are about how code is pushed and running tests, others are about the community of contributors. Paris Pittman, Developer Relations Program Manager at Google explains how mentoring is an engineering problem and not a people problem. We talked about the different ways in which they’re scaling mentoring to thousands of Kubernetes contributors and the role of technology in this process. Paris explained how they gathered data and used that to understand the different types of mentoring that can be provided.

Chaos Engineering introduces failures across a system. This helps us evaluate how are system will perform when a failure occurs. Tammy Bütow, Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Gremlin, explains why Chaos Engineering emerged. We talked about the different types of chaos that can be introduced to a system: DNS related attacks, black hole attacks and database attacks. Tammy highlighted the importance of a Service Level Agreement and went over its components. The discussion continued with topics around what metrics to collect for monitoring, incident management, being on-call and tracking down an issue.

Working as a programmer is more than just writing writing code. Emily Freeman, Developer Advocate at Kickbox guides us through a path to code craftsmanship. We talked about what makes great code, and other human aspects like mentorship and networking. Emily also talked about technical interviews, and types of risks that we can take on a job.

Security tools are essential in helping tackle vulnerabilities in the cloud. Liz Rice, Technology Evangelist at Aqua Security explained the capabilities of security tools, vulnerability reports, and the process of deploying security patches.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery allowed new tools and technologies to streamline the process of deploying changes within minutes. Sarah Wells, Technical Director for Operations and Reliability at the Financial Times explained the process of migrating to DevOps and Kubernetes. We talked about identifying good places to start a migration, DevOps and Chaos Engineering.

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Programmers can come from anywhere. Some start coding since they are children. Others learn it even after being in a different industry. Dr. Sue Black, Honorary Professor of Computer Science at University College London, was living in a refuge when she looked to science and technology to turn her life around. Sue explained how her interest in math and in technology lead her to focus on Software Engineering. We also talked about techmums, an organization she founded to empower mothers and their families through technology. Sue also played a fundamental role in the restoration of Bletchley Park, the central site for British code workers during World War II, of which more than half of them were women.

Thanks to Open Source Software, many companies are able to leverage the technologies from each other. This is a the center of cloud computing. Alena Prokharchyk, Principal Software Engineer at Rancher Labs talked about open source projects that she has worked on. We begin the discussion with Apache CloudStack, and then talked about Rancher, a container platform.

In the 1940s, programming was viewed as women’s work. However, as electronic computing matured the proportion of women working in this field declined. Mar Hicks, author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, explained why programming was viewed as women’s work and how the labor conditions in Britain and the perception of computing pushed women out of the field. We talked about the role of programming during World War II and how women were using computers. Mar also explained the impact that forcing women out of the tech field had on Britain’s technological power.

Artificial Intelligence can be used to make music. From coming up with a beat, to creating a melody, artists are beginning to use it. Taryn Southern an Artist and Musician talked about the user experience for creating music with and without artificial intelligence. We talked about existing tools as well as the APIs that are available to create music with AI.

Hospital patients can end up with an infection they didn’t have when they arrive. This leads to complications and sometimes death. Jenna Wiens, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, worked on building a computational model that can learn to prevent infections by determining the risk of getting one. We talked about what data is useful for building this model and the algorithms involved. Jenna also explained different approaches to building a machine learning model for a hospital.

From idea to execution, starting a tech company is a rewarding experience. Wen-Wen Lam, Founder and CEO of NexTravel (YC W15) explains what it took to launch a tech company. We talked about the process of exploring ideas, talking to clients and the execution of building a product. In the early days of NexTravel, a huge player in the market pulled their partnership. This could have meant the end of the company. However, Wen-Wen and her Co-Founder believed in their idea and worked even harder. Wen-Wen explained the process of building the company. We talked about the problem they’re solving in the corporate travel space, finding clients and pricing strategies. We also talked about her experience at YCombinator.

Technologies like Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine make it easier for anyone to manage their applications in the cloud. With decades of experience in managing systems at scale, Google brings that knowledge to the community through its products and open source contributions. Chen Goldberg Director of Engineering at Google Cloud explains the motivation behind Google Kubernetes Engine, also known as GKE. We talked about its capabilities and about what aspects of Google’s Engineering culture are present in it. We also talked about developer productivity, site reliability engineering and open source software.

Containers are being widely adopted as part of an application infrastructure. For existing systems and applications that want to make the switch, they have to migrate part of their infrastructure. Nicole Hubbard, Architect at WP Engine walks us through migrating from virtual machines to containers. We talked about what a VM infrastructure consists of and the reasons why you should consider to use containers instead. Nicole talked about the challenges of the migration and about scaling an infrastructure.