The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

As women enter the technology field they can come across challenges to grow in their careers. Part of these challenges are because there are still not a lot of women in technology so we might encounter biases that affect our development and the tech community. Fortunately, as other women learn from their experiences, they have built support groups and platforms to help other women learn and grow in the tech industry. Seema Gururaj, Founder and CEO of Square Circle, talks about a platform that she built to empower women technologists to become industry influencers. We are also joined by Maya Ackerman, Founder and CEO of WaveAI, and also a computer engineering professor at Santa Clara University. Maya talked about her work in artificial intelligence, and how Seema’s work has helped her in her career. Dima Ghawi, Executive Coach and Founder of a Consulting Company focused on advancing individuals in leadership, also joined us. Dima explained the role of networking in advancing your career and tips to improve in leadership. Dima has two decades of corporate experience at IBM, Intuit, and Merrill Lynch.

As software engineers we are constantly updating our skills and learning about new tools and technologies. Amy Chen, Systems Software Engineer at Heptio explains how she learned to use Kubernetes by building helm charts. We talked about common ways to learn Kubernetes by using the command line interface and later discussed the benefits of learning Kubernetes by building Helm Charts. We also talked about Amy’s side projects which include a YouTube channel called Amy Codes and Ladies Storm Hackathons.

Available on: iTunes | Android | RSS Artificial Intelligence is being used in...

Available on: iTunes | Android | RSS Evelina Gabasova is developing machine learning...

Every 98 seconds a person in the united states is abused. Every 16 hours a woman in the united states is murdered by her romantic partner or ex-partner. Unfortunately sexual abuse and harassment are still very common in the world. Manisha Mohan, a recent graduate from the MIT Media Lab, invented a sticker that can detect sexual assault. The sticker can detect, communicate and prevent sexual assault. Manisha explained the technology behind this sticker and the different prototypes that were considered.

The telecom industry has been around for over a hundred years. From radio, to television to the internet, it is crucial to how we work. Since it has been around for a long time, there are a lot of challenges in how hardware and software products are developed. Heather Kirksey, Linux Foundation VP, joins us to talk about this and explains how deployment of services is accelerated through network services. We talked about Network Function Virtualization, also known as NFV, among other things.

As applications continue to move to the cloud, it is important to have systems that are easy to use and accessible to more people. This is what Bitnami is doing. Bitnami simplifies the process by managing a catalog of ready-to-run server applications, among other things. Ara Pulido, Engineering Manager at Bitnami, explains what ready-to-run applications in the server are and what it takes to design a product that’s easy to use when working on the cloud. We also talked about Kubernetes, and how Bitnami simplifies deployments to clusters with KubeApps, their latest open source project.

Developers are the makers of marvels today. They are the ones that helped make technology and invaluable tool. Abby Kearns Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation explained how they enable developers to be successful, leverage open source tools and be a part of a community. We talked about examples of products that are possible because of open source, collaboration, and the availability of technology.

The company’s culture has an important role in how engineers work. The success of Netflix is in part because of its culture. For example, they give engineers freedom and by doing so, interesting engineering systems have emerged. Dianne Marsh, Director of Engineering at Netflix explained some of the ways in which the culture impacts how products are developed. We talked about developer velocity and how Spinnaker, a multi-cloud continuous delivery platform was built. Dianne also explained the aspect from the Netflix culture that she finds the most useful when running an engineering organization.

Tips and advice for programming interviews. Edaena explains the mistakes she has made at programming interviews and how she changed that. Edaena also talked about how to organize an answer to a problem, and things to consider when applying for a job.

Developer communities play an important role in product development. We learn from each other in developer communities and we help shape the development of the product. Bear Douglas, Developer Advocacy Lead at Slack, explains what a developer advocate is. We talked about her experience as a developer advocate at Facebook, Twitter and Slack. Bear explained how to build and nurture a developer community.

In 2017, sensitive information from 140 million consumers in the United States was stolen as part of the Equifax data breach. We see this happen in different companies for example Yahoo and most recently Uber. Tarah Wheeler, Cybersecurity fellow at New America explains what the Equifax breach was, its impact, and why the breach wasn’t handled correctly. Tarah explained how to set up an effective incident response and incident detection system. We also talked about incident response teams and what they’re in charge of.

Tech conferences are a place where we can learn about the industry trends and projects that people at other companies are working on. We can also go there to speak about our own experiences. In this episode Michelle Noorali, explains how tech conferences are structured and gives tips on talk submissions. We talked about KubeCon, the largest Kubernetes conference in the world. Michelle is co-chair of this conference and she explained the process of creating an interesting agenda and how talk submissions are evaluated. Michelle is also a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft.

Available on: iTunes | Android | RSS In the United States, when people...

Product demos are the theater of our industry. They engage and inspire the audience, and showcase the capabilities of a product. Erika Ehrli Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft gives an overview of how high profile keynote demos are created. We talked about story telling and the technical components of a demo. Erika also explained how a demo team is structured, what they work on, and the relation between product teams.