The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

Two speakers and one volunteer at The Grace Hopper Celebration share their experiences at the Conference. Liz Hill was a speaker at the student opportunity lab, where she spoke about how to interview teams as you are going through the interview process. Bushra was a speaker twice and shared advice on what makes a talk good, and how to improve your talk so that it gets a high interest factor. Sahana was a volunteer on Open Source Day and talked the projects that attendees worked on, and the importance of participating at the hackathon.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. It is organized every year by the Anita Borg Institute and this year there were 15,000 attendees. In this episode I talked to three attendees, Sundas Khalid, Chih-yu Chao, and John Kingsly. Sundas is a first time attendee, Chih-yu is a returning attendee, and John is one of the male attendees.

Stephanie Lampkin is Founder and CEO of Blendoor. Stephanie was named by MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 innovators under 35 in the category of Entrepreneurs. After graduating from MIT and Stanford, Stephanie applied for an analytics job at a major tech company but was offered a job in sales instead. After this experience, Stephanie created Blendoor on her own at a Hackathon. Blendoor is a job search platform that hides candidate’s names and photos in the initial stages of the process. This is helping tackle bias issues that can occur in the hiring process. We talked about how the idea of Blendoor was formed, and how she built a team and has been growing the user base.

Cynthia Tee is Executive director at Ada Developers Academy. For 20 years, Cynthia worked at Microsoft leading diverse products and during this time she also served as a mentor for many women. We talked about the ways in which she has helped other women grow in their careers and her work at the Ada Developers Academy. The Ada Developers Academy is a tuition-free program in Seattle where women can become Software Developers and get work experience. We also talked about her perspective on staying at a company for 20 years and how she would approach her career if she was starting it in 2016.

Andrea Goulet is the CEO and Co-founder at Corgibytes. When Andrea was 24 years old, she started a consultancy where she worked with some of the world’s largest brands. We talked about how she leveraged that experience to lead Corgibytes, a company focused on continuously improving codebases through software remodeling. Andrea also explained the process of working with legacy code, and the community she built around it called Legacy Code Rocks. We also explored topics on building inclusive environments in tech and her personal experiences in the field. I really enjoyed this episode because Andrea shares the path to starting Corgibytes as well as the early exposure she had to the world of computers when she was a kid. Show Notes: Legacy Code Rocks! Code: Debugging the Gender Gap Purple Cow by Seth Godin

Sonali Sridhar is Co-Founder of The Recurse Center, a free three month educational retreat for new and experienced programmers. Sonali talks about building a successful learning organization for programmers and how to establish and maintain a diverse environment through a set of lightweight social rules. She also explained what people work on while they are at The Recurse Center and strategies to become a better programmer. The Recurse Center is a very unique experience because it is not a boot camp and there is no curriculum, programmers build their own path to learning.

Yvette Pasqua is CTO at Meetup and has been in leadership roles for more than a decade. We talked about the process of growing and evolving the Engineering Organization at Meetup. Yvette explained key strategies to align the company with new technology solutions and how she involves people from different divisions at Meetup. We also talked about the experiences that prepared her to take on the role of CTO and how she stays up to date with technology trends.

Maithilee Kunda was named one of MIT's innovators and visionaries under 35 for her work on an innovative approach to Artificial Intelligence. We talked about incorporating aspects or characteristics seen in people from the Autism Spectrum to Artificial Intelligence and the different perspective this brings to solving problems in the realm of AI. We discussed the experiments that she has conducted as well as the results. We also talked about the role of Machine Learning in AI, and possible applications of her research. Maithilee is currently a Researcher and Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University.

Tammy Everts is Director of Research and Content at Soasta. Tammy has over 20 years of experience researching the relation between Human Behavior, User Experience, Web Performance and Business Metrics. We talked about what the panorama was like 20 years ago and how it has been changing through the decades. Tammy also talked about biological and neurological reasons that can explain how we interact with machines and how this relates to Web Performance. In addition, we explored topics around the use of machine learning to get different insights from performance metrics, areas of opportunities with third party scripts and the future of mobile web.

Andrea comes from an interesting background as when she was very young witnessed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on the National Mall.This event had a positive impact in her life, and we talked about the role that having a background in civil rights has played throughout her various positions in her career including at Microsoft. Andrea gave an insight to her trajectory and the motivation for deciding to lead the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and work preserving the history of the united states and the civil rights movement. Andrea also explained the initiatives that she worked on at Microsoft to make technology accessible to underprivileged people. We also talked about diversity and the types of activities that can help improve it in the technology field.

Katie Stone Perez is a Senior Program Manager at the Independent Developer Xbox Team. Katie comes from a background in Psychology and we talked about the interesting perspective that this brings to building a team and how to approach product development in the gaming industry. We also talked about independent game developers and how these are changing the gaming industry by creating very unique games that have contributed to engaging a more diverse community. One interesting example is a video game called “I hope” where you are battling cancer. We also explored topics around career development and initiatives to bring more diversity to the gaming industry.

Jackie Luo is a Software Engineer at Nylas and Student at Columbia University. In this episode I talked to Jackie about how she, with little experience and exposure to coding, took on the challenge of writing code frequently, committing to github daily. We talked about the types of projects she worked on and what she learned with each experience, and also about putting school on hold, as she took a leave from Columbia to start a full-time Software Engineering role in the bay area. Jackie is a very driven person, and I learned a lot from talking to her and I hope you will too.

Kiki Wolfkill is Studio Head at Halo Transmedia in 343 industries. Kiki loves storytelling since she was young and we had an interesting conversation on the process of developing a story line for Halo, one of the most successful video games of all time. Kiki also explained how the Halo Universe has expanded to other platforms such as novels, comic books, toys and the challenges of maintaining a consistent story and deciding what to explore in each platform. We also talked about the involvement of fans in Halo and how that affects the video gaming industry. Video games have become more sophisticated and the reasons why Halo is so popular is because of its rich story line, so it was very interesting to learn how this is tied with the other areas involved in video game development.

Emily Xie is a Software Engineer and Artist-In-Residence at Pioneer Works. Emily is currently making art with code, and this was a fun episode because we talked about seeing coding as a craft compared to as an art. We also explored topics around the creative process involved in coding as well as the art projects she has worked on and what technologies she uses for these.

Joy Chik is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft on Cloud and Enterprise. We talked about her career journey that started as an intern at Microsoft in the 90s and how she has kept a growth mindset throughout those years. Joy also explains what a path to leadership looks like and the challenges involved once you are in a leadership position.