A podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech.
Hosted by Edaena Salinas, Software Engineer at Microsoft.
Website: wit.fm
In this episode I spoke to Sarah Bird, Engineering Lead at Microsoft. We talked about what responsible AI is and its main components and best practices. Sarah also explained what generative AI is and example metrics to evaluate systems that use it. At the end we talked about existing tools that can assist in developing AI systems.
This episode is part of a series of shows featuring speakers at Microsoft Build, an annual technical conference by Microsoft. Thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the show and letting me attend the event in May 2023.
In this episode I spoke to Shruti Pathak, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft. We talked about optimizing web applications by using Redis cache and things to consider to make it secure. Shruti also explained what in-memory databases are and how they improve performance. At the end we also talked about the program manager and her experience transitioning from a software development role.
This episode is part of a series of shows featuring speakers at Microsoft Build, an annual technical conference by Microsoft. Thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the show and letting me attend the event in May 2023.
In this episode I spoke to Laura Jiang, Product Manager at Microsoft. Laura talked about what DevOps is and security vulnerabilities in this area. Laura also explained how to dentify and address security threats within the GitHub ecosystem.
This episode is part of a series of shows featuring speakers at Microsoft Build, an annual technical conference by Microsoft. Thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the show and letting me attend the event in May 2023.
In this episode I Kathleen Dollard, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft. Kathleen has been writing software in .NET and other Microsoft technologies for over 20 years. We talked about how systems have evolved and how the process of developing software has improved. Kathleen also talked about different programming languages such as C#, F# and Visual Basic.
This episode is part of a series of shows featuring speakers at Microsoft Build, an annual technical conference by Microsoft. Thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the show and letting me attend the event in May 2023.
Mia Reyes, Director of Foundational Security at Microsoft started working in tech after several years of experience in foreign policy. We talked about how her past experience relates to her role in security product management. Mia also gave a general overview on what built in security is and examples of common vulnerabilities. Mia also talked about challenges she’s faced throughout her career and how she’s tackled them.
This episode is part of a series of shows featuring speakers at Microsoft Build, an annual technical conference by Microsoft. Thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the show and letting me attend the event in May 2023.
There are different roles related to the execution of a project. Some examples are: program manager, project manager, and product manager. Jhansi Reddy, Principal Technical Program Manager at Microsoft, explained the differences between these roles. We also talked about how to transition from a developer role into a program manager role. Other topics that were covered are: conflict resolution and building trust with customers.
I’m Edaena Salinas, software engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show, a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm
There are different roles related to the execution of a project. Some examples are: program manager, project manager, and product manager. Jhansi Reddy, Principal Technical Program Manager at Microsoft, explained the differences between these roles. We also talked about how to transition from a developer role into a program manager role. Other topics that were covered are: conflict resolution and building trust with customers.
ES:
You are in program management- So first I want to begin talking about the space. In your opinion is there a difference between the roles Program Manager, Project Manager, Product Manager..?
JR:
I would say yes, there is a difference between the roles, but ultimately it depends on the company. I think various organizations have this role defined slightly differently, but I can share with you what I think these different roles mean.
Product Management- By definition, product managers own the success of the product throughout the product lifecycle, they manage the end-to-end product.
Project Management- Project Managers tend to focus more on the execution aspect. They might have less facetime with customers, but we see many project managers working on large projects with lots of dependencies.
Program Management– A Program Manager is the liaison between customers and engineering. They work on how things are implemented; they are also involved in prioritization and delivery of features and are part of the core engineering team.
ES:
You come from a software engineering background. From your experience, what is the difference between the Program Manager role and the Developer role?
JR:
There are many differences, but to boil it down, as a PM you are thinking about the overall execution and as a developer you are working on a smaller piece of the whole ecosystem. You may own a feature and go very deep into the execution of this feature, but a PM is focused on all the features and how they work together. You could think of this as a close-up view of the feature and implementation versus a 5000ft overview.
ES:
You mentioned that the Program Manager is a liaison between the customer and the engineering. It sounds like you work with a lot of different people and conflict is often inevitable in these situations. Do you have any advice on conflict management?
JR:
This is a great question- not just for PMs but for anyone working in a corporate environment. Managing conflict is a skill we all need to learn. My approach is to first acknowledge that there will be difference of opinions and viewpoints and I take an ‘Open and Growth mindset’. Consider the way you approach those you may be in conflict with. Instead of something accusatory like, “You did this wrong” or “I think this is right”, go with “can you help me understand…” or “can you help me solve this problem?”. The ultimate goal should be working with the person to resolve the issue; it can also be important to be willing to experiment.
I love the phrase “Let’s try it”. For example, we were working on a project and the project team was getting huge. Instead of having a stand up with roughly 25 people, we approached it with the thought “How can we do this in a different way?”. We tried splitting up the group into different work streams that could have their own stand-ups and ceremonies; by using the word “experiment” when we broached this subject, that made this process much easier. I wasn’t saying, “we are doing this” I was saying, “let’s try it” and see if it works.
ES:
When you are a manager or a tech lead you work with many new teams, managers, and customers. How do you build trust with new customers?
JR:
CSE is a global organization, and we work very closely with new customers on our code-with engagements. Every few months we work on a new project so initially the question is ‘do they even trust us?’. Are they comfortable sharing the problems they are experiencing, do they trust us to deliver, can they work openly with us? I want to acknowledge that in the virtual space its even harder to build this trust. Before COVID we would go to the customer and spend some days with them, whiteboarding, working in their space, going out to dinner with them… Working closely with the customer and getting to know them helps build that trust and rapport. Unfortunately, we don’t get that opportunity right now.
To bridge that gap, we tried some icebreaker activities to get to know the teams, both ours and theirs, better- as people not as programmers. We asked questions like, “What was your last online purchase?”, “What is your favorite drink?”. I found that these activities, as well as genuinely being curious about folks, asking “How was your weekend, how are you?”, really builds trust with your team and for your customers.
ES:
As a Program Manager and being in charge of the overall execution- how do you approach a situation where a team is not meeting deadlines?
JR:
The first thing I would want to understand is why- is this a problem of estimating? When we are doing sprint planning, we are committing to getting a chunk of work done. Sometimes the scope of the user story or feature is not completely defined and there are a lot of unknowns. Perhaps the developer was doing investigations and, in the process, they found more issues or incompatibilities and that’s why this work wasn’t getting done.
I suggest doing a deep dive into the individual user stories during a sprint planning or a prioritization exercise and ensuring that everyone understands that implementation of this story means; what is the definition of done, what is the acceptance criteria, what needs to be developed. I often recommend that first we do a spike user story where we actually figure out what to implement first. Once you figure out exactly the 4 things we need to implement this story, then you can have another user story where you can define what that feature should be. The majority of the time, it’s a lack of understanding on the scope. I would go as far as to say that 80-90% of the time, the reason the developers are not meeting the deadlines is because the scope was not set correctly.
For the other 10-20%, it might be that they need help and aren’t asking for it. In these cases, a one on one with that developer or the team could help to brainstorm solutions. Additionally, involving a more senior developer or SME could help them ramp up or unblock so they can meet their goals.
ES:
Coming from a Developer role to a Program Management Role, how difficult was it to avoid micromanaging and successfully make the transition?
JR:
I would say, per my blog post (link), I made this ‘micromanaging mistake’ initially. When I made the move from dev to PM, I was very close to the code we were working on; code I wrote. And I was going back to my comfort zone, of brainstorming ideals and development, but in that process I was overlooking my PM role. It wasn’t until I separated myself from that and starting moving towards the execution aspects of being a Program Manager that things got better.
Ultimately, I want to be there for the developers to help them organize, but I want to avoid micromanaging. I don’t want to track their process, I don’t want status updates several times throughout the day. Except for during stand ups, I want to give them the autonomy to experiment and implement. I want the details in the design review where the whole team can give feedback; but I don’t want to tell them how to do it. This also boils down to trust; it’s up to them and I trust them to execute well. I also trust that if there is an issue or a blocker they will feel comfortable with me both as a leader and as a developer to bring me into the situation.
ES:
Has having a history as a developer helped you be a Program Manager?
JR:
As a Technical Program Manager, it has been super helpful. I still consider myself a developer, I have the viewpoint of a developer; I can help with prioritization and organization because I understand the sequencing involved in development.
For an example, say there is a feature you would like to implement. You have a UI team and a Backend team. In terms of sequence of events, when I prioritize, I know that the UI team is waiting to connect to the backend team. I can suggest getting the swagger API contract out first, even though we haven’t started development yet so we can unblock the UI team and they can work on integration. Meanwhile, we can get to work on the backend. I can work with the Dev Lead on the right estimations because of my background and I can walk customers through similar work that I’ve done on other projects.
Just recently I was working with a customer planning to do some Machine Learning algorithms to detect text in some forms they are using. They wanted to do full-on ML models, but I suggested we try a quick out-of-the-box solution like an OCR first. I was able to articulate my experience with other customers and those architecture solutions, to suggest a “crawl, walk, run” process. This means that maybe we start with something small, then add more functionality in the next sprint, and so on and so forth. I was able to lean on my developer skills to explain it to the customer.
ES:
Would you say that not having these dev skills would be a hinderance as a PM?
JR:
I would say that it completely depends on the kind of PM you are. As a technical program manager (TPM), I feel I am better for having that development background.
ES:
How does one transition from being a developer to a TPM?
JR:
I can talk through my journey and share some tips. My first question would be: Does your group or team have a shadowing opportunity? I recommend trying to shadow the role you are working towards. Perhaps, for even just part of a project shadow the PM. Join in meetings, observe the day to day, see what it entails, and what activities are they involved in, so you can get a good understanding of what you might be getting yourself into. I would also recommend trying to figure out what “flavor” PM you want to be. Talk to various product, project, and program managers and consider the different industries as well. I would also recommend reading up on the roles. Lastly, I would say, if possible make the switch in your own org or company so that the transition is easier. Like I said, PM roles can vary based on the company, so knowing the team, the products, and how the company defines the role can simplify the transition.
ES:
What about for those just coming out of school? Would you recommend they start out as a developer or a PM?
JR:
Initially I would say if you are not sure, try development first. But ultimately, do your homework; talk to a few folks and try and figure out what is most interesting to you. At the end of the day, what is it that excites you to go to work everyday? Is it the code? Solving the code, going deep? Start as a developer! If you want to think about strategy, collaboration between teams, putting puzzle pieces, maybe starting as a PM is not a bad idea. Follow your passions. You can always try another role later.
ES:
One thing I have appreciated about my interactions with you is your mindfulness, especially in regard to taking breaks and stepping out from long meetings. I know yoga is also a big part of your day. Can you talk a little about this?
JR:
As you know we get digital overload, especially with the virtual experience. That is why taking those microbreaks is so important. To help remind you or keep track, there are a lot of tools available – apps or plugins on teams. Regardless of the tool, you need to make sure that you are taking microbreaks- small stretches at your desk, standing up, moving around- it makes all the difference. Having back-to-back meetings, sitting all day, and not moving is not good for you! And it does not help your focus. I might even say if there are meetings where you are not on camera, stretch then, at least stretch your hands that have been typing all day. If you have an opportunity to take a meeting on your phone so you can go for a walk (maybe even outside!) to get some fresh air, take it!
Sponsors
Customer-Driven Engineering (Lara Rubbelke)
May 04, 2021
As technology evolves, more organizations across different industries are looking to adopt new technologies. Lara Rubbelke, Partner Engineering Manager at Microsoft, talked about how engineers at Microsoft collaborate with other organizations to build technical solutions. Lara explained that through customer engineering engagements, they are able to contribute to real world scenarios and help improve products. We also talked about her trajectory to a leadership role and career advice.
I’m Edaena Salinas, software engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show, a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm
As technology evolves, more organizations across different industries are looking to adopt new technologies. Lara Rubbelke, Partner Engineering Manager at Microsoft, talked about how engineers at Microsoft collaborate with other organizations to build technical solutions. Lara explained that through customer engineering engagements, they are able to contribute to real world scenarios and help improve products. We also talked about her trajectory to a leadership role and career advice.
Lara, welcome to The Women in Tech Show.
LR:
Thank you, thank you for inviting me to speak with you. I’m actually very excited, I’ve been following you for some time and love the podcasts. I love the things you share and so thank you for inviting me.
ES:
Thank you, I’m also really excited to have you on I’ve been meaning to have you on the show for the last few years. I’m glad it’s happening right now. Today we’re going to talk about several topics. One of them is SQL and data. I saw that prior to your roles in leadership, you worked a lot in SQL for those that aren’t very familiar with it, can you explain what this is about?
LR:
I did spend the first part of my career working 100% on the data platform, and I was very deeply focused on SQL Server and so this is back in the late 90s, all the way through the early 2000. Very focused around SQL Server, which is a database management system working with companies on prem.
This is pre cloud, so on prem to help them design, build and manage their SQL Server installations and applications that are leveraging the database platform.
So we did a lot of database development, management, design, enterprise design, and out of those experiences had the opportunity to collaborate with others to build out tools and systems that help scale how you manage, and scale how, you can deploy and provide a consistent enterprise infrastructure. I worked quite a on that bit prior to Microsoft.
I was a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, and MVP, in data platform for a while and then I joined Microsoft where I worked in the field directly with customers to help them successfully implement and build out their systems as well.
ES:
Also, when you were at the University of Minnesota, you were database administrator and this was in the early 2000s. Can you talk a bit about the context at the time?
LR:
Certainly, that’s actually an interesting story. That was how I found my entry into what I love to do and I found my calling, my career calling.
I hadn’t been working in technology much to that point, just dabbled here and there through different functions of previous jobs. While I was at the University of Minnesota I had a role that was managing a Graduate Department for Child Welfare graduate students, and I just saw this need to provide better organization around some of the things we needed to deliver and how we needed to connect across our school, the School of Social Work. And how we needed to connect across to outside stakeholders, outside at the University, and I had heard about this thing called a database. And so I just started digging in to see how I could centralized the data that we were using to manage how we communicate and connect and engage with people those inside and outside stakeholders.
As I started building this out there was further need across the broader school to start migrating systems out of old DOS based systems, so I’m really aging myself here, but out of DOS into a Windows platform, and they wanted to take things forward into a more modern database system. And I had cycles, so I said I had cycles so I said, well I can take this on as a stretch project.
And that ended up where it started with me just building this departmental application for my functions. At the end of the year I had built an end to end system for the School of Social work that managed students from the application and ambitions process all the way through tracking them on their field studies and internships and alumni status. And everything in between and had it secured, with role based access based on different department needs within the school and I just started building out my own knowledge on this and I’d learned very quickly how much I loved this. You know, when you find something you love, you lose time that was happening to me. I was losing time, I would just get lost in in the code and get lost in these designs and I started taking one of the benefits of the University is you have free credits you can take free classes so I started taking graduate level classes on information systems and found I was at the top of the class with people who were doing this as their profession and so it just reinforced that this was my calling.
This is not only something that I lose time in that I love to do, but it was also something that I had a certain talent for. So, from that I negotiated with school to carve this out as a role for me, that there was a need for it. I spent the first very first part of my career just building that role for myself, and building that role within the organization. And I got to a certain point where I wanted to find new experiences and take what I had learned more broadly and continue to learn from other environments and other customers.
So I moved from that into consulting role, where that just catapulted my learning, my career, my passion.
I talked about consulting, in the U.S. we talked about dog years, how human life is equal to 7 years in a dog’s life. Consulting is like that, because you’re thrown into lots of challenges, lots of legacy systems. You have to learn quickly how to learn, and out of the number of years of consulting, Ianded in a place where I was globally recognized for my expertise in data platforms and data systems. Specifically, I had cemented a passion around security and compliance, enterprise manageability. I had been speaking at global conferences etc. That was interesting that you asked about that DBA role because that was really the thing that helped me recognized and helped me find what I love to do and got my foot in the door.
ES:
Yes, it seems also that this experience was what solidified your knowledge in different technologies, right? You have the data side with SQL and databases but also the security aspects of the project.
LR:
Absolutely. And when you do a role in consulting and you’re thrown into certain industries, and I was working in insurance and financial industry, I was working in retail industry and learning about the different compliance requirements, the security constraints. That security demands across these different industries and what capabilities were available within these systems, and how you implement them to help make sure that we are driving to successful outcomes was a great experience.
And you know, as I said, I have a passion for learning and so within that space there was always something new to learn.
ES:
You also mentioned in this part of your career you were already learning quickly how to learn technologies and also in the field, working directly with customers.
I want to transition now to your role at Microsoft because you’re doing very similar things in that you’ve gotten to work with customers and work with new technologies. In particular, you work under the Commercial Software Engineering organization. Can you give some context around this organization?
LR:
Certainly. Just to tie into what you’ve said, I have been customer facing my entire career, and I often joke, my entire life. I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, and my dad owned a Dairy Queen and so from the time I could peak over the counter I was serving people, and serving customers at the Dairy Queen, all the way till now. I love being customer facing. My entire technical career I have been customer facing. Commercial Software Engineering, it’s the perfect place where working directly with customers and applying and learning and building engineering organization comes perfectly together.
Commercial software engineering is customer engineering, and it’s different from consulting where consulting often a customer may ask a consultant come in, take this scope of work, deliver it, and then they might move on. Commercial software engineering is a code with organization. We are an investment by Microsoft into our most strategic customers, to help them in their cloud journey.
We have teams of engineers that code side by side with engineers from our customer. We meet them where they are. We scope out the work and understand what they want to build. Build that into scoped outcome that definition of done, the specific milestones that that needs to be hit in what will be delivered in each milestone. We work together with them on a shared backlog as one team. The advantage is that our customers not only get an accelerated and a safe path on that next stage into and through the cloud, but they pick up more understanding, more learning about how to take that forward.
Whether it is learning new ways to apply agile methodologies or if it’s a new way to apply the technologies, these are things that they learn because their engineers are sitting side by side, and that’s virtually of course in in days of pandemics. But they’re sitting side by side and working together with us. Sometimes pairing up and doing pure programming. Sometimes just working within that shared backlog. But we have one team that is comprised of both us and the custom.
This is an organization that’s globally distributed. We have engineers that are all over the world so that we can work closely with our customers geographically where they are. We have industry aligned skills to help bring forward things we have learned from other customers within the industry, to help new customers understand how they may want to apply some of those practices moving forward, and so this is an engagement model.
The advantage to Microsoft is we learn with our customers. I’d say everything we do is with and for our customers. And that means the customer we’re working with and every customer that follows as well.
That means that when we are working with a customer on very new services or a new approach on a workload that is emerging within the industry or within technology world, we bring that back to Microsoft as well. We share their learnings about what works, what doesn’t. What are the things that are delighting our customers? What are their expectations, and where are we falling short.
We bring that to our product engineering to help them do better prioritization on improvements to have, this wonderful customer voice that helps tat make better decisions about what they want to move forward with and how.
We also will build out accelerator code, so this is IP, that when we work with a number of customers on a certain application pattern, MLOps comes up a lot, machine learning operations, so DevOps for machine learning. And how we can learn how to do certain stages of these workloads. Hardened out what that IP might look like, the IP might be an opinionated approach, it might be an architecture and it could be code. And we use this code with a couple of customers to validate and we might package that up and share it more broadly across Microsoft and beyond to help further the success of future customers. So it’s the most fun place I’ve worked in my career. It is great to be with our customers coding. With them and learning with them and being able to share what we’re learning to help people well beyond just that one customer engagement.
ES:
You’re saying that this organization you get to closely work with some of Microsoft Partners and you’re coding with. How would you compare that to a more traditional consulting approach? What do you like about the code with approach?
LR:
Well, there’s a number of things. First, our customers aren’t paying for us Microsoft’s. As I said, this is an investment of Microsoft into our customers, and these strategic applications. So for us it is different from consulting in that we are truly partnering with the customer. We are partnering around this scoped work that we both have identified as strategically important for that customer and future customers. The opportunity to leverage what we’re learning and build that reusable IP, to help accelerate future customers and to realize that that investment that Microsoft is making into these engagements is a multiplier. That just tends to put things in a different frame of engagement.
ES:
Is there an example of a successful customer engagement that you would like to share so people get an idea of the things that are being built?
LR:
Oh so many. And it’s funny how I might look at success differently than you might define success. So there are certainly the multiple engagements where the customer has been able to work with us and remove risk and reduce time to get to their outcome. And, we can talk about hundreds of customers where we’ve done this over the past few. I also look at successes we are working with a customer who is applying some new technologies or technologies in ways that are new that we see as a patterned approach and because of our work with deep work with product engineering we were able to drive a new wave for them to think to broadly more broadly address this new market.
Recently we’ve worked with a number of customers in media and communications and been working on how to do video analytics. We developed some IP that we can reuse with other customers within that industry that helps reduce the time from, you know, several months to several weeks to implement these systems. In some stages of the system, it’s gone from months to days, to be able to get things stood up and start gathering data to build out models. That’s incredible for customers in that industry.
The other side of that, is that we also took this pattern and understood we had certain gaps in our first party services in in Azure that required a lot more work on the engineer side to overcome the gaps. We drove that learning through deep conversations, bringing the multiple customer examples that were of customers that were doing this same workload, worked closely with our engineering leadership that is building out and designing the machine learning capabilities in Azure, and they have now taken these customer requirements.
We built out user stories, they’ve designed new features or updates to existing features and have these committed in their current plans. This full circle in this particular case you see that our work has accelerated customers to get to their outcomes, it’s reduced the risk, they have more confidence and how to apply the shared learnings from previous customers into their future work loads, and we’ve got some great new improvements that are going to further improve that for customers in the future.
ES:
Before we finish, I want to talk now about your career and your trajectory. You’re currently in a leadership position at Microsoft. Did you always aspire to be in this kind of role?
LR:
No, I haven’t. When I joined this organization, I joined as what we call an individual contributor and I see where Microsoft we have acronyms for everything. And I’ve been at Microsoft for almost 14 years working in this organization for the past six and a half years. I joined as an IC or Individual Contributor, which means, I was just I wasn’t here to manage after about two or three weeks, they had a couple of shifts within then the organization and there was a manager role that had opened up. They started speaking to me about, if I would I be interested in that, and I thought, I’d gotten to know the team over the course of a few weeks. I’d known some of them Prior to joining formally joining the org, and I looked at that as a fun opportunity.
First of all, I’m all in in the cloud. I love application development, cloud application development. This team is 100% focused on that and you know it’s a team of subject matter experts. I just love working in that space of these subject matter experts in core areas of their field, and so I accepted that. Over the course of the years that followed, I just continued to learn. I love to learn. Learn about how to leverage the best out of people, how to accelerate people and the way that they think and approach solving problems.
To the privilege to work with such talented people and to learn with them as well on how to best design how we should organize ourselves, to help with our overall mission, it’s just been a wonderful learning path, it’s been a privilege. But just to clarify, I am a geek at heart, and I will always be. And I think that’s why this particular organization is so perfectly suited for people who like to continue to learn and build their leadership skills, but also stay in the game technically. We take an approach where all managers, it’s we call it player coach, even you know at the highest levels of our organization we’re still engaged with customers. We’re still engaged in the technology, we treasure that. So that has helped me in my comfort zone on taking this path.
ES:
The reason I asked this question is because I know there are multiple paths. Some people have leadership on their mind and they ask how can I get there? What do I need? Maybe I need to lead a group of volunteers outside of work to show that I have those skills. I’ve also heard other cases where somebody identified me and suggested I be a manager, but some people might say, you were a good IC, but not a good manager. How did you make sure you had the skill set for manager? What were you doing once you were a manager to make sure you were doing the right thing?
LR:
That’s a great question. I’ve had some really good experiences with managers through my career that I think I learned from and I took forward. When I started managing in this organization, my manager taught me quite a bit. It’s pretty easy to, just get very linear and just keep driving down a certain path, and one of the biggest lessons I learned from my first manager in this organization was to always remember there are people. There are people at the end of whatever you’re doing.
Whether you’re writing the code or whether you’re making a decision about you know how to align people to certain technical areas. There are always people, and to learn what motivates every individual, what their aspirations are to help support them and provide that guidance. You can’t take that for granted. That was something that I continued to think about every day that there’s always a person at the end of whatever we’re doing, and to have that empathy to put yourself in those shoes and to also listen and understand, what is motivating that person and what support they need. Sometimes it’s as you said, people may have an aspiration to manage, to lead, and finding opportunities to give people you know, an opportunity to try that as it is important. It doesn’t mean that everybody has a formal management chain. Leading doesn’t always mean managing. That’s one thing that we impress here, leadership doesn’t require that you have people that you are managing. So finding different ways for people to start building those leadership skills.
We at Microsoft, also, I would say have over the last couple of years, invested heavily in leadership, training, leadership skills and this has been even for myself having been managing for some years already, going through some of these different types of trainings, whether they’re groups or virtual sessions or just collaborative sessions and mentors, formal mentors and informal mentors, Microsoft really embraces this. And I’ve even continued to learn, and I will continue to learn, make the mistakes, be humbled, learn from them, try and take them forward. These are all things that we at Microsoft have invested heavily, to help our managers with how we work better with the people across Microsoft.
ES:
Well, Lara, thank you for coming on the show, it’s been really great having you on.
LR:
No, thank you, and like I said, I’m a big fan and, I also saw you had Chris Kluwe as one of the people that did one of your 5 Minute Mentors and as a Viking fan and Chris Kluwe fan, I’m like yay!
ES:
Nice. That’s awesome.
LR:
Thank you again for the invitation.
Sponsors
WordPress and Open Source (Helen Hou Sandí)
Apr 14, 2021
Open source software is behind a lot of systems we interact with. One example is WordPress, a system that powers over 30% of the internet. In this episode Helen Hou-Sandí, explained what WordPress is and how it’s used to create websites. We also talked about the characteristics of open source projects and best practices. Helen Hou-Sandi is Lead Developer at WordPress and Director of Open Source Initiatives at 10up.
Marketing and storytelling are important components of product development because they allow companies to reach their audience and share their message. Miri Rodriguez, Head of Global Intern Programs at Microsoft, explained what storytelling is and its role in brand development. Miri is the author of the book Brand storytelling: Put Customers at the Heart of Your Brand Story.
Technology changes the way we learn and engage with content. Throughout her career, Mickey Revenaugh has worked on bringing technological advancements to education. We talked about her experience in the 80s when computers were just starting to appear in classrooms. Mickey also talked about bringing the internet to schools in the 90s and how educational content has evolved. At the end we talked about how big data and artificial intelligence are used in education. Mickey is currently Vice President of Business Development in Global Online Learning at Pearson.
There are many paths to a career in technology. Shobana Krishnamoorthy, Senior Software Developer Lead at Microsoft, talked about her time growing up and learning to code with limited access to a computer. We also talked about her work and trajectory as a Software Developer Lead. At the end, we covered topics around the Grace Hopper Celebration, and open source mentorship.
Product management is a core area that helps us build software products. Tracy Mahnken, Vice President of Product at NerdWallet, explained the different areas of product management. We talked about product experimentation, cross-discipline collaboration and market research. Tracy also talked about important skills to have in product management and leadership positions.
Technology impacts the way we learn new languages. Maya Goodall, Senior Director at Rosetta Stone, explained how different technologies are used in language learning. We talked about Lingual Learning, a company she co-founded to help students learn English. Maya explained the challenges students face and the importance of embracing heritage languages and diverse backgrounds. We also talked about her current work at Rosetta Stone, and how they’re using Artificial Intelligence in tools for language learning.
I’m Edaena Salinas, software engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show, a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show, go to wit.fm
Technology impacts the way we learn new languages. Maya Goodall, Senior Director at Rosetta Stone, explained how different technologies are used in language learning. We talked about Lingual Learning, a company she co-founded to help students learn English. Maya explained the challenges students face and the importance of embracing heritage languages and diverse backgrounds. We also talked about her current work at Rosetta Stone, and how they’re using Artificial Intelligence in tools for language learning.
Maya, welcome to The Women in Tech Show
MG:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
ES:
I want to begin our conversation by talking about entrepreneurship. In 2012, you founded Lingual Learning along with Christy Shelley. This company was later acquired by Rosetta Stone, which is where you currently work.
What was the main idea behind lingual learning?
MG:
The main idea behind legal learning was to help learners at school who are non-native speakers of English achieved parity with their native speaking counterparts.
We built lingual learning ourselves because no one else was giving emergent bilinguals an opportunity to talk in class. We wanted to flip the traditional classroom model where the teacher does most of the talking and put the emergent bilinguals in the talking seat.
ES:
What’s usually the background of emerging bilinguals?
MG:
Traditionally, these students have been referred to as English learners, and we felt that was a deficit point of view, focusing on what the learner didn’t have rather than who they were becoming bilingual, we wanted our language to reflect our beliefs that heritage language has value and can be used to learn the second language.
ES:
Can you talk about some general statistics of emerging bilinguals? I want to get an idea of how big this project was.
MG:
Yes, well, about one in four students. By the year 2025 will be considered an emergent bilingual, and the interesting thing about that number is of those one in four, about 85% of those learners were actually born in the United States. Most people have this notion that emergent bilinguals are recent immigrants. Or they, you know, just arrived to the United States. But in fact, they’re usually American citizen, and they have had the benefit of growing up in a house where their parents are speaking another language to them, and they get to go to school and become bilingual there. It’s a large population and it’s going to continue to grow in the United States.
ES:
So you’re mentioning you’re starting Lingual Learning, particularly to tackle this this challenge. Back when you were starting it, what were the first signs that you saw to come up with an idea and to decide this is a viable company.
MG:
Yes, well, I came from the classroom. I was a classroom teacher and I taught in the United States Spanish actually, so ESL. So I taught in English and Spanish. And then I also taught English as a foreign language outside of the country. These two kind of definitions or points of view for second language acquisition really struck me. In California at the time, there was a law being passed called 227, which was the English only law because people were wondering whether or not students could learn how to read, write and speak in two languages at the same time.
When I left the country and taught English as a foreign language, those teachers knew the answer that of course someone can learn how to read, write, and speak two languages at the same time. There was no disconnect there.
They concerned themselves with how best to achieve that goal. So when I came back to the United States, I actually started working for a large traditional publisher, and it was there that I met Christy Shelly, my business partner. We were having conversations with educators across the nation about how to help their, then referred to as “English learners” because generally, there was something else going on and that was, the learners were expected to learn English, and also subject matter content like math, science, social studies at the same time. Most of the teachers were not trained for foreign language teaching or second language acquisition, so they were focusing exclusively on the subject matter, sort of skipping over the language teaching.
We saw this to be a problem over and over again as we visited and spoke with administrators in the United States. That’s how we knew that this was something that we wanted to tackle. Christy also is an educator, so we both had that mission always in mind, and through talking with so many people trying to help their learners do two things at once, learn content subject matter in English. We knew it’s something we wanted to dedicate ourselves to.
ES:
Earlier you mentioned that to approach this, you wanted to shift the focus away from more traditional approaches, like having the teacher constantly talking to the students.
Can you talk about key differences in the learning approach?
MG:
The traditional approaches follows this idea that if you do a lot of speaking or create input for the learner, they will naturally start to understand that input and then they will create their own output. They’ll start speaking and that traditional view is really based on native language learning. So if you think about a baby and its caregivers and if they are talking and singing and producing language, the baby will learn that language. In fact, our brains are wired for it.
So the idea was that for the second language we could follow the same course of action provide lots of input that the learner could understand and eventually they would create their own output. But what we know is that second language learning isn’t exactly the same as first language learning, and you actually have to give instruction for the second language, which is great, and it’s also viable to use the first language as in teaching, we call that background knowledge.
If the learner has any sense or understands the subject that you’re going to teach them, you sort of create a hook on to what they already know, and then a bridge to the new subject. So in this case, all the learners already know a language, so we can use that as a hook, create a bridge, and help them learn the second language.
ES:
Speaking in a little more detail about this, but I like the analogy that you mentioned of the bridge and the hook. Bringing this back to the company. Can you talk about some of the solutions that you were building at the company.
MG:
For Lingual Learning what we were doing was building opportunities for the students to actually practice speaking. We used particular types of scaffolding, which is breaking language down for the learner in English, so that they could, the teachers could hand over that language and have the learners create it for themselves.
What we were finding is that teachers were so used to doing all of the talking, that they didn’t actually give the learners time to practice speaking. When you’re learning a second language. You need a lot of time for repetition. You need a lot of think time. There’s a lot of mental processing going on, and traditionally the classroom is a very fast place. And teachers weren’t necessarily allowing the students all the time they need to digest new language information and then create it again in new utterances for themselves. So we really wanted to make that easy. We wanted to have a step by step flow that the teachers could follow that they could feel good about. One of the concerns we heard over and over again is: how will I know that my learners are actually talking about what they’re supposed to be talking about? So we really wanted to ease the teachers burden with that and create a step by step flow so that whenever the teacher stopped to listen to the learners, they could know exactly what to listen for if they heard that, then they could move on to the next group, let’s say. But we really wanted to build in that speaking practice time for the learners so that they could digest the new language.
ES:
Sounds like you were building a lot of activities and curriculum and guidance around this, right?
MG:
That’s right.
ES:
How big was the team at the time?
MG:
The team at the time was started with Christiane myself, so it was just the pair of us we actually designed All of the activities and curriculum and then we started working with other people on a contract basis.
We were very lucky people were really aligned with our mission and People gave us a lot of their time for free and helped us think through some of the activities and the curriculum and do some of the writing, but the majority of all of the work was done by Christy and I. We had the good fortune of being able to take our curriculum directly to the schools and work with hundreds of teachers, actually, we got a lot of feedback from the teachers. We learned a lot from them about implementation and because we were so small, we were able to take that research basically that they were giving us and apply it immediately to our curriculum. So we had a symbiotic relationship with the teachers and administrators, the campuses that we were working with. And we were able to take their information, apply it directly into what we were doing, and make sure that we had a positive outcome.
ES:
I really like this because it’s a clear example of you built a company in an area that you have already been working on, got exposure internationally and then. You are basically solving a problem that you are constantly seeing.
MG:
Yes, that’s right. That was our goal. We were trying to solve a problem that people were clamoring about actually. So in the United States there’s another term for emergent bilinguals, an that’s called long term English learners.
And when you have a student who starts kindergarten and is labeled or identified as an English learner and then gets to about the 5th grade and hasn’t progressed in their English language proficiency, they then get a new label of long-term English learner, and we knew that we wanted to help solve that problem. We know that it’s possible for learners to become bilingual. And we know that something was missing and that missing piece we saw over and over again was this opportunity for speaking practice.
ES:
In 2017, the company was sold to Rosetta Stone. How did this conversation start?
MG:
Well, Christy and I knew that we had a mission ourselves in terms of how many learners lives we wanted to affect. So we had a goal and we knew that in order to achieve that goal we were going to have to partner with a larger company or get funding. And that’s because we knew we had actually always had the idea to be an edtech company, and in fact had first started our platform online when we approached our first customer and they asked us for our curriculum, they told us they didn’t have the online infrastructure in their school district to support it that way, and they asked us to actually go back and print out the lessons for them. And so we did, and so that took us down a print road that we were not expecting. We had always kept in mind though that we wanted to be edtech.
And we wanted to be able to, you know, affect more students lives through technology. So 2017 was about five years after we founded, and we knew that it was time for us to broach that subject again. We attended incubators and some other places within the ecosystem to see who might be a good fit for us and the very first person we met was the President of Lexia. So Lexia Learning and Rosetta Stone are sister companies and at the time they were looking for away to reach into the emergent bilingual market. And so it was perfect timing.
We both have the same mission which is to help learners and change their lives through the power of literacy and language education. So it felt very serendipitous and like the right fit from the very beginning.
ES:
One thing I’m also curious about is, when these conversations are starting to happen and you’re both on the same page, and it seems like you are targeting the same goal. Then we have to move on to the next phase, which is how is that acquisition going to happen? What were some things that you and your partner were thinking about in terms of do we need to negotiate? Did you negotiate, or how did you prepare for this situation?
MG:
Yes, we did negotiate and the negotiation process took about a year, so it was not a quick turn around.
We had our legal representation help us with our negotiations. We also reached out to former colleagues who we knew had been through negotiations themselves, so just ask questions and help us think through what types of questions to ask and you know what types of things to look for.
So slowly, overtime, the negotiations took place an honestly every step of the way felt right. It felt good. There was no time where we felt unsettled or thought that maybe this wasn’t the right thing.
It was just a matter of getting the details right, but we really, because of the alignment and because basically of the technology assets that we knew we would have access to, we were really excited about the process.
ES:
Can you talk about some of the key learnings during this negotiation process? You’re mentioning you’re leveraging a lot your network, getting feedback from other people that have been in this situation, was there something that surprised you or that you were glad you were told?
MG:
Oh that’s great. Well, I think the most surprising thing is that negotiations don’t have to be difficult or scary. In fact, it’s you know like minded people trying to reach an agreement so that everybody, at least in our case, so that everybody could win and get what they wanted and for us, because we’re in education, the ultimate goal is to make sure that we have this opportunity to create, you know, curriculum that is going to help the learner. All of us have that same mission to serve the learner. So I think it made these negotiations possibly a little easier because we have kind of an altruistic goal along with the rest of the goals that we’ve got.
ES:
You’re currently senior director at Rosetta Stone. You started working here after that acquisition. They are mostly known for their language learning products. Me personally, I used them a lot growing up, so I have very fond memories of them.
Can you talk in more detail what Rosetta Stone is all about now?
MG:
Yes, so one of the reasons that we’re Christy and I are both with Rosetta Stone is because they wanted to purchase our intellectual property and they wanted to keep us on board to help build out the program.
So we, again just kind of illuminates, our relationship with the company was very good from the beginning. So Rosetta Stone, you know has been around since 1992 and their original mission. It was, you know, very much what our mission is and to help students or learners of any age really become bilingual, learn that second language. For us, at Lingual Learning and Christy and I, in particular that bilingualism helps promote the cause of peace in terms of just being able to communicate with more people, having better problem solving skills and really you know, just getting to know others and understanding others. We really feel that mission through bilingualism.
So one of the assets that we were really most excited about with Rosetta Stone was their speech recognition engine. They have been perfecting that for the last 25 years and using that as a means for emerging. Their emerging technology, where a person can speak right away with the engine and get feedback was what we were trying to do in terms of replicate our activities and all that speaking practice that we had on in our paper base curriculum. We knew we would be able to replicate in some way using that speech recognition technology.
ES:
That’s awesome because just to contrast, when I was using Rossetta Stone, it was basically a CD and you would hear the words and then you’re repeating, but nobody is giving you feedback. You don’t know how correctly you’re saying it, so the fact that now they’re leveraging speech recognition engines, it makes it more like having a teacher right there in person, giving you feedback or someone else that’s familiar with the language, right?
MG:
Yes, that’s exactly right, and that feedback, corrective feedback is really important to the learning process. Actually, to whatever subject you’re trying to learn, and especially so with language.
Being able to leverage that technology and give the learner corrective feedback immediately was so important to us and it’s one of the things that we’re very proud of. We can give corrective feedback and let the learner know exactly what they have said correctly and how well they’ve done it because that’s important to cognition and to keep motivation to learn. And then we can also give them feedback as to where they may have made a mistake, how to correct that mistake, practice the correction and then try again.
ES:
As part of your role at Rosetta Stone, you collaborate a lot more with people from different areas like UI designers, other content creators, engineers, can you talk about what that collaboration looks like when you’re all aiming to build solutions in the space of emerging learners?
MG:
Yes, one of the first things we did to bring all of the verticals together, because this project was new, many of the team members were also new to the company, or they were new to working on this particular project, and so one of the first things we did to bring the verticals together was a design sprint. And that design sprint really helped us understand the vision that we were trying to create, get everybody sort of in the same mindset as to what it was we were looking for and help everybody have a voice on this new project. So that design sprint was really important for us after the design Sprint, we went through another kind of thought process and that was to think about our unconscious bias and create guiding principles.
We knew that we were going to be working with UI, UX designers and engineers and the speech recognition, engineers and developers, and we knew that we would need guiding principles that we could all use on a daily basis to help us when we had questions.
We have four very straightforward guiding principles and they are: to design learning experiences from an asset based orientation. You heard me talk about the emergent bilingual with feel that that language represents our asset based orientation towards the learners. Our second guiding principle, is to design learning experiences in which multilingualism is valued and seen as a resource. We knew we were teaching English and we could do this from a monolingual mindset, meaning only English is going to be referred to or talked about or used in the UI UX. However, because we have this guiding principle,
we were able to make decisions that all of the characters that the learners work with are themselves bilingual.
They come from different parts of the world. Some were born in the United States. Some were not born in the United States, but the thing that they all have in common is that they are all becoming bilingual by learning English. Our guiding principle number three is to design learning experiences in which diverse cultures and identities are valued and seen as a resource. Again, referring to the characters that the learners interact with on line. And then finally our guiding principle for which is to design learning experiences that honor and strategically leverage the school family connection that the school family connection is well researched. And it was something that we wanted to also leverage within our product by providing the parents with knowledge about what the learners were doing and also for the characters themselves to refer to and talk about their own family experience.
There’s a story I like to tell with regard to the speech recognition engineers. We were discussing our artificial intelligence, so the speech recognition engine uses AI to understand the learner and to machine learning through the data to make our algorithms better overtime in terms of how we rate the learner and their speech. One of the questions that came up was: do we train the speech recognition engine to accept only what’s considered standard American English? Kind of a Midwestern accent from the United States, and it was easy to answer that question because we could look directly at our guiding principles, and our guiding principle number two, which says to design learning experiences in which multilingualism is valued and seen as a resource, gave us the answer.
We knew that our learners were coming to us with an accent and that they would pronounce words based on their first language pronunciation based on heritage, language or first language is also well documented. Phoneme blends or accents depending on the first language is well known. So the engineers were able to code the speech recognition engine for those well known phoneme blends and accept pronunciations outside of the standard form. This is in line with our thinking. It’s in line with our principle #3, which is to design learning experiences in which diverse cultures and identities are valued. So these guiding principles are really important to all the verticals and they are a living, breathing document. If you will that we refer to nearly on a daily basis.
ES:
From your experience and having work with students, can you talk about the impact of this key decision? It resonates a lot with me because sometimes people kpep training you to pronounce a certain way and then eventually a lot of people lose their accents with all this training. What is your opinion on this, The impact of deciding to accept words with an accent.
MG:
We wanted to send the message that We understand and know that English is a language that is spoken around the world and that the way that people speak English with their accents and pronunciation is 100% acceptable. We really feel that grammar and syntax is the basis for being understood, and that pronunciation or accents are part of language, and opening up to having acceptance for that was really important to us. In terms of what we’ve heard back from the teachers and the students, it is overwhelming positive responses.In fact, so far we haven’t really had any pushback or negative responses.
It’s been so well received, especially because we hear from teachers and the students themselves that they finally see themselves reflected on the screen. And again, with our design principles we wanted to create what are called windows and mirrors. So we wanted the learner to have a mirror reflection of themselves and we also wanted to create Windows so they could see who they might become.
ES:
Before we finish, I want to talk a little bit more about the senior director role. From what you were mentioning earlier, there’s a lot of guiding the team and then having this principles, coordinating design sprints. From your experience what have been other things that you get to work on as a senior director?
MG:
Yes, it’s been very exciting because I’ve been able to work on the content which drives you know the whole entire project and then all the different components that bring that content together. So understanding and leveraging the adaptive blended learning model that Lexia Learning brings to the table in terms of assessments without testing. So everything the learner does onscreen, everything they speak into the speech recognition engine, every click that they make when answering multiple choice questions is being recorded. And that’s done through our platform called My Lexia, which gives teachers immediate feedback. So that’s been exciting and actually very personal to me because in the education field I’ve been acutely aware of the fact that teachers usually don’t have data when it comes to language proficiency learning, how much the learner has accomplished and they don’t have data that can drive instruction in terms of what exact skill they would need to learn next to help them move to the next language proficiency level. So working on the My Lexia and assessment team has been very exciting learning more about the speech recognition engine and how that work.
We also used our own content management system, so just working with all of these different areas to bring this project to life has been a wonderful learning experience for me and also just personally, you know, the most important project that I’ve worked on in my career so far.
ES:
What are some important skills of somebody in a leadership?
MG:
I think first and foremost it’s listening with an open mind and really trying to understand what the other person is saying. There are different ways to listen, and one way to listen that will breakdown communication immediately is to listen to find holes, or listen to respond, and you know really learning how to listen to what another person is saying, and assume that what they’re saying in their experience is true, taking that in and then rsponding, I think, is one of the biggest things that I’ve learned in the last three years. I do spend time reading books.
I study mindfulness meditation and listen to a lot of motivational podcasts to help me continuously grow as an individual and also as a team member with other people.
ES:
Well, Maya thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been really nice chatting with you.
MG:
Thank you so much. It’s been wonderful chatting with you as well.
Google’s main source of revenue is digital advertising. Sissie Hsiao, VP of Display, Video and App Advertising at Google, explained what digital advertising is and its workflow. We also talked about the role of Machine Learning in advertising and tackling invalid activity. Sissie then explained her path to a leadership role.
I’m Edaena Salinas, software engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show, a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm.
Google’s main source of revenue is digital advertising. Sissie Hsiao, VP of Display, Video and App Advertising at Google, explained what digital advertising is and its workflow. We also talked about the role of Machine Learning in advertising and tackling invalid activity. Sissie then explained her path to a leadership role.
Sissie welcome to The Women in Tech Show.
SH:
Thanks, I’m so excited to be here and thank you for inviting me to this.
ES:
It’s great to have you on the show. I’m excited as well.
First, I want begin talking about technology. This is something that has been a part of your life since you were a kid. One example is gaming, which you have been doing since you were six years old. What was your introduction to gaming?
SH:
Yeah, I have really fond memories of gaming and I’m embarrassed to say that I still am a gamer. I Identify myself as one. My first recollection was watching some kids play, you know, the first versions of Mario on a Nintendo console. I think that was around when I was six. I begged my parents for one and ever since then, I grew up playing video games and that really influenced my decision or actually last minute decision to go into computer science. I thought that using code to create like a world and a story and characters was just so fascinating and very creative and said that’s been a defining part of why I chose this field. I always thought I would essentially make video games someday in my career I didn’t get around to that, but I did the next best thing which is to build products and businesses that support game developers.
Right now I build a lot of essentially a business around helping app developers, not just game developers, lots of developers, but we have a lot of clients who are app developers, who are game developers, help them find relevant users who would love their games. An also help them monetize their games through advertising. I’m really happy that even though you know I didn’t get around to making games in my career, I’ve been able to build great products and services in support of that vertical.
ES:
You mentioned that gaming influenced you to pursue a career in computer science and technology. You also mentioned that it was sort of a last minute decision, what was the other field you were considering in studying?
SH:
My father is a professor in the field of finance, so, it was senior year in high school, I was thinking about becoming a business major for my undergrad, and one day I woke up and I just had an epiphany, which was like, why can’t I go into computer science instead and worry about getting an MBA later, was the plan. The irony is I never got around to getting the MBA, but you know the process was very much a snap decision and again prior to that I had never really written any code. I think lots of girls growing up in my generation were not exposed to coding in the areas of computer science. You know, going through regular public schools here in the US, and so it was a bit of a last minute decision and I have to say a really very very good one because it ended up being a field that really much suits my passions, which is just, I love that technology is so open ended and it’s so dynamic, you know I can think of all the advancements in the past ten, twenty years. Most of the very interesting advancements to how you know how we live, behave, work, all of those things, influencing humanity, being advanced in the areas of technology.
Technology is something that I feel like is such a powerful tool that you know can exponentially improve everything around how humans operate and work every day, bring it to my job right now. Our mission using technology is to help keep the Internet free. An open through advertising through making sure that advertisers can find their users. They’re making sure that publishers who create content can monetize their content so that it can be free.
For users and for users to find relevant services, but also to have access to free content. But it’s just one way that it’s really powerful thing that there’s a free Internet that everybody has. You know equal unfair access to content in a very open way. An again that couldn’t have been made possible without, the technology advancements that we’ve all been building through our careers.
ES:
Let’s talk a bit more about digital advertising first. For people not very familiar with how advertising works, I want to get a general idea of the workflow and some of the pieces involved. I know it’s it’s a very broad field and there are many use cases. Can you give an example scenario of how advertising works from releasing an ad to seeing the outcome sort of? What are the pieces in this technology and in this process?
SH:
Yeah, sure. Well there’s firstly what we call the ecosystem and then I can talk about the steps in how an ad works like the life of an ad.
Really the ecosystem, it is three primary constituents. There’s one group of people, I’ll call them advertisers. Really they’re businesses and businesses what they want to do is they want to find customers. So whether that’s your local restaurant that wants to find customers or a travel site that wants to find customers, there’s a bunch of customers.
SH:
Roughly they’re businesses, and what they want to do is buy ads. The second constituent is obviously the user. This is the user that the business wants to attract. This is the user that’s using the Internet every day. Surfing websites using apps, etc.
And then the third constituent we don’t talk a lot about is what we call the publisher, and the publisher is typically you can think of it as small as a blogger on a website all the way up to the New York Times. A very, very big publishing house, an in apps land. It’s people that make games, but essentially, people who create content, and typically because that content is freely accessed the way that the content creators are compensated is often through putting ads on their content in order to drive some revenue for, you know, the services that they’re offering, which is free content free access to services and apps and games and so forth. So really, there’s a symbiotic relationship between advertisers, users and publishers. The publishers get paid for their space roughly.
And advertisers are essentially trying to attract users through advertising. So it’s a very well balanced and elegantly designed ecosystem and within that an advertiser, let’s just say I am a developer of new yoga app and I want to make sure that people who love yoga, who might subscribe to my yoga service in the app, have access and know about this app because finding a service and finding your users is actually really hard. You want to attract the right users to your app, not the ones who might not be interested, but you also need to evangelize your app and get it out to people. So you might go to one of the tools that we built something called App Install Campaigns and you might say: I have a yoga app, I want to find users, I’m willing to pay X dollars per install. And in our case we’ve used machine learning to essentially automate all of the processes of what happens after that fact. So there’s a lot of parts of ads that involves, like where do I want the ads to show? What do I want that to look like and say how much I should I pay for this ad if I’m trying to drive a $1 install and only 1% of the users will click, another, you know small percentage of those will actually install. How much should I pay and that involves a lot of machine learning and prediction models and so forth.
And also prediction models to determine, for example, who I should not to show the ad to. There are many users in the world who probably are not going to be in the market for a yoga app and it would be wasting the advertisers dollars in showing those users the ad. So process of buying that ad and then figuring out all the pieces and so forth is done through the tools like ours that we provide to advertisers. And that’s what my team builds everyday is how to make those ads really affective. Very beautiful. Very appropriate, very relevant to users, and also making sure that we’re hitting the business objectives that the advertisers are telling us.
ES:
And you’ve been this space at Google since 2008, which is about 12 years. What do you find interesting about working in advertising?
SH:
Yeah, I think the most interesting thing is that you know digital advertising, which is roughly advertising that lives on the Internet. I mean, prior to the Internet, you know I’m old enough to remember that you know advertising was, you know 32 second commercials in between breaks on TV that you were watching some show for 30 minutes. But digital advertising arose as part of the rise of Google and search and models for finding things on the Internet. That might be things that you need. And what’s fascinating is that it is definitely a very dynamic space. So, for example, the product that I talked about, which is app campaigns, we took a very different approach to buying advertising which was basically taking what was prior to that, a very manual process where the advertiser has to essentially manually input what ads they want, where they want the ads to show how much they want to pay for each of the ads, which is very manual, very grunt work involved. Hiring lots of people to push lots of buttons and look at lots of dashboards all the time. And interpret data and then you know two knobs to moving that to a machine learning model and of course machine learning is a huge area of technology. Applying it to advertising and building one of the largest revenue driving implementations of machine learning is really interesting. That’s been one technology change that you know when we’ve applied it to advertising, which is a perfect problem to apply it to because it’s very data driven. It’s very well modeled in terms of the math in what the outcomes you want, but just building that at a massive scale has been extremely interesting, and seeing the results be, demonstrably better has been very gratifying.
SoI would say that digital advertising, even though it feels like it’s been around forever, it hasn’t. And the dynamic part of the business lends itself to technical innovation like the machine learning I talked about, but also Business Innovation. I think there’s new models to be introduced in digital advertising that my team continues to innovate on.
That’s what keeps it interesting. It’s not a solved problem. There’s lots of areas that can be improved and improved in non incremental ways. It improved in much more dynamic and larger steps like the machine learning one that I talked about.
ES:
And Google’s main source of revenue is advertising. I was going to ask you about characteristics of how Google approaches it. I’m getting a really good idea from you. There’s machine learning involved, a lot of automation. I was looking at how to set up app ad campaigns and I did see what you’re describing where it just says you don’t need to design the individual ad, just provide resources, provided text and behind the scenes we’re seeing through this automation, the tools are able to experiment and provide different formats of vets and then measure what works. I’m getting the sense of an A/B testing approach and all this is done on behalf of the person that wants to publish the ad, right?
SH:
Yeah, exactly. As you can imagine there’s many layers of machine learning algorithms in the background, really dynamically trying to figure out how to.
Place ads, and yeah, we’re very proud of this product. I think it’s just a demonstration of how technology can be a new technology that is now becoming. You know, even more advanced can be applied to. I’ll call it a space that had one model of solution which is more manually tuned advertising and really completely rethinking it and reshaping it.
ES:
When we develop software, we think a lot about our end user, but also we think about malicious users and how the tools and technologies that we build can be misused. In digital advertising one of the scenarios that I saw was in the form of invalid activity and I did see that there are also tools that Google provides to stop invalid activity. Can you give some context around this scenario? And why it’s important to look at it in advertising?
SH:
Yeah, sure, I think that invalid activity or a class of spam and fraud and abuse of the systems is an issue that certainly, digital advertising has as well as many other technical systems. I think in the early days of Google, for example, we needed to make sure that people weren’t spamming our search rankings through different techniques to make their websites show up higher, for example.
I think in digital advertising because there is a monetary trade of value because the ads themselves have value and the clicks have value and the conversions the purchases have value, there’s a business that’s willing to value those with a certain dollar amount, there’s always going to be people who then figure out how to trick or provide implementations of the systems that then are more abusive. So you brought up invalid traffic. That’s a technique to pretend like there’s real traffic where there isn’t. Maybe through bots or other things like that, which then causes a payment to be issued incorrectly to non real humans. So those are just examples.
I think that it’s an area that we actually have a lot of systems. Internally we have a whole team of people who focuses on this topic and make sure that when we do buy ads on behalf of advertisers that we’re buying good traffic. That of course relies on lots of again machine learning. Other techniques really smart engineers who are constantly trying to measure where the flow of bad traffic might come from, and what techniques are being used to spoof and then to detect and not for example, render our ads on that kind of inventory.
ES:
Exactly, and like you’re mentioning, this is an on going process, kind of analogous to spam email, where attackers or users find new ways to create different kind of spam email and then we constantly, behind the scenes, have systems learning about this new ways and sort of tackle them and improve these tools right?
SH:
Exactly, yeah, it’s never fully done because there’s always more to do, and there’s always more creative techniques that are being used by the spammers.
ES:
Your current role is VP of Display, Video and App Advertising at Google. What are some important qualities for this role?
SH:
My role that I took on over a year ago now, our mission is to keep the Internet open and free while balancing the needs of users, publishers and advertisers. And we take that really seriously to heart. And so I think just as any leader you have to have a mission, number one and number 2 really believe in it and make sure that all of your goals and your team are aligned behind that.
Specific to Display Video and Apps Advertising, it’s a really broad set of customers. So our display customers are very different than our apps, customers and so forth. So thinking about what kind of products and services are needed to, for example, on the app side, helping app developers find users through app installs. There’s a lot of commonalities to, for example, a display advertiser who’s trying to find a user to convert on their website. There are commonalities, and so finding efficiencies in the team to align behind where they are common goals between the different customer sets. But I think the role itself requires a lot of understanding of the different customers of the technologies. The pivots that we’re making on the technology side between the different products and really embracing that our job is to keep that content free and accessible. Which means that you know on the different surface is we have to be really creative about applying our tools, so I’ll give an example. We also service third party video publishers. So a company like Disney for example, might use this for ad surveying into they’re video content and that requires very different technology, very different business models. But ultimately our goal is to make that content ads enabled so that it can be freely made available to consumers.
ES:
Vice president at a big tech companies of very high leadership role. Was leadership something that you aspired to throughout your career or did this come along as you were in your trajectory?
SH:
I am a first born child of three, so I don’t know if there’s a birth order thing, but I feel that like most of my career, why I went into computer science was because like I said, I just thought it was very creative that you could create services and things and features and games and there was just so much opportunity.
And so throughout my career most of it has been like what’s the next amazing tool or feature or product that I can build like what problem can I solve and how can I use technology to solve it and how can I use technology specially in a novel way to solve it? Which I think is sort of what I would put my stamp on and then the fun is, you know, finding a lot of great people, smart people to build things together. That team and that sense of shared ownership and the sense of building a common goal towards a common goal with a common kind of culture and operating model. And like kind of that spiritual alignment between people. Hey, where this is the goal, we’re going to go solve this. We’re going to launch this. We’re going to take this mountain is a really like powerful feeling. I think overtime as I grew my career at Google, building lots of great products with lots of great teams, I now see my role slightly different, right? I’m not the one building the product personally, I’m not writing the you know specs, or the PRDS, but what I’m doing is sort of a couple of layers removed from that, and so I like to say that my product is the team now, which is like I’m still designing a product and implementing a product. It’s just that the output of it is the structure and organization and goals and alignment, but like all the teams under me have and in my creating an environment where they’re successful where their goals are clear where they’re not stepping on each others toes where they’re challenging themselves to innovate and be bold and take risk. And by setting the culture right so that you know the right values and performance are rewarded.
If I do my job right, then we should see lots of very successful technology product features, solutions being built within my organization, and so I think of my drop still as building. But building the team is super important and I think people call that leadership. I call it like my product is my team because that to me is the best way of kind of taking what I used to do, which is being passionate about building products and solutions. And now like as a leader, being directly removed from that but still driving. So having a ton of personal satisfaction when I can see that my team is achieving milestones and getting great product out to market. I think as a leader you know I’m here to serve them. I’m here to make the environment work for them so that they can do what I did in my career, which I found to be very satisfying personally.
ES:
That’s an interesting way of putting it, how your focus is on getting great smart people to work together, building great environment, making sure people know what they’re doing, why they’re doing rewarding performance accordingly.
We are recording this episode as a lot of people are still working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. What have been some changes or thoughts that you’ve had throughout this time in how to keep nurturing that culture, keep managing the teams.
SH:
The pandemic has been a huge reset for a lot of thing. Just even mentally, personally, like what are the values and what do you take as a priority in your life and how do we think about the priorities at work like what is the bare essentials, the minimum but still, what is the core of what we need to do?
I think it’s brought out a lot of humanity as well in terms of just the empathy that we have to show to each other. As you know, co-workers with different in situations at home. it’s brought us in a way closer together to our remote colleagues, who typically would in the past not be in the room. It’s made us be way more laser focused on prioritization. What needs to get done, what doesn’t have to get done, what can be dropped and more explicit in our communications with each other? But that’s you sort of internal facing in terms of operations in the people and how we’re running the teams.
I think that the pandemic will change the world, you know yet to be clear exactly what behavioral changes will stick versus not stick. I’ll give an example, during the first month or two of everybody working from home sheltering in place, we saw a huge rise in use of mobile games, which of course, you know was translated in parts of our business. But the change in behavior was very noticeable. Very different than prior patterns, and increasingly we’re seeing more usage of to get delivery or local services brought to the home. I think that you know when everything is over and we go back to work. It’s going to be a fascinating thing in terms of what has changed and what will stick in terms of the behaviors afterwards. And I think that it’s times like this where again technology is I already see a bunch of startups being pitched with a COVID lens. I’ll call it on what you know what life might look like after and I get really excited about the creativity of that and like what opportunities are being created right at this moment that you know technology can go help solve for. You know, once you know this phase is over.
ES:
Yes, that’s interesting is about what can become a habit because I know if you do certain things after a certain period of time, it might be a habit. Maybe you stick with, for example, doing virtual workouts. Maybe you drop getting the groceries through your phone. So yes, I definitely agree that we will see some changes in this.
Well Sissy. Thank you for coming on the show it’s been great chatting with you.
SH:
Thanks so much for having me and especially during this really interesting time and I really enjoyed our discussion. So thank you!
Technology and Engineering at Intel (Huma Abidi)
Sep 16, 2020
Intel Corporation is one of the largest semiconductor chip manufacturers in the world. Since then, it has expanded and built technologies in other domains. Huma Abidi, Senior Director of AI Software Products at Intel, talked about the semiconductor and microprocessor. We also talked about technologies developed in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. At the end, Huma explained her path to an Engineering Manager role.
I’m Edaena Salinas, Software Engineer and Host of The Women in Tech Show, a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm.
Leadership in engineering is about driving product development, helping engineers elevate their careers, mentoring, managing conflict, among many other things. Kate Reading, Engineering Manager at Asana explained her path from Software Engineer to Engineering Manager. We talked about her experience in this role and its characteristics. Kate also explained the transition to a remote team because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also talked about her work in the Platform Integrations team at Asana.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, domestic violence against women and girls has increased. UN Women released a report with this information earlier this year. Lesley Nuttall, who works at IBM Security Labs, gave an overview of the statistics for domestic abuse. She also explained how technology is misused to intensify domestic abuse. Later we talked about her article “Five Technology Design Principles to Combat Domestic Abuse”. Lesley highlighted the importance of thinking about these concepts when we work on software and other technologies.
I’m Edaena Salinas, software engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show, a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, domestic violence against women and girls has increased. UN Women released a report with this information earlier this year. Lesley Nuttall, who works at IBM Security Labs, gave an overview of the statistics for domestic abuse. She also explained how technology is misused to intensify domestic abuse. Later we talked about her article “Five Technology Design Principles to Combat Domestic Abuse”. Lesley highlighted the importance of thinking about these concepts when we work on software and other technologies.
Leslie Nuttall, who works at IBM security labs, is joining us today. Leslie, welcome to the women in tech show.
LN:
Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.
ES:
I want to talk with you today about domestic abuse and how technology has an impact in this. Particularly because I saw you wrote an article titled 5 technology design principles to combat domestic abuse before we get into detail about what those design principles are, I first wanted to begin with some context around domestic abuse, and some statistics about it. What have been some recent findings that you’ve seen on this?
LN:
Yeah, so I mean, domestic abuse is basically about control an and it doesn’t discriminate, so anyone of any gender, race, religion, age, sexual orientation can be a victim or a perpetrator.
LN:
But having said that, statistically it does appear that the majority of domestic abuse is a gendered crime. I have some UK crime statistics from 2018 and they showed that 92% of defendants in domestic abuse related prosecutions were actually men and 66% of the victims were recorded as female.
Well, I mean the other bits were that 13% were male and 21% of the prosecutions victims, they weren’t actually recorded, so it is at a prevalent issue. And here in the UK, it’s actually estimated that one in five people experience domestic abuse in their lifetime, but for women that actually rises to one in three.
And in other countries around the world, it’s it’s also prevalent in the United States, one in three women have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner, whereas in parts of sub Saharan Africa, partner violence is thought to be a reality for 65% of women, and it’s just everywhere, and even in the EU wide survey they indicated that 22% of women have experienced violence by a partner. And of course it varies in different countries, but it’s just everywhere unfortunately. And there was a UK news investigation particularly related to Tech facilitated abuse, and that was I think it was at the beginning of the year and they found that there was an 1800% increase in alleged cyber stalking offenses between 2014 and 2018. I think it was so we know that domestic abuse is a prevalent issue, and while that hasn’t changed, maybe the tools of their trade has, unfortunately.
ES:
As of June of this year, there are regions still around the world that are on lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. How has this affected domestic abuse?
LN:
Yeah, you’re right. I mean, it’s what’s deeply worrying is that there was a UN report that came out a little while ago, and it was exploring the impact of COVID-19 on on women and that in particular highlighted a trend of increased abuse. Because basically when homes are placed in lockdown.
There under more strain and that unfortunately exacerbates the situation, and there was another report. I think it was a UN population fund and they assumed a 20% increase in abuse all around the world and it’s become so widespread that the UN chief made a call for measures to address this, and I think he said it was a, and I quote “horrifying global surge in domestic violence”. And some other statistics, here in the UK we have a charity called Refuge and the run the National Domestic Abuse Helpline. And they saw that during lockdown, 60% more people were calling the helpline. And they had a 950% increase in traffic to their website. So it has definitely exacerbated the situation.
But the way that technology is being used to enforce control during lockdown, it may have actually shifted focus. So it’s potentially less likely that perpetrators might be tracking your location or your calendars. But they may be using other techniques more, such as maybe monitoring video chats, or using smart home devices for manipulation. And often victims who are in this lockdown situation have no means of escape or they have limited support during the time. So it seems to be easier for abusers to gain that control.
ES:
What are other examples that you know of about how technology is misused?
LN:
Gosh, there are a lot unfortunately. So pretty much, any tool can become a weapon in the wrong hands. And that’s also the same with technology. Some of the typical examples we give, at home I have a connected doorbell, and within the app I can see who is at the door, and it also tells me of any movement outside. It’s a really great piece of tech because it was built with safety in mind. But I could use it to monitor and track my family because I get these instant notifications the moment any attempt is used to leave the home. So it can be used in both ways if coming and going. And then another example, so when you share your location of your device, it will often,
LN:
I think if not all the time, share your battery level and now that seems like a really innocuous piece of data and it can actually be quite useful, because if you’re suddenly if you’re on public transport, say or driving.
LN:
And your partner sees you suddenly stop moving. It isn’t because you’ve had an accident is because your phone died. But with that small piece of information in the hands of an abuser, the victim can’t escape that relentless barrage of abuse. You know, just by turning off their phone and telling a little white lie that their battery had died.
LN:
Because the abuser will know instantly that they’d lied and that could lead to an escalation in abuse. So I mean, there’s loads of other. There’s other examples could be spyware for surveillance. You can mirror devices so that you can see exactly what the person is doing on their phone or their device with your device.
Bombarding with abusive messages, harassment, social media, financial monitoring, smart home devices. It just the list goes on, unfortunately.
ES:
In that article that I mentioned earlier, you talk about this investigation from the UK and how they found people are reporting their experiencing technology facilitated abuse.
Is what you’re describing right now, the various examples, is this what technology facilitate abuse consists of and what it means.
LN:
Yes, so technology facilitated abuse is basically using technology for malicious purposes and I use that word. I mean, we know that technology is increasingly coming apart of our lives, I mean, and there can be immense benefits in the home to that can safeguard us. It can ease our routines and enrich our experiences.But you can also use that technologies and in a jewel app kind of way they can be used to make the abuser appear or seeing they can know everything. So all knowing and to the victim they can appear all powerful and that makes them feel vulnerable, powerless and they also for that they can’t escape and that nowhere is safe.
ES:
I’ve read different kinds of stories around this. Some of them have been about what you’re describing. Others have been people finding ways to get out of situations like they would order a pizza, and they put a note there that to call the police and that kind of stuff. So it’s. It’s also what you’re saying that there are pros and cons of the technology that’s everywhere right now, right?
LN:
Exactly, yes, and technology definitely can be used to help. I mean, there’s quite a few apps already out there that can be used to help victims or survivors find help or call for help if they need to. But yes, it can also be the other way where our technology is manipulated and that’s basically what these design principles were all about is raising awareness that, unfortunately, even though you have all the best intentions when you’re creating your technology, people will find ways of leveraging it to cause harm. So if you had that in the back of your mind right from the beginning, and you built your technology from the ground up, you know we’re thinking of that kind of bad actor use case. Then hopefully we’ll make it more resistant and you know, maybe even a bit safer people.
ES:
Exactly. In this article you begin this way, you talk about domestic abuse, some statistics, then some examples on how technology is being misused. Then you begin to present this idea of the five principles of products before we talk in detail about those, I wanted to ask, in your opinion, if you thought the companies or the people that developed technology, should they take responsibility of the fact that products that they build are being used to facilitate domestic abuse?
LN:
Yeah, it’s a good question. Because I mean, I firmly believe that, there are few of us in the technical community that intentionally create technology that causes harm, but it’s possible that we’re disconnected from the unintended effects of our creations. And when we started this initiative an we were looking at what’s available to help people in these kind of abusive relationships where technology is being used against them. Like I said, there’s quite a lot out there already to help them. How do I do set my phone up so that the privacy settings are how I would like them? Or you know how? What should I remove? What should I add so there’s a lot of like app like that out there, but that puts the onus on you and me.
The end user to keep ourselves safe. I don’t think we’ll ever get away from that, but I would like to put some of the onus on on. Yes, the technology or the creators of the technology for us to think about that and how we can make life easier or safer for you and me. The end user. So that’s the aim anyway.
ES:
Let’s talk now about the five principles. The first one that you present is promoting diversity. Can you explain why this principle is important, particularly for what we’re talking about, developing technology and thinking how it can be used by abusers?
LN:
Yeah, definitely. So I guess often when we’re developing a new technology, we we have target users in mind, but they might not be the only type of users that actually end up using our systems and often unexpected users utilize our apps or or our systems in unexpected ways. So if we have a diverse design and development team.
That actually broadens the understanding of user habits and so it allows you to have a greater exploration of use cases. Both the positive, the ones that you’re targeting maybe, but also the negative. And in this case it would be. How could it be used by a bad actor who’s trying to abuse, and so a nice example here is where you have location data that’s embedded in images. So if you’ve developed an image sharing app and maybe you haven’t considered that, children might be using your app, so you haven’t put that use case through your system and you haven’t thought about that. Maybe they would inadvertently share that image with somebody and they would then know their location. So in this particular scenario, let’s say we had parent and child who were escaping an abusive relationship, the parent doesn’t necessarily want to, you know, restrict their child from talking to the other parent and maybe they’re doing some homework one evening and their parent, the estranged parent, asks for an image of their homework to help them if they don’t realize the child is too young, maybe to understand the wording used in the privacy settings. They don’t realize that their location is included in that image or they think it’s a photo and then the strange partner then knows exactly where they are and you know they might have to scramble and run away. But if you had someone in your team that had maybe that experience or had read about these principles or had that experience and they could share that with the rest of the team. You would then try and include children in your in your target users.
ES:
The other one that you talk about is guaranteeing privacy and choice. What are current issues that you have seen of how privacy settings are presented?
LN:
Yeah, so this is all about making it easy for us to make active, informed decisions about our privacy settings. So often you might see little small red buttons on there, or maybe they’ll be phrases like advanced settings. And that can be quite intimidating, and it’s also if you have a big large green button or a little red advanced settings. It’s kind of quite obvious which one you’re going to choose and which ones easier and which ones more understandable, but you might not understand the consequences of that choice so, so that’s quite important, so I’ll give you one other point on that aspect.
It’s about your default privacy settings. They’re very important because often when people you know don’t go towards the advanced settings or don’t go towards a small red button, they will choose the default settings and you need to make sure you factor in all these different kinds of scenarios. So I’ll give you a kind of a personal example, but it’s not quite domestic abuse related, but it gives a good explanation of why we might want to have appropriate default settings. So my husband, he went for a run in the local forest and he uses one of those fitness apps that keep track of your running and everything. So we set it up and then he went running through the forest and he and he passed another lady runner as he was going past didn’t think anything of it did his 5K. He came back and passed her again at the car park and then once he got home he showed me it popped up and said oh it looks like you were running with this lady. Would you like to connect with her and because her default settings were set as default everything was open. He could see you know who she was. It could see the links with social media. He could see what group she was in.
She happened to be in a mom’s running group, so he knew she was a mother. She only had a few followers so he could tell by the surname who the husband was on his settings like me. Everything is locked down. Yeah, so she has no idea that he’s seen all that information about her, so that’s just a really simple case where you know default settings, everything’s open. And maybe that’s not the right choice for every every app.
ES:
Exactly, yes, because sometimes I get it that some applications their whole purpose might be to connect and you can meet new people. So if everybody has locked their information, there’s nothing to see. So I get it why some might choose to leave everything open by default, but a lot of times this is misleading or I’ve encountered cases where the option to not share is greyed out and the text is very small and it doesn’t even look like it’s a button, but it’s a button, so it’s like they’re trying to guide you to choosing what they want you to choose.
LN:
Exactly, and sometimes a lot of apps now because of wearables, and you know our smartphones. It’s linking the real world with the virtual world. So yes, maybe having that that social aspect of having openness by default is great in the virtual world. But when that starts to be linked to the real person and I can then see where they live, What Car they drive. Maybe then it should be more transparent about what you’re sharing exactly, so it’s just something to think about anyway.
ES:
The third principle that you talk about is combating gaslighting. Can you talk about what this means?
LN:
Sure, so gaslighting is where a person manipulates someone psychologically into doubting their memories or judgment. So the point here is that if you were able to remove evidence of an action actually happening, or maybe there never wasn’t evidence to begin with, it could cause someone to start to question their memory. For example, if you had a messaging app and you know, maybe you’ve discussed with your partner that you’re going out for the evening with a friend. Is that OK? Are you OK to look after the little one or something like that? And they said, yeah, sure, that’s fine. And then everything goes well. But then if you come home and they start abusing you and you say, Well, you said I could go out and then you look on the app and there’s no evidence at all. That that message was there because they’ve removed it. You know. Then you might, and if that happens over and over again, and it’s relentless and it’s the drip drip, you might start to question yourself. So what we’re saying here is that first of all, you don’t want to be able to change the history or the truth of you. Know the auditing trail without some kind of notification to all who participated in it. So we want there to be pertinent and timely notifications as well as that audit trail so that it’s really clear who was done what, when, so that they can’t try and manipulate you because you’ll have the evidence in front of you that makes sense.
ES:
Yeah, so makes sense. Let’s talk about the next one, which is strengthening security and data. What are some of the ideas behind this principle?
LN:
OK so we have GDPR an that requires that we only collect and share the personal information that we actually need. But the idea here is that that consideration could actually be extended to other types of data. So a car app is a good example whereby it will share all of the car journeys with all of the users of the app ignoring who was driving the car and ignoring also the fact that some journeys might be considered private. I mean even in non abusive relationships on journeys might be considered private if I went to the doctor and I wasn’t ready to share that with my partner.
If I wanted to go and buy a secret birthday present, I might not want to share that with my partner just yet. So it’s about what is considered private and can we give that choice to the consumer to decide what is considered private and also back to the A battery example? You would think that would be a really innocuous piece of data, but it’s not necessarily so. Maybe we should think about more about the data and how we’re using it and the other thing here is that so most of the perpetrators out there they’re using standard functionality. They’re logging in as standard users. They’re not hacking in, and they’re using standard functionality to abuse their victims, basically, and that type of user is not normally considered as part of their security threat model.
So if we start to think of that persona and put into our threat model, then we can start, you know, mitigating those risks.
ES:
You mentioned thread model. I just want to make a quick parenthesis because I know you been working in security. An thread modeling is an important component of security. Can you explain for those that aren’t familiar with it. What it consists of?
LN:
So my role, I don’t really do security threat modeling very much. I am more a troubleshooter you could say, but normally you have personas and you would understand how they could navigate your application or your software or your system and you would try and mitigate that threat.
A lot of the time you consider maybe outside forces trying to get in and you will have your external perimeter firewalls or whatever you have to try and stop it, and then you might have insider threats. People who are elevating their privileges within the system and how can they you know, access the data. How can you ensure that privileges are set up appropriately and you know access control lists and all those kind of things?
So those are normally the two main kind of threats outside and internal, but you don’t necessarily think that people who are logged in with minimum privileges would have the ability to cause harm. And maybe this is where this is slightly different to the normal kind of persona you would consider.
ES:
When I’m trying to get out of this, also that to show that people and companies developing software. have various systems in place. One of them involves security reviews, thread modeling. There are discussions going on. Documents are being made, specifications, rules, analysis of use cases. And this is a good place where some of this discussion that we’re talking about can take place, right?
LN: Yes, definitely.
ES:
Some people might be thinking, well, we’re talking about this design principles, like when is this brought up? When should we talk about this? Who should we talk about it? What is it? Is it just about being aware and knowing they exist or? Can they be embedded in our software development process?
LN:
So I think that could be, I mean the the first step, of course is awareness. If you’re not aware of an issue, it’s really hard to tackle it. So that is definitely the first point. And if you’ve got it in the back of your mind and you find a place throughout that whole development cycle to mention it, or to raise the question, then yes. But you’re right. You know the security threat model is a good place.
When you’re designing your thinking up your personas and your use cases again, a really good place. Yeah, if you have a methodology that you use, you could implement it in there, put it somewhere where it’s quite good, and we’ve tried to help. Because yeah, like I said, the first step is being aware, but then the next step is, well, what do I do about it? How do I go about helping? So what we try to do with the paper, we’ve created a set of questions that you could ask within your your team meetings or whatever you do. Some of the areas you might want to consider and think about, and you’re right, they might fit into different parts of the cycle, but at least you have a checklist there. A sheet that you can start to open up those conversations. An all technology is different. All teams know their own technology the best.
So we didn’t want it to be prescriptive, but we wanted it to enable conversations basically.
ES:
I want to talk now about the last principle that you present, which is making technology more intuitive. I know we touched a little bit on this one when we talked about the privacy and security settings. Can you explain in a little more detail what this principle is about?
LN:
Sure, so victims of coercive control. They live in complex ever shifting worlds. And sometimes they may lack the energy or even the confidence to navigate new technologies. So what we’re asking here is that if all users could intuitively use and understand technology then that could help reduce the risk of the abusers from dominating with their greater technical confidence. I mean either with threats or by installing applications the victim doesn’t understand. So I mean, we’ve seen cases where I think a lot of the time there will be one person in the family who is maybe more technically confident.
And we’ll set up a lot of the devices and the software in the house. They have the admin privileges, you know, they set up your your smart speakers, your smart assistants, your IoT devices, and the other people in the family might not necessarily know how they work. Maybe the wording in when you look online, it’s all really quite complex technical jargon being used and they’re just not confident enough to to understand and tinker with it to understand how it works. So we would ask that you know documentation be accessible. We don’t have to use jargon, we can make it readable to end users, and I’m talking about end user devices and software. You know, I understand that enterprise level, it’s slightly different, but if end users could intuitively, use and understand software and devices that could help, and they could say, you know, I know when I’m going to leave the front door that that particular device will do this, or I know when I’ve moved from room to room and the smart lights come on that you’re able to track it on a device when the smart devices come on. If you know that information you know you can change your habits maybe, or change your or do what you want. You have control basically and another nice example here is making it obvious when remote functionality’s been turned on. It’s not always obvious that, say, a smart assistant has been accessed remotely. You know sometimes it might have a tiny little LED that goes from breathing to solid or or something like that, but we need to make it obvious what’s going on in your environment and you need to understand how it works.
ES:
And just to recap, the five design principles, 2% are promoting diversity, then guaranteeing privacy and choice combating gaslighting, strengthening, security and data.
The last one that we talked about is making technology more intuitive. One last question I wanted to ask you is, I read the article and I saw it was published under IBM policy lab, what is thi?
LN:
Sure, so maybe I’ll talk a bit about the policy lab and why we published it with them. So the IBM policy lab, they’re very focused on providing policymakers recommendations for, you know, all of the emerging problems in technology and background is the IBM has always believed that when you have a big challenge, you really require a practical solution to it, and that’s what they’re trying to do. That’s what they’ve been charted to create, so there focused on the big problems in SoC we presented with. Like I said, we’ve been running this initiative for quite awhile. We’ve been, I think, about a year now where we did all the research.
And so we presented all our findings in the paper, and they completely agreed that this was a practical solution to a quite a challenging societal issue of our time. Really, myself, I work in the IBM security expert labs. It’s called and I basically liaise directly with customers all around Europe, helping them get the best from their security deployments. At the focus of it all is helping others. And that’s really what drew me to this initiative.
ES:
Well, Lesley, thank you for coming on the show. It’s been great talking to you about technology and how this is impacting in domestic abuse and how we can make it better.
Digital journalism enables us to reach a wider audience that traditionally we might not have been able to reach. Brenda Salinas, Audio Content Strategist at Google explained what digital journalism is and its impact. We talked about advancements in audio technology particularly in podcasting. Brenda explained how artificial intelligence can be used to index podcast topics an allow people to discover content. We also talked about several software systems in podcasting and how the field has improved. Brenda also gave an overview about her trajectory in digital journalism.
ES: I’m Edaena Salinas, software engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show, a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm.
Digital journalism enables us to reach a wider audience that traditionally we might not have been able to reach. Brenda Salinas, Audio Content Strategist at Google explained what digital journalism is and its impact. We talked about advancements in audio technology particularly in podcasting. Brenda explained how artificial intelligence can be used to index podcast topics an allow people to discover content. We also talked about several software systems in podcasting and how the field has improved. Brenda also gave an overview about her trajectory in digital journalism.
Brenda Salinas Baker is joining us today. Brenda, Welcome to The Women in Tech Show.
BS: Thanks for having me.
ES: You have a background in journalism, in digital journalism. You’re currently an audio content strategist at Google. First I want to begin with your opinion of what digital journalism means.
BS: When I hear digital journalism for me it’s the ability to reach listeners in audio readers in text to reach audiences that in traditional journalism, we wouldn’t be able to reach right? So before if you were a newspaper Reporter.
Your newspaper circulated in your city and every once in a while maybe you’d get a syndicated article in the national paper, but that was rare. And in radio, if you were a local radio reporter, your voice only carried as far as that FM or AM signal. And now with podcasting.
With digital platforms, you’re able to reach audiences all over the world on their own time, and I think it really amplifies the power of our voices.
ES: Throughout your career your held various roles. One of the early ones in your career began with being the recipient of the NPR Kroc fellowship. Can you explain a little bit what this was?
BS: Sure, so growing up all I ever wanted to do was be a storyteller. I come from a very rich oral storytelling tradition and I started listening to NPR when I was about 14 or 15 because my teachers at school would talk about a story that they heard and I always wanted to be in the know. So I made my mom. My mom was a teacher at my school and we would always listen to the radio together on our way into school. And you know, instead of listening to the pop station I made us, listen to NPR. And when I heard the voice of women who sounded like me. Lulu Garcia Navarro Maria Hinojosa, Latino women who pronounced their names the way that I pronounce my name and told stories about their communities that really lit a spark in me and I thought, you know, I’ve always wanted to tell stories I’ve always wanted to write. I think I want to tell stories on the radio.
And when I was in University, I studied economics and during the summers I interned at my local public radio station in Houston, Houston public media, and I loved every second of it. I would beg reporters to let me carry their kits so we could go out on stories. I got to report a couple of my own stories as well.
And the general manager at Houston public media told me, hey, there’s this fellowship for recent graduates at NPR at the national level, I think you should go for it, and we’ll make sure to recommend you. And so I applied. I applied in December. I got the call in April that I was one of ten finalists.
And we all went to NPR from all over the country. So after I did a yearlong fellowship at NPR, which was really, it was kind of my Graduate School. It was kind of my journalism school. I went to New York to work on a national show with my Idol, Maria Hinojosa. The show is called Latino USA and I was a producer and Reporter there.
So after I left KUT to be a Reporter, I did it for about 10 months and it was going really well. And then Steve Henn, that Reporter that senior Reporter that I had met at this training, called me to say that he was starting his own company, and by then I was thinking of starting my own production company in Austin.
And he said, well, why don’t you come help me start my company? It’s a personalized radio company. I want you to be the founding producer so you know he sold me on the idea. The company was called 60dB and it was a personalized radio app where you would get an onboarding where you got to say you know who are your favorite radio broadcasters. What are your favorite topics? And then you would get a playlist of short stories. So not podcasts length. You would get like the NPR newscasts and then you would get what we would call traditional news magazine packages. So stories that are from 2 to 7 minutes long and you would get a long playlist of those. And then if you want it you could do like a podcast at the end of that experience, and then when I was at 60dB at this personalized radio company where I was filing stories. You know every day we had this platform and it actually inspired the Google Podcast Manager Platform. But more on that later. So we had this platform where I could see a graph.
And see where my listeners had dropped off and skipped the story that I was telling. So I could see bad tape. I could see when I wrote something badly when something wasn’t clear I could see a dip in that graph and through filing stories every day and then looking at the audience retention graph
I was able to improve dramatically as a storyteller, like for example, my completion rates, my average completion rates were like at 80%, and I wanted them to be higher and Steve, my editor told me, hey, like, why don’t you try this breathing technique that I learned back in the day? I think it might really help you.
So I was like OK, I’ll try it for a week. I did that in every single story an my completion rates shot up by 7 percentage points. So I was really able to AB test my stories, be able to use that editorial muscle, but then also combine it with data analysis to improve as a storyteller, and there’s a through line between that and the work that I do at Google because that company, as you may know, spoiler that company got acquired by Google in 2017 and we became a part of the Google Podcasts family, and so many of the product’s that we made now sort of influence the things that we do at Google and I’m able to use that same data analysis with editorial content insights to help partners on our platforms reach their audiences in in better ways.
ES: You are talking about very interesting points about leveraging technology, data science, data driven decisions in journalism, to craft stories, to evaluate how your stories are being listened. Another thing I saw that you worked on was crowd sourcing through social media stories. Can you explain the idea behind crowd sourcing stories via social media?
BS: Yeah, absolutely. So this is more popular now than it used to be. But back in the day when Twitter and Facebook were new, journalists would mostly used those social media platforms to promote their own stories. So you would see a lot of tweets from journalists saying hey, I just filed this story, check it out, and then people would retweet or comment or whatever. And so it was very much an afterthought, and I started particularly at Latino USA when we had this very strong brand. This very strong platform figuring out that we could actually use social media in the reporting process to find sources and find stories and have that conversation. Not just be omni directional right? Not just be hey, here’s this voice on the radio telling you a story, but actually we’re real people and you can tell us stories and maybe they’ll make it on to the show. Or maybe they’ll just influence our decision making. And so I started Latina USA being in charge of the social media there and thinking of it, not just as an afterthought to promote our work, but actually to build a community that helped us source information and now that’s becoming a lot more popular throughout digital media, I would say, but particularly in the audio space, there are a lot of podcasts who have voicemail setup. You know where you can call a Google. It’s usually Google number, but we can call a phone number. And leave a voicemail, leave a story, and sometimes those stories make it into your favorite podcasts and being able to influence a content maker directly like that really helps you feel like you’re in a community of people who understand you and who see the world in a similar way than you do, and I think that’s really powerful. I think the best podcasts create these worlds around them that really help people feel like they found a spiritual home.
ES:
Earlier you were talking about working in freelance for some time, then later working on this company 60dB, which eventually got acquired by Google an A lot of it became part of the Google Podcast Manager Program. Can you talk about this platform?
BS: Yeah, so Google thinks of audio in a really comprehensive way and it’s kind of different than other tech companies that are experimenting in the audio space. So let me explain it to you this way. The way that podcasts are distributed you know this, but maybe your listeners not all your listeners do is through a standard called an RSS or Real Simple standard.
So it’s basically like a really ugly looking script on the back end and it’s open so that different, we call them podcatchers, but different podcast apps crawl all the RSS feeds and then index them, right?
So you know, there’s a bunch of different podcast apps you know, and Google podcasts is a pod catcher. In that way we crawl RSS feeds that unless they’re blocked, we surface them on our platform. It used to be that within an RSS feed, you know, it has all this information. It has meta tags, it has title, it has an image, and there’s always an MP3 file.
And that’s the audio file that gets distributed. Well, it used to be that a company like Google had no way of knowing what was in that MP3 file. It was virtually a black box, so the only way we had of organizing that information was through the meta tags. You’d say: this is a comedy podcast. This is a religion podcast. This is a sports podcast.
Because of AI because of machine learning, automatic transcription software has gotten so good and so cheap that a company with the computing power that Google has can use that automatic transcript to figure out what exactly is being said in that MP3, an index it.
The way that we would index a web page on Google search or a news article on Google News. So we’re using that automatic transcript that happens almost instantly.
ES: And this transcript, like you’re saying, they’re mostly used to get more insight into what people are talking about in the podcast. The transcript itself is not published, right?
BS: No. You can kind of see the transcript if you are YouTube user and you turn on captions, you can get a transcript of those captions on YouTube. But on the podcast, honestly, the transcripts are pretty messy. They’re not super readable, they make mistakes. You know if you say things with a certain accent, it might not catch it.
But what it is really good at is in what we call entity detection, so it knows what Kardashian you’re talking about. It knows what sports event you’re talking about, and that helps us match like with like and see how different entities how different you know nouns are related to each other. In this web of worldwide information.
ES: Exactly, I don’t know how it happens behind the scenes, but I could see how you are transcribing words with machine learning, and I’m guessing there’s probably like a probability of how confident the system is that certain word was said . And then based on that we get more insight into the content than just metadata that people manually put, so I think it’s really good.
BS: Correct, so it’s exactly it’s the same technology that Google News uses to index information. It’s the same, but there’s this added step where we go from the MP3 file to this transcript that almost acts like a dummy web page on our back end and then that is what’s indexed on our internal infrastructure so that we can really understand what is being said and you can see this in Google podcasts, but you can also see it in another product that we have called Your News Update. So Your News Update is the evolution of 60dB, that company that we had that got acquired so it’s a short form playlist of news that’s personalized to you, mostly on your location and some of your interests so you know, Google probably knows what sports teams you like, ’cause you look up the scores constantly. Things like that.
So in this product, the way that you access it, anyone can access it. You tell the Google assistant play me the news and you can do that even on an iPhone if you download the Google Assistant app, I think it’s pretty cool. It’s a different way to get the news. It doesn’t sound quite as like cohesive as if you were listening to the radio because you’re getting news from all different sources, but you might be surprised what you get to listen to.
ES: So you were just talking about using AI to transcribe podcasts to have a better idea of what they’re talking about. Earlier you also talked about this company 60dB where you’re getting more insights on how your story is doing in terms of listenership where they’re dropping off. Potentially brainstorm why that might be and make improvements. Are there other examples of useful analytics that can help drive future story development?
BS: Yeah, so if you have a podcast you automatically have access to a product called Google Podcast Manager, so it’s kind of similar. If you ever go to Google Maps and you look at an address and it says claim this business, have you ever seen that on Google Maps? It’s the same thing, but you can claim your RSS feed using the same email that you have to that you use to set up your RSS feed on whatever hosting provider so you can claim your RSS feed on Google podcasts and automatically get 30 days of data on how listeners engage with your content. So it tells you where they listening on a Google Nest at Google Smart Speaker. Or were they listening to it on a mobile device and that kind of information I think is really useful, but for me the most useful thing is getting that second by second drop off rate and Aggregated Drop off rate so you can see you know did I have a good introduction or maybe the story was too long and people only listen to half of it and you can use those analytics to tell better stories so?
I really think as a storyteller you should be able to make interesting content about whatever story topic you’re interested in, because there’s a reason why you are interested in it and it’s just about communicating to your listener that passion.
ES: At the beginning you touched a bit on having diverse voices on radio. I could definitely relate to that. I’m also a Latina and even I hesitated launching this podcast because I thought my accent had to be perfect, like the people on TV that I had. It’s always this, I think certain type of American English that I had seen in the media in the US, I hadn’t been exposed to more Latino voices. Can you talk about how this is changing, particularly in podcasting radio?
What are some of the things that are being done or can be done to improve this?
BS: I think in traditional broadcasting there is still a lot of gatekeeping, and it might be that if you wanted to work in radio, someone would have told you no, you you can’t be on the air with your accent, which is absolutely horrible because you’re not just an accent, you’re a person who’s telling stories from your point of view. And you’re coming from a different point of view. That would be highly beneficial to the listeners of that radio station. So I remember, you know at that public radio station in Texas we had an intern that she was Japanese an she was very understandable. But you know, English was not her first language, but she was a great Reporter.
And she filed the story and I went to bed for the night, and somebody actually retract the story so literally took the words off her script, took her reporting, reported it in a white male voice, and that’s the voice that got aired on the radio. And I just remember being so angry and so disgusted. So that was a couple of years ago. I would hope that the conversation is starting to change in broadcasting. I don’t think it’s changing fast enough and I think that’s why podcasting is such a valuable medium because you can prove your own worth with a microphone and a computer.
You don’t have to wait for someone to give you an opportunity. You can make that opportunity for yourself and you can find an audience and you can find people who love your accent or maybe have the same accent or it reminds them of their sisters accent. And that’s a beautiful thing. I think as long as the way you’re speaking is clear and you know mostly grammatically correct, or at least you know a listener is able to follow what you’re saying. That’s enough. You don’t have to be a cookie cutter person like you don’t have to sound the way you think you would have to sound to be on at NPR and more and more, we’re seeing that reporters are being given an opportunity to sound more like themselves.
That’s something that I really like about coaching people in the radio space because you’re never telling somebody a good radio coach never tells you to sound different, they just help you sound more like yourself. And that’s something that we do with the Google Podcast Creators Program, we help people find their voice and.
It’s not just a metaphor, it’s really finding your voice in your body and talking the way that you talk. For example, when I was a Reporter in Texas, I had this one editor, you know this, this older white guy who’s really sweet, a really good editor and he kept trying to get me to put the word folks in my script.
Because he said you need something to change it up so you don’t see people all the time and he actually taught me how to say folks he was like you don’t say it with an L. It’s f-o-k-s, folks and I like tried a million times but ultimately like I would never in my real life say folks yeah, so it’s like that shouldn’t really go in my script if it’s not something that. I’d say in my real life it’s not something that I can say convincingly and I’m I just need to speak the way that I speak and be authentic to my own voice in my own experience.
ES: You briefly mentioned the Google Podcast Creators Program. Can you talk a bit about this?
BS: Yeah, the Google Podcast Readers Program is my favorite thing that I do at Google.
So we have partnered with PRX, which is a public radio distributor to create a program that seeks to empower the next generation of podcasters. We’re going to be launching our application for round three, so it’s our second year, but we were doing a third round of applications so if your listeners have a podcast that they want to take to the next level, please please look for that on line. We really want your application and what we do is we pair emerging podcasters and merging storytellers with a team of producers. And mentors who can help them really think through the marketing of their podcasts. Like how do you reach an audience. How do you determine your audience? And then also the production? You know whether it’s a chat cast or a narrative podcaster. A fiction podcast? We want to make sure that people have the skills and the craft to take their production to the next level. So in our first year, we focused on emerging podcast creators, so people that were just getting started.
And we created a video series. You know, we realized we had 10,000 applications for two cohorts, so there were. We realized there were so many more people who wanted this knowledge than we could possibly reach in this small group setting. So we created this series called podcasting 101. You can Google it.
And it’s basically a video series of the fundamentals of podcasting from production to marketing to distributing, to selling ads, and monetizing so every lesson has a very specific point to make, and if you have a podcast, even if you think you know everything, I promise that there is something in that series that will help you grow.
ES: And who is this program going to be targeted for? because you’re mentioning your bout to lunch round three or about lunch round three in a couple of weeks.
BS: We really want to see stories that we haven’t heard before. Everybody is open to apply, but we really want people to think about. You know what stories do I have inside of my heart that the world really needs to hear?
BS: And what will I get from this program? We’re looking for people who want to grow and learn and be coached so they can reach the new Heights that they’re striving for.
ES: Well, Brenda, thank you for taking the time to come on the show. It’s been great chatting with you.
BS: Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed our chat.
Technology has a big impact in our society. Some examples from the last decades are, the internet, personal computers, smart phones, and social media. Kara Swisher, a Technology Journalist, has been covering tech since the 1990s. We talked about what the panorama was like when she was first starting out as a reporter back then in Silicon Valley. We also talked about the impact of technology in journalism. Kara also talked about the lack of underrepresented folks in tech, and observations she’s made throughout her career.
Kara Swisher
Transcript
[00:00:00] ES: I’m Edaena Salinas, Software Engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm.
Technology has a big impact in our society. Some examples from the last decades are, the internet, personal computers, smart phones, and social media. Kara Swisher, a Technology Journalist, has been covering tech since the 1990s. We talked about what the panorama was like when she was first starting out as a reporter back then in Silicon Valley. We also talked about the impact of technology in journalism. Kara also talked about the lack of underrepresented folks in tech, and observations she’s made throughout her career.
Before we move on with the interview. I’m really excited to announce that season 1 of the 5 minute mentor podcast is available. This is a podcast where you’ll get advice from prominent people in tech, authors, journalists, artists and more. Go to mentors.fm for more information about the show. Thank you.
Kara, welcome to the women in tech show.
[00:01:140] KS: Thank you.
[00:01:14] ES: You’re a technology journalist. You’ve been covering tech since the mid 90s. throughout your career, you’ve interviewed top technology executives, how do you prepare for these interviews?
[00:01:26] KS: Well, you know, I’ve been covering them for a long time. So I know a lot. I don’t spend hours and hours preparing because I’ve been covering them for 20 years. And so you know, I keep up on the news, I do a lot of reporting, I tend to know a lot of them pretty well. And I’m pretty up to speed on the stuff they say publicly and what I know to be true privately. And so, you know, it’s been an ongoing education for me for that many years. And so it’s a little probably easier for me than others because I sort of anticipate what they’re going to say and I try to sort of get them to tell the truth about what’s really going on.
[00:01:57] ES: What motivates you to do the kind of work that you do? I know you’ve been doing it for over 20 years.
[00:02:03] KS: You know, I just really think technology is when the most important force in the world. The top, the wealthiest, most powerful people in this world are now technology people, for the most part it used to be oil or other businesses that we’re sort of at the forefront right now, technology is one of the most critical parts of, of our world. I mean, right now, most of the tech companies are worth more than almost all the countries of the world, at least four fifths of the country, the world GDP is smaller than the value of some of these companies. And so, and they’re also accountable and elected for the most part. I just think it’s really interesting to write about the impact that technology has on the world right now, because it’s the most important force in the world right now.
[00:02:42] ES: And you went through that shift of seeing it become powerful force and a lot of wealthy people are in this area, from the people that you’ve interviewed or previous investigations, was there something that you’ve considered particularly revealing?
[00:02:57] KS: It depends on the person really depends on the time depends on the time period that I was covering. I mean, Microsoft, for example, has changed rather drastically from a very malevolent force in tech. And so a company that many people felt was dangerous to one that is quite doing a lot of good for the tech world and has a much better image than other companies. So it just changes over time.
[00:03:20] ES: Looking back, do you have any, regrets or something that you wish you had us different in any of the interviews that you’ve done?
[00:03:29] KS: I guess. It’s kind of a massive amount of people I’ve interviewed just even on my podcast, I’ve interviewed 600 people and before that, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more. So you know, I think I’ve pretty much one of the hallmarks that I have is I do ask people the questions I want to know and I don’t feel regretful from doing that.
[00:03:47] ES: Since you were covering tech very early on, and you got to talk to a lot of people that were running companies that were pretty small at the time that now became pretty big like Amazon and Yahoo. And at that time some people were skeptical about what they were building? Do you remember what it was like or what you were thinking at the time when you’re covering this emerging game changing technologies?
[00:04:13] KS: Well, you know, I always thought they were going to be big. I think the reason I started covering them was because I really felt like they were going to be massive the whole time. And so I always thought that this technique was sort of like the beginning of radio or the beginning of television or the advent of electricity. I always thought this was going to be big. And so even though they were small companies at the time, I really did. I think I understood probably more than others, how big these companies were going to be. So I think I really did always have a sense of what was going to happen.
[00:04:43] ES: One of the things, characteristic of the tech industry is the lack of underrepresented people, is this something that stood out to you since the beginning when you were covering this?
[00:04:54] KS: Well, I’ve been writing about that issue for a long time. Its lack of diversity, lack of women, people of color, Different people, it’s sort of a monolithic, tech is largely white male controlled and operated for a long time. And while there are other people in it, the leaders, the owners, the the money is all, it’s all the same group of people. And so I’ve always said, this is a problem, because any homogeneous society has, you know, problems of bad teeth or whatever, you know, genetically, you don’t want to have a homogeneous society. And so I’ve always felt like the lack of diversity has been a real lot of the problems of tech are relate directly to the fact that it’s homogeneous. And so I’ve talked a lot about that is a lack of representation on the board’s lack of representation. It’s in the top parts of the company, and things like that. And so I think it’s critically important, you know, especially as we move forward, that we have much more representation of different people. And I’m not just talking about women or people of color, I’m talking about age, economic background, political background, and I think it’s very important to have diversity because it leads to better products at the Two products that are more considered in. So I think that’s really important.
[00:06:03] ES: In 2018, you said that you hadn’t seen much change in this area. And in your opinion, it wasn’t really a priority for the industry. Do you think that has changed in the last two years?
[00:06:16] KS: I do not. I think it still remains the same homogeneous society. I think it’s absolutely the same. And I think there’s still not enough women in power that some people color and power, there’s still not enough women, people of color on the cap table. It’s just it continues to be the same old, same old.
[00:06:31] ES: Do you have any particular recommendations on how this could be like something that you wish they would do?
[00:06:40] KS: Well, no, they should hire more women, they should hire more people of color. I mean, they seem resistant to the idea of doing it and they don’t seem to want to do it. I think the way I do it is I do it from my perch where I say have you noticed that 70% of the management is men, white men, very few Asian few Asian men, there’s fewer Indian. I try really hard to point out the what is the obvious for most people’s point of view, which is that it’s just simply not diverse enough that leads to problems. I really do believe the issues are around any of the social networks is because the people in power have never experienced what others experience. And I think they’re not as aware as they can be. And they can’t be as empathetic as they can be.
[00:07:22] ES: Are you optimistic about this?
[00:07:20] KS: No, I don’t know. They can only change it if they change it. And there’s no reason for them to change it right now. They don’t have any impetus. But if you look at the top echelons of all these tech companies, it’s virtually the same person, or very similar people.
[00:07:37] ES: Technology, in particular, the internet, which is something that you started covering early on, has changed journalism significantly. One of the big shifts was going from print to digital, but there have been other changes in this area. Can you talk about some of the ways in which technology has impacted journalism, from your experience?
[00:07:58] KS: Well, I mean, everything’s going Digital and you know, from everything from the business plan, the advertising business has sort of fallen out the bottom of it and they make less money. The distribution platforms have changed how people get their news, they get them from Facebook. And Facebook is an enormous distributor of news. They don’t take any responsibility for that news that they distribute, you know, every aspect. You know, the way people report how quickly the report the use of Twitter, every single aspect of journalism has changed dramatically in the good parts, that it’s more accessible than ever at the bad parts. It’s more accessible than ever, which means any liar can get on there and put out false information.
[00:08:36] ES: Yes, and this is something I’ve been talking to recently with a lot of local journalists here in San Francisco, where they’re saying the ads model that has sustained journalism for over 200 years is dying.
[00:08:47] KS: The model for journalism has changed over a lot of time. I mean, the big advertising plays were like that before. They’re very different, how they used to get money by subscription, and then it was by advertising and then back to subscription, but there’s always been, you know, journalism has been a difficult profession no matter what song but right now, what’s happening are these massive structural changes around the business model of the distribution model that are very hard to combat at once. And journalists don’t have the technological background to compete in that regard.
[00:09:14] ES: What do you think can be done to help this though?
[00:09:17] KS: Well, I don’t know. Much can be it’s like small businesses right now. But in the pandemic, it’s really hard. I mean, how do you compete with these massive platforms, you can’t create your own platform, you’re all in different places, look at local news, they can’t compete by themselves. You can’t mount a technological challenge to bigger sites, you know, I think you have to get smaller, it’s going to contract and then you have the issue of not not enough journalists covering some very serious issues now that now To be honest, a lot of previous journalism had a lot of sloppiness to it. And a lot of like, not all of it was good. But the fact matter is, there could be a lot of more people thriving in the old system than the new one.
[00:09:54] ES: So you’re mentioning some of the journalism wasn’t very good?
[00:09:57] KS: Well, I just saying there’s sort of a romantic idea that every was so good, there was a lot of sort of mediocre journalism done for a long time, you know, that just wasn’t challenging. And there’s a lot more really great investigative stuff going on now, but it’s still the challenge that the business model and the distribution model faces makes it very hard for even the very best to compete.
[00:10:19] ES: One thing I saw in your ethics statement is that you say the following, and I’m just gonna start quoting: “Honoring a long term commitment to high standards of journalism is key to the success of my work”. In your opinion, what are some of the characteristics to high standards of journalism?
[00:10:360] KS: Well, I’d say fairness, accuracy, I think point of view is all right to have come to a conclusion. I don’t a lot of people just don’t think this but I do. I think as a journalist, you can say, you know, just like President Trump last night saying he was taking hydroxychloroquine you can say this is bad. And here’s the reporting on it. Like before, you’d say here’s the reporting on it, and you wouldn’t make a conclusion. today. I think it’s very fair and important. To listeners or readers or whatever audience you have to say, This is nuts what he’s doing right. So it’s okay to base analysis on good reporting, and come to a conclusion. I think that’s something I’ve been doing for a long time. So I think it’s really important to shoot to the basic tenets, which is Fairness and Accuracy but not shy away from having a point of view. I’m not calling it opinion because opinions not necessarily based on fact, but having a point of view based on factual reporting.
[00:11:26] ES: One last thing that I like asking us on the show at the end is, if they have any advice for young professionals, their advice can be you know about anything you see for your career, or just general life advice that you would like to say,
[00:11:40] KS: Oh, well, I have a lot of advice. I have a lot of children. So I always tell them my life advice. I think it’s really important to not be frightened, so easy right now in the pandemic to be frightened about your future and things aren’t going to turn out isn’t that there’s always a chance to single person can make a great deal of change and you yourself as a younger person in an early in a career can make Take a lot more risks than you do I find too many young people are risk averse, or they’re worried about what comes next. They’ve spent their whole life on the wheeled dribble wheel of achievement, and they don’t realize they can step off at any time and find new things that might risk failure. And I think that’s all right. And I don’t think we teach our kids enough about that the idea of risking things and trying new ideas and trusting your instincts. I think we keep them often too much on the same pathway. And I think there’s a quote, he says, paths are made by walking, which means just walk in the direction you want to walk, and you will find your path. And I think that’s the most important thing is giving people permission to say no to things and I don’t think enough people say no, I say no all the time. So I’m used to ‘No’, but I think it’s really important to be able to not be quite as inflexible in your career, especially at the earliest part.
[00:12:48] ES: Well, Kara, thank you for coming on the show. It’s been great having you.
Fighting cyber criminals is a challenging task. Laura Mather, Cyber Security expert, talked about her time at eBay fighting cyber criminals in the early 2000s. Laura explained different attacks that she saw and how these were being tackled back then. We also talked about Silver Tail Systems, a company she co-founded in 2008 to build systems that other companies could use to fight cyber criminals. Laura also explained the challenges of getting funding and how the panorama is changing for entrepreneurs.
In 2017 Laura was the recipient of the Abie award for technology entrepreneurship. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global nonprofit with a goal of reaching 50/50 gender equity in tech by 2025. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This episode is part of a series of show that highlight the work of previous Abie Award Winners.
ES 0:00 [00:00:00] ES: I’m Edaena Salinas, software engineer and host of the women in tech show, a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm
Fighting cyber criminals is a challenging task. Laura Mather, cyber security expert, talked about her time at eBay fighting cyber criminals in the early 2000s. Laura explained different attacks that she saw and how these were being tackled back then. We also talked about Silver Tail Systems, a company she co-founded in 2008 to build systems that other companies could use to fight cyber criminals. Laura also explained the challenges of getting funding and how the panorama is changing for entrepreneurs.
I want to point out that this interview was recorded at the end of April and a lot has changed since then. We started to see more conversations about funding to underrepresented group. I followed up with Laura about this, and I included her latest thoughts at the end of the show, when we discuss this topic.
In 2017 Laura was the recipient of the Abie award for technology entrepreneurship. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global nonprofit with a goal of reaching 50/50 gender equity in tech by 2025.. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This episode is part of a series of show that highlight the work of previous Abie Award Winners.
Before we move on with the interview. I’m really excited to announce that season 1 of the 5 minute mentor podcast is available. This is a podcast where you’ll get advice from prominent people in tech, authors, journalists, artists and more. Go to mentors.fm for more information about the show. Thank you.
Laura Mather, welcome to the women in tech show.
[00:02:03] LM: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:04] ES: Today we’re going to talk about cybersecurity a lot, which is an area that you’ve worked on since you were early in your career. First, I want to begin with the panorama at the time you finished school. You completed a PhD in Computer Science in 1998 at the University of Colorado, can you talk about what it was like coming out of school into the tech industry back then?
[00:02:29] LM: Sure. I started my career at the National Security Agency, which was fairly interesting. I’ll be honest, though, all of the really hot topics were being worked on in places like Silicon Valley. So there I was in DC and doing interesting work. I liked feeling like I was helping the government and helping our country. But I was super envious of the folks who were on the west coast. I felt like they had the most interesting problems to tackle that their work had a lot of impact. So that was a way to start my career that felt like I wasn’t really starting that I was just kind of getting my feet wet in an area that I had some interest in, but not a ton of interest. And mostly I was looking west and feeling very envious of the folks that were on the west coast.
[00:03:27] ES: So you’re mentioning you’re in DC working at the NSA. And then after that you moved to work at Encyclopedia Britannica, right?
[00:03:36] LM: I did. Yeah. I actually interviewed for a bunch of jobs in Silicon Valley. One of them was at a company called Infoseek, which was a precursor to Google. This was 1999. Google wasn’t around yet. And I interviewed for the position of Infoseek. I interviewed with Britannica for a position there, so I was definitely exploring my options at the time.
[00:04:02] ES: Can you give some context around Britannica and what people were doing at the time? This is early 2000s, right?
[00:04:11] LM: Yeah. I think my first day was January 6 of 2000. A lifetime ago. I was working for britannica.com. Britannica had started their online presence a couple of years earlier, but really wanted to understand the users of their website at britannica.com. My job was to delve into the data, look at how people were clicking through the websites, what queries they were doing, what results they would get from those queries, whether or not they would stick around whether or not they would pay us and try and really get an understanding of that kind of trend data. It was essentially web trends for the Britannica website. Web trends had just gotten started right around 2000. I didn’t even know about them when Britannica hired me. So I built a very rudimentary version of web trends for britannica.com.
[00:05:15] ES: After that is when you started really diving into cyber security at eBay in specific, and I’ve heard you mentioned in the past that somehow they put together NSA and your online experience at Britannica, and it seemed like a perfect fit for cyber security. Can you talk a bit about this?
[00:05:37] LM: Yeah, eBay was getting targeted by cyber criminals at the time. Prior to eBay, the cyber criminals had really focused on AOL if anyone listening to this remembers a company called AOL. They were the main focus of the cyber criminals until eBay came along and then the criminals saw a real treasure trove of opportunity to steal money from people using the eBay platform. Now the executives at eBay, realized that this activity was new. No one had done this before. No one had used a website to steal money from people. And because of that, they didn’t know who to hire to go after these folks. They wanted to hire law enforcement. But when you talk to people in law enforcement, especially in 2003, those people had no experience with online. You talked to people who worked online, those people had no experience dealing with criminals. And the poor executives at eBay, were tearing their hair out saying who do we hire to do this? The fact that I had experience with the National Security Agency, so I had some experience understanding the way people think when they’re trying to evade others etc. And then I had done this work for britannica.com essentially trying to understand you behavior on the britannica.com sites that look like about as close as they were going to get to someone who could possibly look at this problem with, you know, a little bit of experience. And so the fact that if I were to map out my whole career from PhD to NSA to Britannica, it looks like this jagged line, and yet that jagged line fit exactly into what eBay wanted, which was fortuitous for me for sure.
[00:07:29] ES: Exactly. And once you join eBay, and you start figuring out how to tackle this online criminals, and there are all these attacks coming, can you give some examples of the kinds of attacks that we’re seeing?
[00:07:44] LM: Yeah, the eBay platform, unfortunately, made it so that cyber criminals could find ways to steal money from people. The biggest attack vector we like to call it was what we call second Chance offers and there literally are things on the eBay platform called the second chance offer. But what the criminals love to do is they love to see that an auction happened for usually a fairly high priced item, something around the 1000 to $2,000 price range. And they would look at the bidders because eBay was very transparent. They wanted all the bidders to see who else had bid and how much to make sure that people trusted that it was real people bidding that they were, you know, in the midst of a legitimate auction. The criminals would then look at the person who didn’t win the auction but had the second highest bid. And their whole goal was to get that person’s email address, reach out to them and say, Hey, I noticed that you bid 1800 dollars on a Rolex, guess what I have that exact same Rolex and all that. I’ll give it to you for 1500 dollars. Now granted, they didn’t have the Rolex. The other part of the eBay platform that was not ideal for protecting our users was that when someone purchase something, the winner of the auction would send the money to the seller, and when the seller received the money, then they would send the item so if you’re a criminal, you could say to someone I have that Rolex just send me 1500 dollars and as soon as I receive your money, I’ll send you the Rolex. Now an unwary, or sorry, uneducated or unaware eBay user might get very excited about this. I’m gonna get that watch. I want it and it’s only 1500 dollars. They send the 1500 dollars and guess what they never hear from the other person again, the suppose it seller. So it was my job to prevent that type of criminal activity and I’ll say that it was not at all an easy job. The criminals were tenacious, the criminals didn’t have to QA the stuff that they built. They could launch any tool that they wanted into cyberspace immediately. And they would find very creative ways to try and steal money from eBay users.
[00:10:23] ES: And during this time, were you trying to generalize a system or a way in which you could prevent this attack? Or was it mostly on the go like, you see this attack, and then you try to craft a solution for it?
[00:10:36] LM: In the beginning, it was very much on the go, you know, we’re seeing this functionality on the website being used to target eBay users. We’re going to fix that and then the criminals would always respond after I was only there three years, but after maybe a year and a half, we started to get a little bit smarter about should we think about how if we shut off this attack vector, where are they going to go next? And how do we prevent that? And in fact, by the time I left, we tried to be much smarter and say, if they’re gonna go anywhere, we actually would really like it. If they went over here, maybe because there’s not very many users there. And we could let those users know or maybe because the users on this other functionality are much more savvy about these criminals right there, we would think about that. And we would try to actually push the criminals because we knew they weren’t just gonna walk away and be done. But if we could try and encourage them to go to a place where either we already knew is protected, or maybe was much less damaging for eBay users. We tried to even get that sophisticated about how we responded to them.
[00:11:51] ES: And I’ve heard you mentioned in other talks that toward the end, it was so much work you you kind of were overworked, right and then you left?
[00:12:00] LM: Absolutely, I mean, there’s a really challenging mindset in security, which is again, the, the criminals are never going to give up. There was a tough situation personally, where I would be sitting at work, and it would be 7:30 at night. And I would think to myself, I could write up this next business requirements document to try and prevent the, you know, this horrible thing that is happening to eBay users. And I can stay for two more hours to do that. Or I could go home and let this horrible thing happen to eBay users for an extra day. And that can be a very draining decision making process, especially day after day after day. And then finally to eBay as any business does had to prioritize. Are they going to put resources towards security and protecting users or are they gonna put resources towards new users and new functionality. And I think it we had also gotten pretty good at our jobs. And so the losses due to security had gone down quite a bit. And that made the business think maybe we don’t need to invest in this thing called security because that seems to be going okay. For now, anyone who’s actually in security will recognize that that usually means you’re about to have a spike in some kind of incident because the minute you stop investing, the criminals know it, and they go after you. But it can be very hard, as a security professional to have the business tell you what you’re doing is not super important. So we’re not investing in that. Thank you very much for what you have done though.
[00:13:45] ES: Exactly. And one thing I like from your trajectory is that you were overworked and then you leave. But you’re still thinking about this space, and In 2008, you co founded Silver Tail Systems, where you are bringing a lot of your experience from your days at eBay fighting cyber criminals. And at this moment, you are taking a step back to think about systems that you would need to fight attacks at eBay and how other companies online could potentially use these tools. Can you describe some of the main ideas behind the system and this company?
[00:14:27] LM: Yeah, absolutely. I noticed two things after I had stepped back from eBay for a few months. The first thing that I noticed was the attacks we saw to eBay. We’re starting to target other companies and that has something to do with how well we did at eBay. The criminals are happy to go after the weakest link. And if there is a strong defense in one part of the internet, they’re happy to go find a place that does not have quite as strong a defense, that’s actually a good return on investment for their time. And so stepping back from eBay, I went to work for a company called MarkMonitor. And MarkMonitor protected many different companies from something called phishing. And because I got to talk to all these companies, whether it was banks or e commerce companies, and it definitely was not at the level we were seeing at eBay, but I start to hear some of the same stories that I had heard from eBay users of, “hey, you know, I’m at this bank, and we’ve got this weird thing happening where you know, our forgot my password functions, getting a lot of traffic”. And that’s not what we would expect and, you know, just different stories like that. And I realized, wow, criminals are really diversifying, and they’re going after any place where they can make some money. So that was one realization I had. Once I realized that the key was to start thinking about if I can do eBay all over again? What type of system would I build? Because I had three years of headache and different obstacles that I had to overcome and why not build it the way I wished it had, it would have ended up but start from that place. And what we realized when we built the system for Silver Tail was that you need something very flexible, that is monitoring things in real time that is giving alerts in real time. And that can also respond essentially, within minutes at the most, maybe even seconds. Because again, these criminals are constantly revising their attacks, constantly looking for new ways to deal with this, constantly looking for new ways to steal money. And if we could build a system that could be as agile as the criminals, that’s it What you want to arm our customers with at silver tail? And so that was what we built.
[00:17:05] ES: So you found that in terms of the system components, the ability to monitor in real time and was it to update things quickly is what helped be on par with criminals?
[00:17:19] LM: Absolutely. So to know, within a few minutes that something new is happening on a website, you know, at eBay and at other companies before something like silver tail was available, it might take weeks before customer support has gotten enough of these very strange phone calls, that they decided to raise it up to someone in the security group of Hey, all of a sudden people are saying that they keep getting these forgot my password emails or that they, you know, have seen the strange activity on their account. Why not make it so you don’t have to wait for your user to tell customer support and then customer support to tell you, let’s make it so the system is looking for these things, looking for anything that looks out of the ordinary and is giving you immediate indication when that type of thing happens. And then when possible, letting you respond to those new behaviors as quickly as possible.
[00:18:22] ES: And the security industry is an area that is still growing like you said, criminals don’t give up. They keep updating, attacks are more sophisticated. And I’ve heard you and other people in this space say how the number of jobs are growing in cybersecurity, and we don’t have enough people that will be able to do them. So what are some of the things that you liked from working in this area throughout your career?
[00:18:51] LM: Oh my gosh, I mean, security is such a rewarding field to be in. I mean, let’s be clear can be very frustrating to the criminal are beating you know you at at various phases, but then to be able to say there was this attack against my website and I was able to find a way to prevent it from happening. That is incredible. And knowing that you are out there protecting people’s money, heck even their sanity, right? We all know that if we’ve ever had our identity stolen or you talk to someone who had their identity stolen, the heartache and the rigmarole you have to go through to deal with it is just a nightmare. And the fact that people who work in security every day can say, I am helping to make sure that doesn’t happen. That can be an amazing feeling and an amazing calling to life, I think and to a career.
[00:19:53] ES: And what would you recommend to someone that’s been in the industry, they’re software engineers like they have been exposed. To do programming, are there recommendations that you would say into how to start looking into this area?
[00:20:08] LM: I mean, the best you can do now is actually get a degree in it. There wasn’t degrees in cybersecurity when I graduated from school, but now there are degrees. But there are even online courses you can take, if you’re an engineer, just, you know, look for job openings in the security engineering group. Oftentimes, for an engineer, you don’t actually need security experience. And you can just go do engineering projects in the security group at your company and start to get some of that experience. That’s actually what happened with my co founder, who is also my husband, he was an engineer at eBay. And I was doing all of this anti fraud and security work and he came to me and said, I have been coding up all of them. The projects that you have dreamt up, and I’m helping you to protect the site. And now I want to do what you’re doing, I want to create policy that does that I want to try and figure out how to detect these attacks. And so he was able to successfully transition from being an engineer and understanding how the bits move through the website, to understanding how the criminals thought about how to use the website in their activities. So there’s lots of paths for this. I think it’s similar to almost any job if there’s something that interests you, you know, find a way to get a foot in the door, even if it’s not exactly the job that you’re looking for. And then find a way to be useful. Everyone’s always looking for someone to volunteer to help with things. Just find a way to take on some tasks that might be relevant and show that you are interested. I think that can be a great way to do things.
[00:21:56] ES: Exactly. I want to talk a bit now about the entrepreneurship aspects of this. You founded several companies. Right now we’ve talked about Silver Tail Systems, the security company. I’ve heard you mentioned in other talks that it’s challenging to raise money. And at some point you were getting over 40 rejections. In your opinion, what are some reasons for getting rejections?
[00:22:25] LM: I mean, let’s be clear. There is bias in the venture capital world. There is it is a male dominated field. It’s similar, in my opinion to computer science. When I got my PhD, I think 12% of graduates were women. The startup space is probably even fewer as far as founders go, we know it’s way fewer as far as female founders who actually get funded. So it just is an area where there still is A lot of people who have a mindset of what an entrepreneur looks like. And unfortunately, as in a lot of other fields, people who are quote unquote, hiring someone, whether that means they’re actually giving them a job or maybe giving them money to start their company. We, as humans often do that more for people who look like we do, then we do for people who don’t look like we do. And there’s plenty of studies showing that that’s how venture capitalists work as well.
[00:23:37] ES: Exactly. And in addition to that, you know, where we have this bias of like you’re saying it’s a male dominated field. Do you think that’s a big component or there can also be reasons that you can tackle, like, they can tell you well, you need twice the number of users or some more actionable reasons or that wasn’t your experience?
[00:24:03] LM: Well, so let’s be clear. Most of the comments that venture capitalists give to any entrepreneur, most of the comments are, here’s what you’re missing. Right? And because that’s their job, their job is actually define the holes in what you’re doing to reduce the venture capitalists risk when they invest. What that means is they’re very good at finding holes, even when maybe those same holes exist in another entrepreneurs business model. In fact, I did have a conversation once with a venture capitalists. This was a male, but someone who’s actually really open to try to understand what was going on with his own thought processes. And I went in and they asked me all kinds of very challenging questions which they should, they should and at the end, they you And they would ask me a question, I would come back with an answer. And they would ask me to sort of a deeper part of that same question, I’d come back with an answer. And we had this kind of great conversation at the end, they said, Wow, we don’t have this kind of really deep dive conversation with our the other entrepreneurs who come in. And I said, well, because you’re not holding their feet to the fire the way you are holding my feet to the fire, right? And you should have seen this venture capitalist, his eyes kind of lit up. And he, you could see it dawned on his face of, oh my gosh, I’m not holding certain entrepreneurs accountable in the same way that I hold women accountable. And so, the point is that, if you want to say no to anything, you can find a reason to say no, I mean, I would challenge the listeners out there. Think about your favorite thing, whether it’s like your favorite restaurant to go to, it’s something we can fantasize about in this times, right? But or you’re feeling dinner or whatever, and then decide that you’re going to find a reason you don’t like it, you can find that I would challenge anyone to find something where they can’t find some reason that they don’t like it. Right? The human ingenuity is just so amazing in that way. But what that does is it lets venture capitalists rationalize the fact that they’re turning away a lot of women, because they say, Oh, she didn’t have quite as many users. Oh, she didn’t have quite a good answer. When I asked this question. Oh, I think her monetization plan isn’t quite as good as this other one. And yet, someone else will walk in who looks just like them, who maybe hasn’t done nearly as much planning nearly as much research doesn’t understand the space and they get super excited about it because it looks like Something that they recognize, right?
[00:27:02] ES: Or they see potential, or something. Yeah, they’re not there yet. But I see it.
[00:27:06] LM: I literally use air quotes potential, right? It’s like, it’s so funny because I get it. I can see it. I mean, I know I’ve done it too. I know I’ve done it too, right? I don’t know, maybe I get annoyed with someone and then all of a sudden, I can nitpick things and find things they do wrong all the time, even though those same things wouldn’t have bothered me the week before, right? We can do that as human beings, but it ends up impacting the outcomes. And what’s actually really sad is it impacts the actual outcomes for venture capitalists, right, because there have been these studies, whether it’s from the caper capital folks, and others, that startups from minority groups, whether that’s women or people of color, they actually do better. They have better return on capital. They have much less consternation within their existing teams, there’s all these things, all these metrics where those companies look good. And yet, these traditional VCs who have a cookie cutter way of looking at what they’re going to invest in, they miss out because what walks in the door doesn’t fit inside the cookie cutter.
[00:28:21] ES: Exactly. Right now I’m starting to hear more and more conversations around this. Are you optimistic for the next five years? Let’s say that we’ll start seeing more funding to minorities?
[00:28:35] LM: Well, the pandemic I’m worried is going to change everything. If you had asked me four months ago, to be honest, I’m not sure my answer would have been that much better. I may have been slightly more optimistic.
[00:28:49] ES: It’s hard to tell.
[00:28:50] LM: Yet Well, I worry that with the pandemic, what happens when people get scared, is they fall even more back onto what is comfortable for them. And what is comfortable For people are people who look like them, unfortunately, I will say that if we were able to go back to, let’s say, November, and you were to ask me the same question four months ago, I actually was having some frustration because I would see things like, you know, so just launched a fund for black entrepreneurs, but the fund would be $10 million. Right? And then you look and some of the big VC firms even now are closing, you know, $3 billion funds, right. So how does $10 million compete with a $3 billion fund? You know, I look at $10 million. And I think that’s not even investment in one company, not even and these people, they have such great intentions, and I certainly don’t want to fault that. But they would say, you know, and we’re going to use this $10 million and invest in 30 companies and I just think, Oh my gosh, like you don’t understand what you’re competing against. If SoftBank is going to go put a billion dollars in a company, and they’re going to have all that money to do marketing and to hire people and do all these things, a company that’s getting less than a million dollars, even less than $10 million is unfortunately set up to fail. They just are and what I do hope maybe a way to turn this more positive is I do hope that the times we’re in now are going to reset this growth at all costs mentality that we’ve been seeing, because I do think that could help the companies that are founded by people of color and women, because I do think when it is about a realistic business model, and realistic growth, that does start to help the playing field get a little more level, when it’s about hype when it’s about spending. As much as you can, and then you pile on to that the fact that women and people of color have such a hard time getting capital at all, let alone exorbitant amounts of capital. That is a really difficult situation to try and overcome. So if there is any kind of silver lining to this moment of time, maybe it is going to be that a realistic business plan will look better to VCs and be more successful. And if so, that could make things a little bit better.
[00:31:36] ES: I followed up with Laura in July to get her thoughts on this question again. The reason for that is because in the United States, we started seeing more racial injustice activism. This is what she wanted to add, quote: With the racial and justice activism that has occurred over the last several weeks. We are seeing some investment firms looking to invest more money in underrepresented groups. Two examples include SoftBank, pledging 300 million in contributions or investments to minority groups, and Andreessen Horowitz, talent x Opportunity Fund, with an initial investment of 2.2 million. These are definitely a start. And I hope the venture capital community can continue to create funds like this”, end of quote.
I know we’re almost out of time. So I just want to end this interview with a couple of questions related to the award that you received in 2017. You are the recipient of the award for technology entrepreneurship. What did it mean to you getting this award?
[00:32:47] LM: I mean, holy cow. The fact that an organization which is now called the need to beat org, it wasn’t then chose me as the recipient of this award. I’m not sure There is a greater honor. You know, here are all these women who are so technical and are so accomplished, and to have them recognize the work that I had done as being beneficial. I mean, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I love Like I said, I would love cybersecurity because it helped people. And I loved doing my cybersecurity company because I love knowing that I was protecting at one point, it was like 2 billion online accounts, holy cow, that was so amazing. And that’s why I start companies is to try and have impact in the world and to have this amazing organization recognize that I had impact. I’m not sure that there could be anything more meaningful.
[00:33:52] ES: And did you see an impact in your career in any way from getting this award?
[00:33:57] LM: I mean, it’s definitely a record admission that other people look up to for sure. And, you know, being able to say that I got this award being able to put it in my signature line that opened doors for me, it definitely got people interested. It meant that, you know, I’m of course, I can’t do any kind of AB test, but I would love to have, how many people actually responded to my email when they saw that versus not. But I feel like because I had that to point to it gave me some legitimacy. You know, obviously, I had done even if I hadn’t won the award, I had done the work I had done, but that solidified it and sort of summarized it nicely for people of hear someone who knows what she’s doing as an entrepreneur, who has built things that are impactful. It’s the way to create this label that lets people know that without me having to say it in to without having someone have to spend Three minutes explaining it, which is fantastic.
[00:35:02] ES: What I’ve also heard from other winners is, from getting this award, well, I need a beat or writes articles about it. And people notice they might be familiar with your company now. And they’re like, Oh, this is exactly what we need right now. And they found out because they saw you got the award, and then they look up all your work and that kind of stuff.
[00:35:22] LM: Exactly. I mean, let’s be clear, any kind of PR, especially positive PR is fantastic. And when you’re doing a start up, holy cow, you’ll take anything you can get, but having something that well sort of distributed, I had, like old professors reach out to me and say, you know, I just saw that you won this award, and we haven’t talked in 15 years, but congratulations. I mean, it was incredible. The amount of people who saw that because of the reach that Anita b.org has, that’s what makes it amazing.
[00:35:55] ES: Well, Laura, thank you for coming on the show. It’s been great chatting with you.
[00:35:59] LM: Absolutely. Thanks for having me this is fun.
Flexible work environments provide an opportunity to be more inclusive to other people. Brea Starmer, Founder of Lions and Tigers, talked about building a company with a flexible work environment as a priority. We talked about how to maintain the company culture and sense of community and some of the challenges. Brea also talked about her trajectory in marketing in tech, and insights and learnings from early in her career.
Brea Starmer
Transcript
[00:00:00] ES: I’m Edaena Salinas, Software Engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm.
Flexible work environments provide an opportunity to be more inclusive to other people. Brea Starmer, Founder of Lions and Tigers, talked about building a company with a flexible work environment as a priority. We talked about how to maintain the company culture and sense of community and some of the challenges. Brea also talked about her trajectory in marketing in tech, and insights and learnings from early in her career at Microsoft and in consulting.
Before we move on with the interview, I’m really excited to announce that Season 1 of the Five Minute Mentor Podcast is now available This is a podcast where you’ll get advice from prominent people in tech, authors, journalists, artists, and more. You can find more information about the show by going to mentors.fm. Thank you.
[00:01:11] BS: Thank you. So happy to be here.
[00:01:13] ES: We’re going to talk about various topics of your trajectory. You’re an entrepreneur, you’re the founder of Lions and Tigers. Before we get into that, I want to talk a bit about your upbringing. I read both of your parents were self taught entrepreneurs. Your father owned a popular bar in West Seattle, your mom was a marketing executive and consultant, among other things. You are also an entrepreneur. Looking back to your upbringing. Were there things that you learn from your parents self taught entrepreneurial lifestyle?
[00:01:50] BS: For sure. You know, being an entrepreneur is sometimes very scary. It can be an intimidating thing to even say, even to own the title entrepreneur. It’s such an interesting hat to wear. And I watched my dad, own some retail establishments, have a career in logistics and then go into real estate and so traveled through a couple of different industries having some success and some failures. I watched my mom stay in one industry and really accelerate her career by doing so. I definitely learned a few lessons out of that. Certainly the kind of grit and resilience required to sort of withstand those highs and lows in this lifestyle. I watched my parents kind of navigate that, and neither of them have college degrees. My dad was a college dropout and my mom barely tried, but they both sort of despite like not having what people would traditionally consider the credentials, displayed a level of courage that I felt was really inspirational and they probably would never describe it that way. I mean, they would just probably describe it as like they needed to pay our mortgage. And so for them it was about need. But as I reflect back on some of the lessons I took from them, certainly their ability to just like courageously move through some of those decisions, has affected my ability to be a bit audacious. So those are a couple of things I took from them at an early age.
[00:03:1] ES: And you did go to college and you graduated. You studied specifically communication and marketing. One of your first jobs out of school was at Microsoft, as a Marketing Manager. And later as a marketing program manager. What were some of the highlights of your experience of working at such a big tech company, specifically in the marketing division?
[00:03:44] BS: Oh, man, so when I was a college senior, I had a plan. I was planning, okay, I want to work for either Nordstrom, Starbucks or Microsoft, these big Seattle employers. And so I kind of had this whole campaign to try to land a job at one of those large stops. And I remember I was getting near the end of my senior year. And so I was getting a little nervous because I hadn’t gotten any offers yet from either any of those companies and got referred to Microsoft and met a hiring manager there and went through an interview process and I remember getting the offer, and it was the happiest day I can really ever describe because I went to Washington State University, and not many Kooks were being hired into Microsoft, just, you know, it wasn’t really known for tech, it was just kind of a hard college to enter into Microsoft from it wasn’t a source school. And so I felt really lucky to have gotten one of these really coveted spots. And so when I was hired, I was part of a college hire program at Microsoft that that was the first year that they had it. And what happened was, Microsoft realized that as a company, all of it was starting to age, the workforce was aging. And so they wanted to bring in some younger talent and so they hired like, 250 of us right out of college and they put us in these really big jobs like these, you know, Marketing Manager jobs up next to peers who were much older than us. And then they supplemented our first year with some really in depth training. So Duke and Harvard created some curriculum just for us. And so we kind of got this little like mini MBA style training. And so to launch a career at Microsoft, you know, with that kind of support was such a game changer and a foundation for me to build upon, that I’m still grateful for To this day, and I feel a debt owed to Microsoft, because of that investment in me. So I was really set up for success. I also had some really beautiful mentors that emerged during that time in my life, because being right out of school, you just like, I didn’t know anything I didn’t know, you know, how to communicate effectively. I didn’t know how to advocate for myself. I didn’t know how to approach annual reviews. And so to learn all of that on the job with some really, really gifted mentors is again, something That has really set me up for a career of success.
[00:06:03] ES: What are some of the ways in which those mentors would help you? Was it a lot of explicit coaching and tips? Or was it just the fact that you are being exposed to working with this very experienced people that you’re observing and how they work, how they interact?
[00:06:19] BS: Both. I mean, when you’re a new employee, you need help in every aspect. You’re really trying to figure out what level of authority, what voice, how to structure an email to get what you need out of people influencing without authority. So all of those moments where I really needed specific coaching, I found, you know, to have lots and lots of people who would sign up for that. Additionally, again, as I look back now, as now I’m a working mother, I realized my very first manager and my first mentor, Stacy and Deanna, both of them were the first models I saw in a workplace of working mothers and being able to have really impactful careers while also raising families at home. And I didn’t know at the time because I wasn’t yet thinking about family planning. But those role models early in my career also informed some of my values around work life integration. And so I had a number of moments that I just went through some really rapid learning during my time at Microsoft,
[00:07:18] ES: After your time at Microsoft, you move to a consulting company, and you worked a lot on helping the company grow and drive change around this. Can you talk about some of the things that you did at the time and kind of what that consists of working in consulting and, you know, different space than what you were doing previously?
[00:07:39] BS: Absolutely, I should definitely I kind of addressed my decision to leave Microsoft to because the idea of leaving this job in this community that had given so much to me to go to a company that was not just brand new, but like this wasn’t even a company at and so to leave the sort of security I remember having to like give up my business cards from Microsoft and how hard that was. And I remember having to print my resignation letter and how hard that was. And so to leave that, that safety was just a really scary moment, especially early in my career. But I did, I felt this entrepreneur calling, and I just I knew that I needed to go have this experience as early on as I could. And so this wonderful gentleman, Jeff invested in me and said, Hey, could you be my first employee, you know, I’d like to start this business. And so when I got there, he had a couple of folks who were kind of 1099 contractors in the business, and he would wire them money, you know, once a week, and there was no infrastructure in place, we didn’t have a brand. And so the idea was that I was going to come on and start selling the business as a business developer. And when I got there, it was really clear that the work that we really needed to do was to essentially build the infrastructure of a startup. And so I got to have really every job there I ran payroll, I was on like, irs.gov, googling how to pay taxes, you know, we really had to figure out honestly on the job, how to set up a business from scratch, we put in benefits, we put in payroll, I had to learn about 401Ks and all the matches, we had to think about employee recruitment and retention. So I mean, I truly was immersed in this business and in every function that this business had, and I was so fortunate that we were really in the right place at the right time. And that business saw tremendous growth and success. So in the four years that I was there, we were able to ramp up to about 120 consultants and about $16 million of revenue since I’ve left they’ve you know, more than doubled that so they still are on a wonderful trajectory, but to be a part of the early stages of a business like that, and to have so much autonomy to make those decisions. Man, that is just a gift that I will you know, I have taken with me for sure as I’ve continued this like entrepreneurship journey,
[00:09:52] ES: How did you navigate jumping on new areas? I’m guessing some of this you didn’t have prior experiences.
[00:10:00] BS: Oh, yeah, I had no experience. None. I mean, that’s why I was like, are you sure you want to hire me? But I guess, you know, he’s like, No, you seem good enough. So, no, I mean, we kind of matched a lot in terms of what we saw as a vision for this thing. But yeah, I mean, I certainly stumbled a lot. And you know, we hired a number of consultants to help me figure out some of those tough challenges. Remember, the first time we ran payroll, and I was trying to figure out how to withhold taxes in the ADP payroll system. So we had to hire a woman to come in and sit with me for a couple of hours while I ran our first payroll. And so you know, just I definitely made a ton of mistakes in those early years. But it was a really gracious culture. And so everyone was kind of along for the ride. Well, we went through those early bumps.
[00:10:43] ES: After working in this early stage consulting company, you worked in a different consulting company. And just in general, you’re working with clients at both these consulting companies. Some of them are big tech company clients. Can you talk about some of the important skills that you learn through your career working with clients and building and nurturing relationships and selling products?
[00:11:14] BS: Sure, you know, I’ve worked in a variety of different business models. I’ve done startups, small businesses, digital marketing agencies, staffing firm, since sort of a management consultancy, if you were to kind of bucket the things that I’ve done. And across all of those experiences, no matter if it was a team of less than 50, or a fortune 50 company, one of the things that I have found to be true and all of those experiences is that humans run businesses. They’re the ones who buy they’re the ones who work hard to fulfill on promises. And so human centricity has been a core value that has really sat with me as I’ve traveled through those experiences. Alongside that, one of the more practical ways that that shows up is that I think that setting proper expectations is a critical component to success in each one of those relationships and engagements. And by that, I mean, you know, when I was selling versus when I was servicing versus when I was building product in each of those settings, helping people understand what you’re trying to achieve, and what is to come next has been a skill that’s taken me a long time to hone but has been something that has really helped people come along to not just want to say yes to what I’m trying to build, but to turn them into mentors and sponsors, as I’ve kind of like building out a vision. So those are a couple of things that have traveled with me and show up today in my work.
[00:12:40] ES: Have there been particular resources or ways in which you learn this? I know earlier, you talked about the importance of mentors and then working with highly experienced people so that you can learn from them. Are there other things that you found useful, like perhaps some books that you read?
[00:12:58] BS: I think that it kind of depends on your life. learning style. So for me, I really value conversations, I love to talk ideas out, like me with another person in a whiteboard in a room, it feels like you know, like, that’s my playground. That’s where I really love to learn. And so along the way, I’ve had a number of people. So I would say that terms of mentors, it hasn’t been these like long enduring relationships where I’ve had a mentor that has seen me through all of these different moments of change. For me, it’s shown up in these sort of micro moments of, I need to make this next change, or I’m considering this next skill I need to learn. And so I’ve tended to seek out a thought leader or a mentor in that particular moment to try to make that next decision. So that’s really how that’s shown up for me. There hasn’t been sort of like one aha book. It has been these like these really next critical decisions that I’ve wanted to unlock alongside another human who’s been there or that perhaps as a peer or as an advisor that I can use to make that next decision.
[00:13:58] ES: Earlier you mentioned that You made a lot of mistakes throughout your career and that leads to growth and building new skills. Is there something that stands out like a mistake or maybe an opportunity that taught you a really valuable lesson, looking back.
[00:14:17] BS: In the times that I’ve been a part of high scale experiences or high growth experiences. In my early career, I think I was a bit unclear on my either my “why”, or the professional values that I wanted to use to make decisions. as I’ve gotten older and a few more gray hairs. I now have a better compass for making decisions. But, you know, I’ll give you some examples. When we were growing staffing firm. Part of the energy that happens there is that every time you staff someone into a role, you’re giving someone new a job, and there’s a lot of joy that comes with giving out jobs for a living, but what happens when you do that too quickly. Is that you tend to lose track of the people who you’ve placed originally. And so I think what I learned there was that I looked back and felt like I wasn’t building the kind of deep relationships that if I really am honest with myself, that’s the kind of experiences in life that I wish to have is these more quality, longer term deep relationships. And so I took away from that experience to say, you know, perhaps growth or scale at speed isn’t always the most desirable thing. It’s definitely something I’ve considered as I’m now scaling my own business, how quickly and at what cost do we consider growth in scale and speed relative to the quality of experiences and engagement and it just takes you doing that a couple of times to know like, how to dial those things simultaneously.
[00:15:48] ES: When I was researching for this interview, I saw that at some point after all this experience, you were laid off and you happened to be seven months pregnant at the time. And then, later on, you founded your company Lions and Tigers, which is a marketing firm with a flexible working style. Can you talk about that time when you’re laid off, and then you’re looking to start a company.
[00:16:17] BS: I had gone from Microsoft to a pretty fast growing staffing firm to a digital marketing agency to a start up. So I had been really curious about all these various business models. And I had really had this kind of career plan and trajectory, like I was sort of on this path. And I was at the startup. It was a big startup and it was really well funded. So it felt very safe to go there. And we decided that it was the time to start our family and so I was fortunate to get pregnant with my first son while I was there, and the business wasn’t doing awesome. We, you know, certainly there was a lot of indicators that we didn’t really have a path to profitability. So I was maybe shocked but not surprised that on grey day in October We would all get pulled together and 20% of the company was to be laid off that day. And I definitely agreed with the business decision because it made sense. But from a personal perspective, being pregnant, seven months pregnant, my third trimester and facing job market with the kind of fear that comes with that moment really rocked me. I mean, I didn’t have health benefits for my upcoming birth, I certainly didn’t have a maternity leave or had budgeted or planned for that. And my greatest fear was that I was on hireable. And that proved to be true. I went on a number of interviews and certainly faced some discrimination during that time, which is probably a whole nother podcast episode, but the only thing that I could do and I of course recognize such privilege and being able to do this, but I made myself available as a consultant. I said, Okay, well, can you hire me on contract and what would that look like? And so I hustled and I was able to Bill 60 hours a week for my whole third trimester to To save enough money for 11 weeks of maternity leave, so that I could Welcome my first son. And it was a really scary time because not only was it not like, I wasn’t making progress on my career, but I was going through a massive transformation to bring a baby into the world. And so after my first baby was born, I went back to just one of those contracts. It was a 25 hour a week consulting project that was so so such a good fit for me, and it compensated me so well, like it was so worth my time to go and do. And so I did that for a few months and I sort of got my sea legs under me my mama sea legs as I figured out how to have this little baby and be a consultant for the first time and I realized how much I loved that I had never consulted up until then I had always sort of sold consulting services or structured them but I had never been a consultant on my own. And I just fell in love with the kind of work that I got to do. I loved the flexibility. I loved the model I love that I can say yes or no to clients as my life allowed. And so I did that for a couple of years, about three years. And then we decided to expand our family again. And so in the first month of my second pregnancy, I felt a calling like I felt a true moment where like the clouds parted and I felt called like, Brea, you have figured out and stumbled upon a kind of working that has enabled your life. I just felt so much gratitude for this work, that I felt incumbent upon me to share it with others and to help other people, especially working moms, like me try to understand how they can go about doing this kind of consulting part time, full time, whatever their needs were, and I wanted to teach this kind of methodology. And so I decided to found this business and so I grew a baby and a business in 2018 and built the business so that I could prepare for a second maternity leave this time with employees to backfill me on Some of these projects and so that was really the start of this company. And now it’s called lions and tigers. And today we have roughly 50 people who are living this way that get to choose how much when they work and be involved in really high impact projects in a non traditional archetype.
[00:20:20] ES: We’re starting to see more of this flexible work. Now, in particular, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a lot of companies had to be bought to support our remote working environment. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to stick with it. But they’ve been some challenges with this. From your experience in running a company that is built on this idea of flexible hours flexible work environment. What are some of the main characteristics of a company that operates this way?
[00:20:54] BS: It certainly works better in knowledge work. I mean, you can’t certainly the smallest At work in all industries, hospitality, manufacturing, some of those will of course have more challenges when considering flexible, remote work. However, in areas like Microsoft or other large tech firms in areas where knowledge workers highly coveted creative work, for instance, it is a ripe model to consider this idea of working from home. So the kinds of brands that are attracted to this model tend to be ones that think about inclusion as a core value. They’re thinking about how to keep talent in the workplace, because they potentially have some attrition or retention concerns, because their employees are wanting to go this route. And so they are dictating a brand to think more fluidly about their talent to they’re needing to move into more agile spaces. So they may have in the past thought only about the W two full time employees that sit on their roster, but the iteration required for transformation right now is So fast, the clip is so fast, that they’re needing to move with more agility than they have in the building. And then three, they really have to have the culture and infrastructure set up to be able to allow for the kind of tooling required. The kind of you know that everyone has laptops, there actually has to be a technical ability that the teams and staff can work either autonomous Lee or asynchronously, despite where they may be sitting at their kitchen table or in a building somewhere.
[00:22:28] ES: An important component of this that I, my personal opinion, and what I’ve heard other people say is making sure you still have your sense of unity as a company, community, making sure people feel included and not isolated. Can you talk about some of the ways in which you and your company do this?
[00:22:50] BS: It is really important and, you know, I have always since hoped that our workforces would become more human centric. We’re seeing now that you cannot ignore work and life. It’s not a binary choice. And we talk about work life balance. And really right now it’s a work life collision. I mean, people are on conference calls and dogs and kids are in the background. And you can’t apologize for that right now because it is what it is. But one thing that we have always done is advocated for people to show up to their work at lions and tigers as their whole authentic self. That has never been a question for us. And, you know, when I have a story about when I first hired one of my employees, Terry, he joined and in one of our very first conference calls we had together I said, Hey, you know, I need to turn off my camera for a minute because I need to pump it to me, I didn’t even think twice about it. But to him, he reflected back later to me, he said, You know, I’ve just never been a part of a culture where people could just do what they needed to do and then do their work. Like that’s just such an obvious conclusion I had never come to before. And so now we’re required to even more consider how we keep people feeling inspired. And by that we have really consistent all staff meetings where we share really transparently around how the business is doing and where we’re headed. I think it’s really important that we give that kind of consistent update to our team. We use tools like teams and slack all the time. It’s really important to us to have not just individual items and not just items around work, but we’ve got really specific channels around we’ve got a channel for virtual work right now where we’re sharing best practices, resources, homeschooling tips, we have kudos boards, content recommendations, so that people are bringing through this element of we have a value around intentional community. And so that right now is being pressed super hard. And then, you know, for us truly, it’s about giving a little bit of delight. And so we actually I’ve hired this gal for just five hours a week, but she is our Director of delight. And so we’ve been sending weekly and now monthly packages out to our whole team contractors employees doesn’t matter so that they just feel cared for right now. I mean, and it can be anything we’ve sent out coffee or send out sweatshirts. We’re just giving everyone just a little bit more love and grace right now, we gave everyone an extra day off around the Memorial Day holiday just for a chance to take a beat and try to kind of recalibrate, everyone just needs a little bit more grace. And so that’s how it’s been showing up for us at lions and tigers.
[00:25:19] ES: Do you meet in person as a company sometimes?
[00: 25:29] BS: I do, and I’m so sad because last year, I hosted a family picnic in my backyard. And this year, we don’t get to do that. And that feels like a really big loss truly, because you cannot replace in person. You just can’t in many ways, and we’re doing everything that we can to still build these strong connections virtually. And in some ways I’ve deepen my relationship with some of the folks I wouldn’t have otherwise interacted with, but we certainly are missing being in person. We also had a co working space prior to this where we would all come in and meet in sub teams. And we’ve really missed having that space. And so we’re still envisioning what fall will bring for us in terms of in person gatherings, we’re still a little unsure on what our reopening looks like for in person. That still remains to be seen as everyone’s trying to figure out what’s most appropriate in each community that they’re a part of.
[00:26:17] ES: Well, Brea, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been great hearing your insights from your trajectory and your most recent work running lions and tigers.
[00:26:27] BS: Thank you. Thank you for telling such important stories and the voices of women in tech. This is such a privilege to be with you.
Building software involves understanding our users. This helps us build better software and consider new things. Sarah Hall, Lead User Researcher at Crunchyroll, explained how insights from users can drive product development. We talked about different types of user research, and various examples of how a product can improve from this. Sarah also talked about the role of a Lead User Researcher and important skills for the job.
Sarah Hall
Transcript
[00:00:00] ES: I’m Edaena Salinas, Software Engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm.
Building software involves understanding our users. This helps us build better software and consider new things. Sarah Hall, Lead User Researcher at Crunchyroll, explained how insights from users can drive product development. We talked about different types of user research, and various examples of how a product can improve from this. Sarah also talked about the role of a Lead User Researcher and important skills for the job.
Before we move on with the interview, I’m really excited to announce that Season 1 of the Five Minute Mentor Podcast is now available This is a podcast where you’ll get advice from prominent people in tech, authors, journalists, artists, and more. You can find more information about the show by going to mentors.fm. Thank you.
Sarah Hall, lead user researcher from Crunchyroll is joining us today. Welcome to The Women in Tech Show.
[00:01:16] SH: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here, it’s really good podcast.
[00:01:20] ES: Thank you. I’m excited to have you on the show too. Today we’re going to talk a lot about user researching, user experience. First, I want to begin talking a little bit about Crunchyroll. This is a leading company for distributing anime and manga. Can you explain in more detail what Crunchyroll is about? Sure.
[00:01:42] SH: Well, Crunchyroll is part of the bigger Warner media family. And it’s actually the world’s most popular anime brand. We have the biggest anime library, and we’re translated into eight languages across 200 countries. And we have something like 60 million registered users. And I like to think that we’re a bit more than just a streaming service. It’s more of like a global community. We offer our fans like a 360 experience that includes games. We make our own shows and movies from our studio. We have merchandise, we do live events, we have a huge convention every year. It’s really a fan community. But yeah, also a video streaming service dedicated to anime.
[00:02:25] ES: So it sounds like what you’re saying is very focused on specific kind of content, right? In the anime space.
[00:02:34] SH: It is. Yeah.
[00:02:35] ES: Okay. Before we get a little bit more into user research, can you just talk about some of the main functionality of the platform?
[00:02:45] SH: Sure. So yeah, we have over 1000 titles, 3000 episodes of anime, but then we also have a bunch of cool community stuff like we have forums and chats where you can go talk about the show and find other people that like the same stuff is you. We have a localized to different countries so that you can get really specific to your region. We have stores, like I said, we do things like anime awards, so you can vote each year on your favorite shows, there’s a bunch of event information, you can see original stuff, we actually have Crunchyroll games, some that we make ourselves some that we partner with others for. So it’s really a big kind of fan site in a way where you can get all of your favorite shows, but then you find everybody else who likes them too. And you can really connect with people all over the world.
[00:03:36] ES: So you’re highlighting this community aspect is very important. And there’s different ways people can interact, forums, chats, get recommendations vote for awards.
[00:03:47] SH: Yeah.
[00:03:48] ES: Now that we have that context, you specifically work as a lead user researcher. In your opinion, and from your experience, what does User Research consists of, what is it?
[00:04:02] SH: I think fundamentally, user research is understanding the motivations and behaviors of a user so that we can help them solve their problems and achieve their goals. And then my role specifically, I lead user research within a much broader and bigger data and Insights Team. And so we actually work incredibly close with the analytics half of our team to triangulate observational and self reported data. With these larger trends that we see in viewership data viewership data could just be like everyone watching a particular show, or, this show, it appeals mostly to girls, or, and so then in user research, we do stuff like interviews and focus groups and surveys. And we put all that data together. And this type of integration helps us capture a more holistic picture of the user.
[00:04:51] ES: So that sounds a little bit related to the behavior component because you mentioned two main components of user research are looking at motivations and behaviors. So I heard you list several behaviors. What would be an example of a motivation in the context of the product you work on, which is Crunchyroll.
[00:05:10] SH: The motivation is maybe like the desire to escape. Like, say you’re a college student, and I don’t know, you’re working on really complicated math problems all day, which might not be your favorite. And you just want like a brain break at the end of the day. And so you’re looking into maybe a particular anime genre like fantasy to let you sort of escape into another universe at the end of your day. And so that’s a motivation, but it can also be really baseline like, hey, my friend recommended this show. I’m looking for it on the site, and your motivation is just trying to find what you want.
[00:05:45] ES: Can you talk about the different areas of user research?
[00:05:50] SH: Sure. Well, I think it breaks down into the quantitative and the qualitative. Quantitative tells us what is happening. So, like I mentioned, if we see a big trend of like, oh, Dragonball Z is super popular, or oh, it seems like only people under 25 watch this particular show. And so you can get that kind of stuff from like viewership data or surveys or A/B testing or intercept surveys. But then the qualitative gives you the answer, it gives you the why. So we see these big trends, but, why are they happening? Why do only boys like the show are under 25? Or why is this show so popular? or Why does everyone seem to be having this particular stumble or problem on the website? And that’s where things like focus groups and interviewing and field research really come in handy to answer you can follow up and really round out those answers of like, why is this trend happening? And then there’s stuff like usability testing, and I feel like that is actually a nice mix of both. Because if you give someone a test, like say you’re showing them a new design and you ask them oh try and add this to your watch lists are your queue, and they stumble. Or you can count how many seconds it takes them to complete that task or how many, you know, incorrect places, they click on their path trying to achieve that task. But then afterwards, you can ask them why, like, why did you assume that you needed to click here to go there? And so you get that nice mix of both, which actually gives you the answer. I don’t think you can have one without the other.
[00:07:25] ES: What would be an example of a product decision that was driven by an insight that you got from user research or that the team as a whole got.
[00:7:35] SH: User research drives all kinds of product decisions, like how to bundle our subscription tiers, what different features are people willing to pay more or less for but I think a more interesting one that we’ve actually been working on this week revolves around our Hime, our mascot, so she’s a gingka with is a anthropomorphize version of inanimate object or concept. In our case, she’s the live version of our company. She’s a cute little fox spirit. And so we’ve been doing a ton of research these last few weeks just trying to figure out where people want to see her. Like, if they see an error message, are they happier to see her face next to it? Does that make that a more pleasurable experience for them? Do they want to see her introduce videos? Do they want to see her recommendations? And so I think it’s a particularly, maybe more fun than normal way that user research is driving some product decisions and design decisions, at least lately for us. And we really inviting users kind of steer the ship on this one and tell us exactly how much they want of her and where they want to her and how they want to see her and what she should be like. And so it’s really cool, because it’s a very user generated kind of organic process, I think.
[00:08:53] ES: For something like this, do you do both quantitative and qualitative types research?
[00:09:01] SH: Yeah, we did a surveys, we did an in-app survey. So everyone that came to our homepage was just asked quickly, if they knew her, and if they knew her what they thought about her. We did some survey research showing people different designs, and some that just had her in some that didn’t have her and we didn’t point her out explicitly. And then ask people which page was more compelling. We also in some focus groups brought her up and had people give their thoughts on her. And people actually have a lot of, really, passionate thoughts on her, and how she should be used. Also at conventions. we did some interviews where she came up as well. It’s the nice mix and that kind of painted us a clear picture of just how we should employ her in our designs.
[00:09:47] ES: How do you decide what things to investigate in the “why”, in the qualitative? Because I imagine not everything that is measured, gets to have a dedicated focus group and additional interviewing, right? Because that costs more money. Is there usually a process that you go through to the terming? Oh, this, we should have a focus group for this.
[00:10:12] SH: Absolutely. So we almost always start out with the quantitative. And it almost always starts out with just the data that we see on our own site. So I mentioned we’re global company. And so we’ve been seeing that our popularity and more so than just even Crunchyroll, anime’s popularity in Mexico and Brazil and Bhutan markets in general is just skyrocketing. Anime is getting so popular. And so we could see that in the quantitative detail of like, oh, Mexico City alone watches so much anime on our site. So maybe we should go down and talk to them. So for example, we went down to Mexico, Mexico City in February for some exploratory research to follow up on some of these big trends we’ve been seeing. We wanted to get a deeper understanding of our Mexican anime audience members, so we kind of saw it in the data that there’s this huge market we saw where they were quantitative. And then we did a big survey before we went to try and identify some trends like where do they buy anime? Where do they hang out? What do they want? How is it different than American markets? And then once we got down there, we followed up with a bunch of qualitative stuff we did ethnography is we did a focus group we even did some usability testing, but mostly we just spent a great deal of time in people’s homes. interviewing them. We walked around areas where anime fans hang out like anime theater showings comic bookstores, this place called Frikiplaza, which is this amazing six story building with has floors for video games. It has anime merch, it has anime inspired food vendors, tables for like card games like Magic the Gathering. It is definitely somewhere I would have hung out a lot when I was younger had it existed in America. It was really fun. But yeah, but by like immersing ourselves in their worlds, we could really explore these trends that we had seen first and the data on a deeper level. And I feel like it added so much depth to what we already had, like seen what they had said in all these surveys. So that’s a way that it pairs really nicely, I think with each other. But yeah, I don’t think we would know what to look for first, if we didn’t go with hard data to lead us.
[00:12:30] ES: I’m really excited about that. That your having an effort, especially because I’m from Mexico. So I appreciate companies, you know, making an effort in understanding other cultures and then improving the product based on that. I was watching anime at Crunchyroll I appreciated the Spanish subtitles.
[00:12:49] SH: Nice.
[00:12:50] ES: Yeah.
[00:12:50] SH: Oh, that’s exciting. Yeah, we’re actually our team is supposed to be in Brazil next month, but COVID has sort of shut down our plans. But yeah, we’re really lucky at our company, we have regional leads in each country. And so we really can go explore other cultures, because we have these people that are from there that are also, you know, huge anime fans and stuff and understand the business that can really like scout locations for us and translate for us and just, I don’t know, be our gateway into all of these different worlds. And I feel it brings us together so much more as a 360 company and a global community.
[00:13:26] ES: Exactly. Especially because yeah, you observe you are global community, so might as well make an effort to understand your global users.
[00:13:34] SH: Absolutely.
[00:13:35] ES: I want to talk a little bit now about the Lead User Research role, which is your current role. What would you say are some of the things that you do as a Lead User Researcher?
[00:13:48] SH: As a Lead User Researcher, I lead my team and I help them design the best ways to collect data. But then also one of the trickier parts is, how to pull out insights from that data and then make those insights actionable. Because it’s one thing to gain a little knowledge, it’s another to translate it into something that other teams and the rest of the company can actually move on. And then I think it’s also very important to disseminate that knowledge. Half the battle is just getting up in front of people and trying to be persuasive and being like, this is what we’ve seen. This is what our recommendation is, this is why this is important. This is the evidence to back that up and to really push and lead the team in those efforts. And then I think maybe the last part would be mentorship. I think it’s important, especially because user research is such a new field to really act as a mentor and help those that are just starting out and coming up to learn kind of best practices and methods and stuff like that. And that’s one reason why me and a colleague created the San Francisco User Research Group. I started more in academia. And when I switched over to user research, I worked for a series of small startups. And I was the only one, I was the only user researcher embedded on a design team or working under a PM or whatever. And I just, I felt I had to figure everything else out on my own. And that can be kind of tricky. And so I think it’s really important to get a group of professionals together, especially when a lot of us are siloed on design teams, or kind of by ourselves and smaller companies. So you can share best practices and methods and really help each other just establish really strong practices.
[00:15:43] ES: One of the things that you mentioned earlier on was the importance of being persuasive, and you’re talking a lot about using data and how that can help. Throughout your career, have there been other things that have helped you improve in how persuasive you can be
[00:16:00] SH: Yes, I think I had to get a lot better at public speaking, I feel like coming from a more medical and academic background, I was just like, okay, here’s all the hard data. Here’s a graph after graph after graph. But honestly, that’s really hard for people to absorb. I do think that part of being a good public speaker and a persuasive public speaker is being kind of funny is breaking stuff down into little, I don’t want to say sound bites, but little consumable pieces of like insider knowledge that they can walk away from and actually remember. So I think I had to work a lot on just my own presentation style and kind of lighten up and be more fun with it. And I think that I can still get across strong data messages. But when I do it in a lighter way, it resonates more deeply with my audience.
[00:16:56] ES: You mentioned that you came from a medical and academic background. I saw you have a background in psychology, which is the study of the mind and behavior. Have you found some similarities between your academic and medical background? And what you do now as a user researcher of a global platform?
[00:17:19] SH: Yeah, totally. So my background is in psychology, which I think is a really good underpinning for any user researcher. So if anyone is in that field and interested, I think it parlays really nicely to the user research field. But I was always research based, like it was never going to be a therapist. I always was very research specific. And I do think that psychology offers you lessons about people in general, and especially about their own mental models and the motivations behind their actions. So this is especially really helpful when you think about human bias, which we’re all subject to, we’re all very infallible. But there’s all kinds of different bias. The recency bias which is the tendency to hold on to the last thing you heard or the bandwagon effect, is you believe one thing if everyone else is doing it. And there’s all kinds of these little traps that people get sucked into. And so I think when you’re considering how to do a design that is the most usable, it’s really helpful to understand the way humans think, in general. And then I ended up weirdly working for UCSF and going into medical research just for a little bit, because after graduate school, I love San Francisco and I knew I wanted to live here and I was just looking at research jobs and stuff like that. And they were doing just some incredible cutting edge biomedical research. And so I just went to a few lectures, went to an interview and just thought I’d give it a try. And I was like, hey, it’s data, I can do data. I’ve been a researcher. I think that it was really good to train me and cut my teeth because medical research requires a very high level of precision. So really rigorous protocols. In a challenging recruitment, even analyzing qualitative data, we would use like complex software’s like Atlas to carefully, quantify qualitative data and code it. But it took years, it took so much time. I really had to then adapt those strategies back to user research when I joined tech because you innovate much faster. And you don’t have a year, five years to spend on the study, you have to be much quicker. But I do feel good that I built this like very solid foundation in research with some more traditional methods. And then ironically, UCSF actually paid for my path to user research because one of my doctors when I was in sports medicine, Dr. Anthony Luke offered me a job as a user researcher and his new startup called RaceSafe, which is a medical technology that allows race organizers and medical staff and stuff to talk to each other and be able to look up patients really quickly if they have an incident during a race and so That was my little bridge way into user research. Because honestly, these days, it just comes down to people and data and how people use their medical devices is not that different than how they use their streaming service platform. It’s all you know how people interact with technology.
[00:20:17] ES: Exactly. I feel this is very important to notice, especially if we have listeners, working in other fields, but they might think, Oh, well, I didn’t study computer science, or I’m doing medical research. Essentially, you’re gaining a set of skills that are applicable to other industries. So if you wanted to specially work more closely with the tech industry, the skills translate really well in a lot of cases. Right? And you’re explaining one of them.
[00:20:49] SH: 100% Yeah, we just hired a new data scientist and she comes from a health background, but she understands people in data and how people interact with their own data there on devices. And yeah, I don’t see any kind of barrier there. The fact that she maybe isn’t an anime expert or something, researchers research.
[00:21:09] ES: That too. I found that I’ve talked to people where they are interested in working for video game companies or products. And they’re like, Well, I’m not a gamer. And people tell them no, well, all we need is exactly what you’re describing people that can understand data problem solving. So there’s no real barriers there, I think.
[00:21:30] SH: Definitely. And you’ll learn and sometimes, not being really into the content that you’re studying actually gives you a kind of a more unbiased approach, because you don’t have strong feelings either way, you’re just looking at the data. And for someone who is like a data scientist that can be really good to like, be very unbiased.
[00:21:48] ES: Definitely. Well, Sarah, thank you for coming on the show. It’s been great talking to you about user research and Crunchyroll.
[00:21:56] SH: Oh, thank you. This is so nice, and I’m so glad you’re doing this. I can’t wait to listen to more powerful women more of your episodes. It’s been really fun.
The fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters on the planet. María Isabel Amorín, Founder and CEO of INDEQUI, explained the different types of pollution generated by these industries. We talked in detail about water pollution and about an affordable filter that she built to clean the water. Maria Isabel also explained the challenges of building a company in Guatemala and her path to raising funds.
In 2019, María Isabel was recognized by the MIT Technology Review as an innovator in biotechnology.
María Isabel Amorín
Transcript
[00:00:00] ES: I’m Edaena Salinas, Software Engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech. For more information about the show go to wit.fm.
The fashion and textile industries are one of the biggest polluters on the planet. María Isabel Amorín, founder and CEO of INDEQUI explained the different types of pollution generated by these industries. We talked in detail about water pollution and about an affordable filter that she built to clean this water. María Isabel also explained the challenges of building a company in Guatemala and her path to raising funds. In 2019, María Isabel was recognized by the MIT Technology Review as an innovator in biotechnology.
Before we move on with the interview, I’m really excited to announce that Season 1 of the 5 Minute Mentor Podcast is now available This is a podcast where you’ll get advice from prominent people in tech, authors, journalists, artists, and more. You can find more information about the show by going to mentors.fm. Thank you.
[00:01:23] ES: María Isabel Amorín, welcome to The Women in Tech Show.
[00:01:27] MA: Thank you so much.
[00:01:28] ES: I’m excited to talk to you today. And some of the things we’re going to be talking about are building solutions to help the environment. In particular, you’ve been exploring solutions to tackle pollution generated by textile factories. Can you give some background on textile factories like what they do and, kind of why they exist?
[00:01:54] MA: The textile industry is this economic activity that has the objective of the production of the fibers, yarn, and making clothing and textile that you can use for your personal or technical or industrial purposes. So, it’s a complex production that includes several steps to cover all the entire production cycle. From the raw materials, the production of the raw material that can even be natural or synthetic one, and then to the production of the final product that could be the fabric or clothing.
[00:02:33] ES: As you’ve been investigating this industry and building solutions to tackle pollution in the environment. Can you talk about some of the impact that you’ve seen textile factories have in the environment.
[00:02:49] MA: Yes, all these textile industry and the fashion industry is one of the major polluting industries in the world. Since the production of the raw materials, the energy that you need to spin in them into fibers also requires a lot of water, uses of chemicals, including pesticides for the growing of the raw material, such as the cotton. On a global scale, the textile industry uses between 6 to 9 trillion liters of water each year just for the public dyeing. So it’s a very polluting industry.
[00:03:28] ES: Wow. Yeah, that’s quite impactful. And in more detail, you’re mentioning impact in different areas like the energy, you know, to manufacture the fibers. Also, you’re saying pesticides. When I was researching for this, I saw you’ve been focusing a lot in the issue with the contaminated water. Can you talk about usually what are some kind of contaminants in the water and then what happens to the water, typically.
[00:03:59] MA: Yes. For example, it all depends on the type of the fiber, but in the dyeing process for cotton for example, that is the most common fiber that is used for making clothing and textiles, the dyeing process often needs a large amount of water and also you have to put there a lot of chemicals, a lot of salt. And the main problem is the process is quite inefficient, the fixation rate is about only 70%. So, you have 30% of the dye that, it will go to the water. And you need to use the salts to change the charge of the fiber. So, in cotton, the cotton is made from cellulose, and cellulose are glucose bond together. And they have hydroxyl groups that are negative charged and the reactive dye is also negative charge. So, it can’t bond there, so it’s a really inefficient process. And that means that many of the dye will go to the water after all the washing.
[00:05:11] ES: So you’re talking right now specifically about the particles involved. And you’ve been talking about charge, like the cotton is formed, it consists of glucose bonds, and then they’re negative charged. And then you’re trying to mix cotton with the dye which is also negative charge. Is this analogous to trying to put together two magnets from the same side?
[00:05:39] MA: Yes, that’s how it would work.
[00:05:41] ES: So people have a visual idea what the industry is trying to do. They’re trying to mix dye with cotton, they’re both negative. So it’s really hard to stick them together, which is one of the reasons why you were saying there’s a lot of wasted dye?
[00:05:55] MA: Yes.
[00:05:55] ES: And, when you’ve been investigating this, what are some of the things that you’ve seen happens to this contaminated water. Where does it end up? What do people do with it?
[00:06:08] MA: Yes, there is a widely used phrase that among the designers, and they say that you can know the color of the fashion next season by the color of the rivers in China. And they use this phrase all the time. So that’s what is happening in developing countries where the most of the production takes place, often, we don’t have a strict environmental legislation. So the way the water is often discharged untreated to the water bodies. In China, it’s estimated that 70% of all the water bodies are contaminated by the textile industry.
[00:06:50] ES: So, this is specifically what you’ve been working on. You’re trying to reduce this pollution in the contaminated water. Can you talk a little bit about what it would take to, you know, filter and clean this water at a high level?
[00:07:09] MA: Yes, there are traditional methods for the remediation of waste water contaminated with dyes and includes electrochemical reactions, chemical press also reverse osmosis. However, these metals have several limitations such as the high operating costs, the low efficiency, production of byproducts and this makes them difficult to acquire in a small scale and in the developing countries, not only in Guatemala also Mexico, Bangladesh, India, there are many textile artisans. The production is made in small scale fabric companies. So, they can’t afford these metals, they can’t afford a reverse osmosis chemical press. So, we were working on providing them a solution to treat this wastewater in a more affordable and more easy way to treat it.
[00:08:07] ES: I was reading that you thought of the solution while you were in school taking classes about polymers. For people that don’t know polymers, what are some main characteristics of polymers. What are they?
[00:08:21] MA: Yeah. So, a polymer is a large molecule, it’s composed of many repeated units that are bound together. Poly means many and mer means part, so it’s a large molecule of many parts. And polymers can be scientific ones like plastics, that plastics or polymers and also there are natural ones that are, they’re biopolymers. So the biopolymers is a polymer that is produced on living organisms. They can be present on the biomass and we can extract them from there.
[00:09:01] ES: What are some living organisms where you saw the polymers present?
[00:09:06] MA: Yes, for example, in plants, in trees, the cellulose is also a polymer. And the chitin that is the main product that I am using it, the chitin is present in some fungi in the exoskeleton of crustaceans and also insects.
[00:09:27] ES: Yes. So you’re using crustaceans specifically prawn shells, right?
[00:09:27] MA: Right.
[00:09:28] ES: What is a reason why you decided to use this versus plants or trees? So what is it about prawn shells?
[00:09:44] MA: Okay, yes. It’s because in this a crustacean shells contains three primary chemicals. There is the calcium carbonate, the chitin and protein. The chitin is a polymer that is the second most abundant natural biopolymer and can be transformed into chitosan, and this chitosan, so they chitin is the acetylated polymer and you made up the acetylation. And you get the chitosan and this chitosan has a lot of applications and a lot of properties due to the positive charge that is in all the chain.
[00:10:26] ES: So we’re talking about, you’re in school taking classes about polymers, this large molecule with repeated units together. And then you’re mentioning how they occur synthetically like plastic but also in nature, like plants and trees, and specifically focusing down on prawn shells. Where do the polymers come into play when trying to build a solution to reduce contaminated water? What is their role in this?
[00:10:59] MA: The positive changes that are on the chain, they can act as a flocculant, it’s the process of the agglomeration of all these particles. So, in wastewater in general, the organic matter has in the surface negative charge, and also as I said before the dyes are negative. So, they can link together to absorb the dye and also to make these agglomeration and to act as a flocculant.
[00:11:33] ES: Once you first are thinking about, this idea in the properties of the contaminated water, the negative charge, and then you see the polymers have a positive charge. What are some of the things that happen next, before you start exploring an idea, do you run experiments or do you read more? Can you talk about that process of coming up with an idea and then try to build it.
[00:11:58] MA: Yes, I think there is a big gap in the lab experiments and then trying to transfer the technology to the industrial sector, you have to make a lot of running experiments with the real wastewater. And that was the thing that I developed during the pilot project because I have run experiments with different dyes, and calculating the efficiency of with every dye in a separate way. And then when I collect the wastewater samples of the industrial process, the pH was different. They were mixing all the dyes so it was a complex project to try to figure it out if you can change the pH to get more efficiently or what happened with the salt, and everything is different when you want to apply it on an industry the thing that you develop on the lab. So we started working since, all the lab experiments in the lab, to then transfer the technology and go into the real industries and working with the artisans and to really develop a technology that could be used in the industrial sector.
[00:13:23] ES: And you’re based in Guatemala.
[00:13:26] MA: Yes.
[00:13:26] ES: Particularly looking at this, providing a affordable solution to artisans that cannot afford other ways of cleaning the water. Can you talk a little bit about the panorama in Guatemala, the textile industry artisan made, just to give some context?
[00:13:47] MA: Yes. In Guatemala, the textile industry is really important it represents the 20% of the product that the country export. However, according to an environmental audit, the 40% of the companies didn’t want to respond to the question what treatment is given to the dye in the wastewater. 10% they say they incinerate the waste. That’s a common practice to incinerate and we are only transporting the problem to the air.
[00:14:20] ES: Yeah like you’re not dumping in the water you’re burning it but then the air is contaminated.
[00:14:25] MA: Yes, and even 30% they only discharge these into the water body with no treatment. And this situation is alarming because we have a lot of polluted water bodies the Platanitos Rivers, Alomar River are always contaminated with different dyes.
[00:14:47] ES: What about in terms of the sea life or the seafood industry? Because, you’re using crustacean shells for the polymer used for the filter for the water?
[00:14:59] MA: Yes. Also in all the world, the shrimp and the prawn shells are globally, they dump these waste in the landfill or even into the sea. In developed countries, they it’s also costly. It’s so costly that I met some owner of a seafood company in Brussels, and he told me that they produce the product, and then they transport it to a Latin American country to peel it because it was cheaper. And also in that way, they don’t have to deal with the waste. And it’s what is happening here, 40% of the skeleton of the prawns is an inedible portions, so therefore is not exportable. So these 40% of the total weight of a shrimp is waste. And is discarded into landfill, so rivers, and is also an environmental risk due to the age of fracture of organic matter.
[00:15:58] ES: Got it. So you’re making use of that waste, the crustacean shells, to build your solution to clean the waste from the textile industries and you’ve founded a company around it. It’s called INDEQUI. Can you talk a bit about the company, its focus.
[00:16:17] MA: Yes. So I founded that company, that it means chemical research development, because I realized that there is a great need in the industry to develop research and development. Many times in other countries, they do partnerships with the academia and this is not happening here. The industries don’t want to invest in laboratories or to hire scientists. And also they are not working together with universities and research institutes. So it’s an opportunity to offer them research and development to make solutions for them. And it has been difficult because when you have to work with chemistry you have to invest in expensive laboratory, the facilities and also to the reactive and the chemical reagents and expensive equipment, but you can also make agreement with industries and also with academia. So that is why I founded this INDEQUI, this company. And CrustaTec is the brand of the polymer and the filter that we develop.
[00:17:32] ES: Got it. I was reading about your journey in this, and founding a company, you’re in Guatemala, and that you encounter difficulty trying to raise funding locally. Can you talk about some of the things you encountered?
[00:17:48] MA: Yes, it had been difficult. They don’t want to invest in science. I think it’s a problem that science and research, they are seen as the entertainment of the scientists. Many times the result of their research remains in the scientific articles, in thesis, and society doesn’t see a science as something important to invest. So it had been very difficult. I think technologies and apps gain more in those projects than in science.
[00:18:23] ES: So you think part of it could be this cultural shift might be needed, where science can become a priority, you know, to improve the local society, right?
[00:18:34] MA: Yes, to really put the results of the research available to the society and that, maybe they change their mind that science is important.
[00:18:46] ES: Another thing I found interesting is so eventually you were able to raise some funds internationally. And you found the organization that could provide you funds through social media which was Young Water Solutions. Can you talk about how you found them or what your social media experience is.
[00:19:07] MA: Yeah, so I saw this post on Facebook for Young Water Solutions. They had a call for applications for these Young Water Solutions fellowship that they develop each year. And this organization is an NGO that aims to develop and support the potential of young people to contribute to water sanitation and water resource management. They empower these young leaders and entrepreneurs and provide them with tools and to develop projects and their business around water. So I saw the application and they were offering training to spend some time in Switzerland learning how to develop a viable business model and how to do a pilot project. They also were offering field funding to the implementation of the project and coaching for the next year when you were doing the project. So I saw that this post on Facebook and I applied with the project, and that was the beginning of everything.
[00:20:21] ES: Yeah, I think this is good that you’re persisting and you weren’t able to get funding locally but you’ve got an internationally. Now you’re building this company in Guatemala, I think this, I hope, will help change things locally. And then it can be an example of a successful company that’s applying science and then hopefully open the door to more scientists in Guatemala to get their inventions out there applied to real world scenarios.
[00:20:53] MA: Yes, I hope so.
[00:20:55] ES: Well, María Isabel, thank you for coming on the show is been great talking to you about this.
[00:21:02] MA: Thank you, so much. Thank you for this opportunity.
Rebecca Parsons has been working in technology for over 30 years. Throughout her career, some of the things she’s worked on are system architectures, software design patterns, distributed systems and best practices. Having started programming at 13 years old, she has seen significant technological transformations. In this episode we talked about the evolution of technology and how that leads to changes in how we develop software. Rebecca is currently the CTO of ThoughtWorks.
In 2018 she was the recipient of the Technical Leadership Abie Award. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global nonprofit with a goal of reaching 50/50 gender equity in tech by 2025. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This episode is part of a series of shows that highlight the work of previous Abie Award Winners. For more information about the Abie Awards, go to anitab.org
Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks
Transcript
[00:00:12] ES: I’m Edaena Salinas, Software Engineer and host of The Women in Tech Show, a podcast about what we work on, not what it feels like to be a woman in tech, for more information about the show, go to wit.fm
Rebecca Parsons has been working in technology for over 30 years. Throughout her career, some of the things she’s worked on are system architectures, software design patterns, distributed systems and best practices. Having started programming at 13 years old, she has seen significant technological transformations. In this episode we talked about the evolution of technology and how that leads to changes in how we develop software. Rebecca is currently the CTO of ThoughtWorks.
In 2018 she was the recipient of the Technical Leadership Abie Award. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global nonprofit with a goal of reaching 50/50 gender equity in tech by 2025. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This episode is part of a series of shows that highlight the work of previous Abie Award Winners.
Before we move on with the interview. I’m really excited to announce that season 1 of the 5 Minute Mentor podcast is available. This is a podcast where you’ll get advice from prominent people in tech, authors, journalists, artists and more. For more information about the show, go to mentors.fm. Thank you.
[00:01:47] ES: Rebecca Parsons, welcome to The Women in Tech Show.
[00:01:51] RP: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:52] ES: You started coding at 13 years old. Can you talk about your introduction to coding?
[00:01:58] RP: I was at an algebra class, and we had just switched school districts, and there was some uncertainty about whether the grades I’d gotten in math, in my old school district, were actually relevant or not. If you will. And so I had actually learned all of the things my freshman algebra teacher was trying to teach me, back actually in the 5th grade. And so he realized that very quickly and at the time he was taking a course at the local University in programming and PL/1, and so he bought another copy of the textbook and he gave it to me and said “I will run your programs for you”, for whatever reason, and I never have learned why, but our school had a keypunch machine, and so he gave me a key to the keypunch room. So I just started working my way through the book and he ran my programs for me at the University when he ran his. And that’s how I learned to program, and I just,I fell in love with it. I thought it was fantastic.
[00:02:58] ES: And, what time was this, roughly?
[00:03:00] RP: Early to mid 70s
[00:03:03] ES: OK. And you’re highlighting a lot that he was running your programs for you because you couldn’t do it yourself, right? It was more about you program, and then you take the program to the machine, right?
[00:03:12] RP: Exactly. It was done on punch cards so it had to be taken to the University and the operator had to feed the cards into the mainframe computer at the University and it would generate a print out. So it was a very very slow feedback loop.
[00:03:26] ES: And throughout your career you’ve tried new things and even helped define and adopt new approaches to problems. One of the examples that I saw is your work in evolutionary architecture. But before we dive into what that is, we need to understand how we got there by looking at how technology has evolved and how it has changed software architecture. So I want to begin with a quote that I’ve heard you say multiple times from Ralph Johnson, a computer scientist, and he said “Software Architecture is about the important stuff. Whatever that is.” Can you explain what this means?
[00:04:05] RP: Well, when you look at different kinds of organizations, there are going to be different aspects of architecture that are more or less important for the success of that particular organization or for the success of that particular computer system within that organization. And one of the examples that I like to use, of around the year 2000 I worked on a trading system. And when people hear trading system they think high throughput, low latency, everything’s gotta move fast, performance is critical. But this particular trading system at that organization in their wildest dreams, they figured they might do 100, perhaps 200 transactions in a day, not in a minute, not in a second. In a day, but each transaction was worth billions and billions of dollars, and that was in the year 2000. Now, if I would have looked at that trading system and built it in a way that corresponded to the normal architectural characteristics of a quote, unquote typical trading system, well, it wouldn’t have been right. Similarly, there are systems out there where security of particular kinds of information just isn’t that important. But on the other hand, if it’s a medical record system, if it’s something that’s holding personally identifiable information or your financial data. Security is a huge component of it. So what this is basically saying is, your architecture needs to take into account what are the architectural characteristics that most determine success. And some of the other ones, you can just ignore because they’re just not that important.
[00:05:54] ES: Got it. I want to understand now, how we got to a point where we’re using and talking about evolutionary architectures. In your 2018 keynote at Grace Hopper Celebration, you mentioned that when you were just starting out you had mainframe computers and no databases and that things were very simple back then. What did architecture mean for systems during this time.
[00:06:21] RP: Well people rarely talked about architecture because there was a dominant model, what I described, mainframes, and they had file systems then. They didn’t even have what we would consider a database today. And so there just weren’t that many choices even at that time though, you did have systems save from Digital Equipment Corporation, the mini computer, and so you did have slightly different architectures. But if you looked at it from either the hardware perspective or really the software perspective, time sharing systems were not that common, and the way people thought about programs, you know they were, everything really was a monolith back then, and so software architecture, hardware architecture, none of those things, you just didn’t have that many degrees of freedom, and so you didn’t have that many choices to make. And in fact, when I went to Graduate School, even when you said computer architecture, what that meant really was the architecture of the chip, how computers were physically put together. People really didn’t talk about architecture in relation to software or the way systems you know code communicated with each other. That just wasn’t as big of an issue at that time. Just, as I said, because there were so few choices that it wasn’t necessarily an interesting discipline to talk about.
[00:07:42] ES: So after mainframes, like you’re mentioning, there were, you know very few paradigms, and people weren’t really thinking about it in terms of silver architecture. What came right after mainframes when we started to think more about this software component and software architecture?
[00:08:00] RP: Well, I would say the big shift really happened with client server, which was roughly in the 90s. Even before then, you did still have distributed applications you did have. You were starting to see more interesting networking going on. People were starting to use different networking protocols to allow different types of computers to talk to each other, but I think from a software architecture perspective the real revolution came with client server when you had the client PCs. I’m talking to the big back-end server and that’s when people really started thinking about OK, what processing should go where in these business applications and one of the things that is really still true today, although the difference is shrinking, is really the disconnect between scientific computing and business computing an in business computing, say in the 80s, people were looking at the large relational databases. How do I solve problems like that? The scientific community was looking at protein folding to do more what they called rational drug design, and trying to design new drugs to solve problems. Climate modeling, reservoir modeling was happening in the oil and gas industry when they were trying to figure out how to get more resources out of a particular well. And so really, during that time you had people thinking about scientific computing, which in many ways was more architecturally complex. And then you had more business computing, which the big revolution. As I said, was the advent of client server. And when on the business computing side, we started thinking more and more about what kinds of things could run on a PC. What kinds of things? How should we think more about the interaction between the user and the computer program? We got much more flexible user interfaces during that time, and so that was really the next big shift if you will, from a software architecture perspective.
[00:10:02] ES: And would these shifts go hand in hand with changes in the hardware and the equipment from the time, would you say?
[00:10:10] RP: Well, it was really enabled by the personal computer, because before then, the devices most people used to interact with the computer was basically just a normal terminal. We used to call them green screens, although not all of them even more green in their print, but we call them green screens. Even at that time, you know, there were still these complex graphics workstations use for things like chip design, and things of that nature. But primarily, if people were accessing a computer, they were accessing it through one of these very simple green screens. Once the PC came along, you had much more power on the interface device. And so you could make forms and you could do interactions and display information in ways that you really couldn’t do before. I mean, there was actually something called ASCII art. People would draw pictures with the kinds of characters that you would put on a screen because you didn’t have the ability to display things in anything close to a photorealistic way. But once we got personal computers, you could start doing more with graphs and all of that.
[00:11:22] ES: In other talks that you’ve given around this topic for you mentioned, that there was a time when we were just trying to plan ahead and even try to think of, you know, architectures in terms of “would it still work in two years or five years?”. Can you talk about the way in which people were approaching software architecture during that period of, you know, planning a lot?
[00:11:47] RP: Well, it really comes back to the pace of change of Business and Technology relative to the timescales, IT departments we’re looking at to create some software systems. And when you look at the early applications that people wrote on the systems, they were accounts payable systems or accounts receivable systems or a very simple address book. And there isn’t a whole lot in the world that’s going to change how accounting works, how you post to a general ledger, and, you know, dual entry bookkeeping and all of those things. The rules were very well understood and very stable and technology. While it was improving significantly, it wasn’t expanding the category of pieces of software that a traditional business would use. relational databases coming on the scene was a really big deal. But for a long period of time, in business computation, you had people running databases and people writing COBOL programs and the business requirements of those were relatively stable because they were addressing problems that really weren’t changing that much. When you look at both the software and the hardware stack these days, well, you have web frameworks, and you have graphics frameworks, and you have persistence frameworks, and you have different kinds of libraries for different protocols and different systems wanting to communicate and and XML parsing going on. And they’re all of these different pieces of these frameworks of our software stack. And those just continually change. And so, one of the standard lines when Neil and I give our joint talk on this, this is one of Neil’s lines, regardless of the audience, you know, I will bet you 100 in whatever the local currency is. So, $100, if we’re speaking in the US, if you can guarantee me what the name is of the JavaScript framework that you will be using in two years, and of course, everybody in the audience laughs. And, you know, the punch line, is that’s you can’t tell me because it probably hasn’t even been written yet. Well, back when I started, you might get a new release of the system software once a year or something, but you weren’t having the radical changes and the introduction of new capabilities. We didn’t have anything like Docker or Kubernetes, Mesos, any of those things, you know, and just the fallout in, you know, the container ecosystem and the container orchestration ecosystem, you know, things move quickly now. And so trying to say, I’m going to tell you, absolutely, what the technology stack is going to look like for an application I build in two years, well, that’s nonsensical. And yet, when I started, you could legitimately talk about a five year roadmap. And sometimes even a 10 year roadmap would at least be indicative. Those concepts when you’re talking now about technology, they make no sense and it’s because of the increased diversity of tools that we’re using the increasing complexity and capabilities that we have in our technology stack, and how rapidly they’re evolving. And, it also depends on the fact that we’re addressing problems now where the expectations of what the software will do, will change. Just think about how people’s expectations and how they’re going to communicate with their bank changed when people started using iPhones. Now, all of a sudden, they, all of these banks had to figure out a completely different way of dealing with our customers. And those kinds of changes are happening more and more rapidly. So business requirements are changing faster, and technology is changing faster. And with both of those, it simply makes that level of two and five year planning irrelevant.
[00:15:46] ES: Got it, which is one of the core ideas behind evolutionary architecture right to be able to respond to changes like this like new tools, new platforms, new tech analogies, right?
[00:16:01] RP: Exactly. And I would say it’s really inspired from two perspectives. One is the approach to extreme programming. And you know, the tagline for extreme programming is “to embrace change”, you don’t know where it’s going to come from, but you know what’s going to happen. So, you know, just decide that’s a good thing. And then from the field of evolutionary computation. But one of the important parts of evolutionary architecture is the recognition that even though you know, change is going to happen, you don’t know what that change is, is going to be. And so the more you try to anticipate it, oh, I’m going to build, you know, under an adapter to allow me to plug in different approaches to this problem, because I know that’s going to change. But what happens if that’s not where the most disruptive change is coming from? What have you done? You’ve increased the lines of code, you’ve increased the complexity of the code, you’ve introduced more bugs because bugs are correlated with lines of code. You’ve probably made the architecture and the program more difficult to understand. And, when the change happens, that doesn’t correspond to what you predicted was going to happen, you probably have a harder time making the change that you have to make, because you’ve got all of this other stuff in there. And so the basic premise of evolutionary architecture is rather than trying to predict how things are going to change, have your system and your architecture in a position where it can adapt as quickly as is possible to whatever change happens, while maintaining the integrity of the technical, the architectural characteristics that you think are important. So, we can’t say everything’s going to be easy or quick, but the intent is to make it as easy as possible and as quick as possible to make whatever changes are necessary as a result of whatever development might have happened. Whether it be In the technology landscape in your business requirements in the hardware that’s available to you, or changing regulations, or whatever it is that’s causing you to have to change your system.
[00:18:11] ES: What’s an example that you can think of a decision that was made for an architecture that allowed it to have these characteristics of evolutionary?
[00:18:22] RP: So there was a colleague of mine who was telling me about a system that he was building. And there were two competing approaches to how the various components of the system, we’re going to coordinate their activities. And most of this team wanted to go one direction, but he felt strongly that this other mechanism was going to work better, but he really couldn’t articulate why. And he never really managed to convince the rest of his team that he was right. And so what they did is they looked at how the system would be different, how they would implement the rest of the system differently, based on the choices that they made of this coordination mechanism. And then they effectively built an abstraction layer. And then they went ahead and implemented what he thought was right. And a couple of months later down the road, he acknowledged that he was wrong. And they were right, and that they should have done this in a different way. And because they built that abstraction layer, it wasn’t hard for them to switch to the other approach. Now, I’m not advocating that everywhere you could possibly think of something potentially changing building an obstruction layer, because that, again, just makes things more complicated. It’s more code, but in this particular case, they knew that they didn’t have enough information to make this particular decision. And so they constructed this abstraction layer as a way of allowing them to change that part of their system with a minimal amount of change. So that’s one example. Another example, if you think about a microservices architecture, the level of encapsulation that micro services have, really allow you to make very isolated decisions about how a particular micro service is built. And, so if something radically changes, and you want to implement a microservice in a very different way, you can do that without touching any other service within the ecosystem. So that’s another form or another way to achieve an evolutionary architecture, is just that that level of encapsulation. And you’re trying to look at the encapsulation from the perspective of what types of things fit together from a business perspective. And so when you talk about microservices architecture, we talk a lot about the bounded context idea from domain driven design because that gives you a logical business relevant back boundary, an encapsulation boundary to draw around a microservice. So those are just a couple of examples.
[00:21:05] ES: So it sounds like during the process that involves a lot of leveraging previous design patterns and some architecture patterns, right?
[00:21:15] RP: Yes.
[00:21:16] ES: Got it. Before we finish, I just want to switch gears a little bit. So I want to talk now about something that I hear a lot, which is that women leave the tech industry at higher rates than men. You’ve been in technology for over 30 years. What are some of the reasons why you’ve stayed intact and why you enjoyed what you do?
[00:21:38] RP: Fundamentally, I’m a geek. I’ve always known I was a geek. When I was introduced to programming, I found a very specific way of expressing my geekness. I am passionate about technology. I can’t imagine doing something else. It continually fascinates me, the potential to solve problems, the pace of change and the ability to learn new things. I just find it fascinating. I’m passionate about it the way painters are passionate about painting or musicians for performing. I just can’t imagine doing anything else. And I think that’s been why it just hasn’t mattered to me that people didn’t think I belonged in technology, because of course I do. I mean, it’s in my blood. I can’t imagine doing anything else.
[00:22:29] ES: So you’re saying you did have instances of, you know, feeling different, you know, by the people that you’re surrounded with. But that didn’t really get to you because your love for it is very strong.
[00:22:42] RP: Yes. I mean, I had a professor when I was an undergraduate, who got up in front of a class and said, “women are incapable of understanding math and computer science”. And there were three other women in that class with me and we all bonded together and said, we’re going to prove this guy wrong. And all four of us ended up with As. many of the men got Bs and Cs, some dropped out. None of us dropped out. We all got A’s. And it was like, we’re going to demonstrate to you, that you are wrong that this has nothing to do with me being a man or a woman. This has to do with, some people are good at something. Some people are good at others. And I was really lucky in that my parents instilled in me and my brother and sister, this just inherent confidence that whatever we wanted to do, if we worked hard, we could do it. And so it never occurred to me that I couldn’t learn something or I couldn’t do something because that’s just not how I was raised. I was raised to believe that if I wanted to do something, if I set my mind on it, if I worked hard, I would be able to do it.
[00:23:44] ES: That’s great. That’s really good that you were able to prove people wrong. So good approach. I think one more thing that I wanted to ask you about is you are the recipient of the Technical Leadership Abie Award back in 2018. What does getting this award mean to you?
[00:24:02] RP: I was overwhelmed. When I was chosen for that award, we have a saying in inside ThoughtWorks that everyone is a leader. And I truly believe that but to be recognized by an organization like AnitaB.org as a technical leader, that was very humbling. I look at the other winners of the award. And it’s hard for me to think about being in that cadre because they’re, you know, some truly incredible women with, you know, tremendous accomplishments. And so I felt very honored, very humbled to be chosen for that award.
[00:24:38] ES: Do you think also getting this award had any impact in your career?
[00:24:42] RP: it just reinforced many things that I already had felt was important. I believe very strongly in role models in providing support to others. And so that just reinforced in me this desire to not hide under a rock. So I do podcasts like this. I give conference talks. And I get up on stages and such because I believe it’s important for young women who also have a passion for technology to be able to see other women up on stages like that and hear their stories and get that same sense. Of course, I can do this. I love technology. And I want to and I can be a part of this
[00:25:24] ES: Last question. What is some general advice that you would give to young professionals? It doesn’t have to be, tech related, just what are some thoughts that you would say to them,
[00:25:37] RP: To never be afraid to learn something new. So many people, when they think of learning, they think of school and you know, the teacher at the front of the desk and tests and all of that, but learning is so much more than that. And, if you approach your career and your life as what’s something new that I can learn today. What are questions that I don’t know the answers to that I can go off and answer or figure out how to answer. It keeps the world fresh, it keeps your career fresh. And I think it also helps us address some of the problems that the world has. So just don’t be afraid of learning. Just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Just go ahead and try anyway.
[00:26:23] ES: Well, Rebecca, thank you for coming on the show. It’s been great having you.
Understanding how people use technology across cultures around the world gives us valuable insights. Genevieve Bell, Anthropologist and Distinguished professor at The Australian National University, talked about her work in anthropology and technology. Genevieve has been working in technology since the 1990s. We talked about her time working in silicon valley, particularly at Intel, where she was studying how different groups of people were using technology. Later on, we talked about how technology and mass surveillance are being used to fight COVID-19. Genevieve explained solutions we’re seeing in around the world and the trade-offs.
In 2013 Genevieve was the recipient of the Women of Vision Abie Award for Leadership. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global nonprofit with a goal of reaching 50/50 gender equity in tech by 2025. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This episode is part of a series of show that highlight the work of previous Abie Award Winners.
For more information about the Abie Awards, go to anitab.org
Advancements in technology have enabled us to share information much faster. We can start a blog, share information on social media, or create a podcast. Yasmin Alameddine, Founder and Host of the Witty Podcast explained why and how she started the show. We talked about the challenges and the things she learned from this. We also talked about data journalism and the intersection between technology and journalism. Yasmin studied Communication at Cornell University and is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Journalism at Columbia University.
Yasmin Alameddine, Founder and Host of Witty Podcast
Throughout the decades we’ve seen numerous advances in artificial intelligence. In the late 1990s, Catherine Havasi invented crowdsourcing for artificial intelligence. This made it possible for a vast amount of data to be collected and used for the Open Mind Common Sense project at MIT. A project with a goal of teaching computers what we consider as common sense. Catherine Havasi is a Research Scientist that specializes in artificial intelligence. We talked about her work in this area. She also explained the intersection between research and the enterprise.
A workplace can become a safe space for employees in many different ways. One of them is by enabling conversations around mental wellness. Beth Anne Katz, Program Manager at Microsoft talked about her struggle with depression and the importance of an accepting work environment. We talked about mental wellness and things that a workplace can do to be more welcoming. Beth Anne also talked about her initiatives to raise awareness around mental health, one of them is the podcast Katzbe Fights Depression.
Note: If you would like to connect with a crisis counselor in the united states, you can text HOME to 741741. Thank you.
Providing opportunities to migrants can help them integrate to society and add value. In 2017 Marcela Torres founded Hola Code, a startup with a goal to integrate migrants in Mexico by teaching them software engineering skills. With these skills, they’ll have access to more jobs and opportunities. Marcela explained the challenges that migrants face and how they tackled them. We also talked about the tech scene in Mexico and in other parts of Latin America.
Designing technology with accessibility in mind is about making sure that your product can be used by a wide range of individuals. This includes people that have disabilities such as visual, speech, motor, among others. Jhillika Kumar, creator of Mentra talked about why she and her team built a hiring platform for people with autism. Jhillika explained the challenges people with autism face when looking for a job and how technology can help solve them. We also talked about her experience building a company while studying at Georgia Tech.
In 2019 Jhillika was the recipient of the Student of Vision Abie Award. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global nonprofit with a goal of reaching 50/50 gender equity in tech by 2025. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This episode is part of a series of shows that highlight the work of previous Abie Award Winners.
For more information about the Abie Awards, go to anitab.org
Startups can get funding in different ways. Susan Preston, Managing Partner at SeaChange Fund explained how startups can get funding from angel investors and venture capital. We talked about what the differences are and to evaluate companies before deciding to invest in them. Susan also talked about her first investments in the 90s and what she has learned throughout the years.
There are many ways in which organizations share their message and build a brand. One of them is through social media and social networking. Lauran Driver, Senior Client Partner at Twitter, explained the difference between Social Media and Social Networking. We talked about how digital media strategies are built by leveraging these tools. Lauran also explained her workflow for working with clients and partners in this space.
People that work in tech adapt to new technologies, learn new skills, and can work in different roles throughout their career. Asya Kamsky, Principal Developer Advocate at MongoDB, started her career in the late 80s. We talked about her experience working in software development, systems architect, product management, and most recently in developer advocacy. Asya gave advice about navigating a career in technology. We also talked about her work at MongoDB in measuring the performance of databases.
Asya Kamsky, Principal Developer Advocate at MongoDB
Behavioral science and artificial intelligence can enable recruiters and candidates to find a job that matches their skills and potential. Frida Polli, CEO and Founder of Pymetrics explained how behavioral science can be used to get insights from a candidate that we would not get from a resume. We talked about how games based on neuroscience can help candidates find a job. Frida also explained ways in which a recruiting can function like a recommendation engine.
Natural language processing is used across many different systems that people interact with. It can help us extract information and get insights from data. Thamar Solorio, Associate Professor at the University of Houston explained what Natural Language Processing or NLP consists of. We talked about how systems use it and different approaches of implementing it. Thamar explained how NLP is used to determine the author of a text and some applications for this system.
In 2014 Thamar was the recipient of the Emerging Leader Award. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global nonprofit with a goal of reaching 50/50 gender equity in tech by 2025. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This episode is part of a series of show that highlight the work of previous Abie Award Winners.
For more information about the Abie Awards, go to anitab.org
Show notes:
AnitaB.org was formerly known as Anita Borg Institute.
Grace Hopper Conference refers to Grace Hopper Celebration.
Cybersecurity is about protecting systems, networks and programs. Jen Easterly, Managing Director at Morgan Stanley explained the core ideas behind cybersecurity. We talked about understanding and assessing threats and about the importance of understanding the adversary. Jen also explained what cybersecurity in financial services consists of and different roles in this domain.
Many applications we use are distributed systems. Some examples are ATM systems, social media and currency trading. Depending on the type of application, we might need to process system events in a logical order also known as causal order. Aly Cabral, Lead Product Manager at MongoDB, explained how causal order is implemented in a database system. We talked about several design implementations that she and her team at MongoDB considered. Aly explained concepts like distributed systems, clock synchronization and dependency tracking.
Nimmi Ramanujam is developing technology to improve women’s health and well-being. While in graduate school, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her experience with this diagnosis led her to develop a portable cervical cancer screening device. Nimmi explained how the device works and the process of designing it. We also talked about existing structural, emotional and cultural barriers present in women’s healthcare.
Nimmi is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Director for the Center for Global Women’s Health Technology at Duke University.
In 2019 Nimmi was the recipient of the Social Impact Abie Award. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global nonprofit with a goal of reaching 50/50 gender equity in tech by 2025. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This episode is part of a series of shows that highlight the work of Abie Award Winners.
For more information about the Abie Awards, go to anitab.org
Nimmi Ramanujam, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University
Design is a fundamental component for building technology. Heather Winkle, started her career in design in tech in the 90s. We talked about the panorama of the tech industry when she was first starting out and about some of the areas that she worked on. We also talked about leadership roles in design, designing financial products and the impact of design in an organization.
Heather has worked in design at various tech companies like: eBay, Yahoo, Adobe, Apple and many others. She’s currently Managing Vice President, Head of Design at Capital One.
Since 1994 hundreds and now thousands of women in technology gather for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Just this last year, 2019 it attracted 25,000 attendees from all over the world. The Grace Hopper Celebration, also known as GHC is organized by AnitaB.org, a global non-profit helping women in tech succeed. Kety Esquivel Vice President Head of Marketing and Communications at AnitaB.org explained the different goals they have to help reach gender equity in the tech industry. Kety also talked about AnitaB.org’s mission, GHC, and other programs that they organize throughout the year.
Kety Esquivel, Vice President Head of Marketing and Communications at AnitaB.org
Space exploration allows us to understand our place in the universe. Natalya Bailey, CEO and Founder at Accion Systems, is on a mission to accelerate the exploration of space. We talked about satellite propulsion and advancements to make it more accessible. Natalya explained the different types of propulsion technologies: chemical propulsion and electric propulsion. We also talked about the process of developing a hardware product for space.
Natalya completed her doctorate in space propulsion at MIT where she helped invent the first working prototype of an ion engine technology for small satellites. She has an M.S. from Duke University and a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from San Diego State University
In 2019 Natalya was the recipient of the Emerging Technologist Abie Award. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global nonprofit with a goal of reaching 50/50 gender equity in tech by 2025.. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This episode is part of a series of show that highlight the work of previous Abie Award Winners.
For more information about the Abie Awards, go to anitab.org
Data protection is a fundamental component in software systems across different domains. Ana-Maria Calin, Systems Engineer at Paybase explained what data protection is and the role of a Data Protection Officer. We talked about compliance and the General Data Protection Regulation, also known as GDPR. Ana also talked about Financial Technology and the challenges in this area.
As technology continues to be an important driving force in many industries, we still see a lack of representation from various minority groups. Having diverse teams building technologies that impact all of us is important to account for different perspectives or things that we otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. Robin Máxkii, a Native American technology activist and software engineer, talked about growing up in an Indian Reservation in the United States and her path to a career in technology. We also talked about her work running the first national Native American collegiate hackathon. Robin also explained different ways in which companies can be more inclusive.
Enabling people from various backgrounds to build technology can help us create better products and include different perspectives. Mehul Smriti Raje, Software Engineer at Google, talked about her involvement in getting more women into the tech industry. We talked about her time as an undergraduate student and her experience in participating in programming contests. Mehul explained how she saw a gender gap and why it was important to address it. We also talked about her trajectory in tech and various projects she has built.
In 2017, Mehul was the recipient of the Student of Vision Abie Award. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global non profit organization with a mission to help women in tech succeed. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This series highlights their work. For more information about the Abie Awards, go to AnitaB.org
Cryptography is fundamental to providing privacy and security over the internet. Tal Rabin, Head of Research of the Algorand Foundation, explained what cryptography is and the main ideas behind it. We talked about the building blocks of cryptography and how these can be used to build protocols and systems that provide privacy and security.
Tal Rabin is a researcher whose general area focuses on cryptography and, more specifically, on secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography, and proactive security. She obtained Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University, Israel in 1994. Tal worked at IBM Research in the cryptography group and managed it from 1997-2019.
In 2014, Tal Rabin was the recipient of the Abie Award for Innovation. Abie Awards are presented by AnitaB.org, a global non profit organization with a mission to help women in tech succeed. Abie awards honor and celebrate women who have led technical innovations and made a notable impact on business or society through technology. This series highlights their work. For more information about the Abie Awards, go to AnitaB.org
Tal Rabin, Head of Research of the Algorand Foundation
Mastercard is an American multinational financial services corporation founded in 1979. Dana Lorberg, Executive Vice President of Operations and Technology at Mastercard, joined the company in 1987 and was part of a team that programmed and designed some of the early systems at Mastercard. We talked about how software was developed throughout her career and about examples of technical constraints that influenced how software was designed and implemented with performance and availability in mind. Dana also talked about leadership, management and building a good working culture.
Dana Lorberg, Executive Vice President of Operations and Technology at Mastercard
Advancements in hardware allow us to get better measurements and insights about our body movement. Nan-Wei Gong, CEO at Figur8 explained how we can obtain useful measurements about our body movements and how these can help us improve our health. We talked about the concept of movement intelligence and the technical components that are used for it. Nan-Wei also explained how she and her team are building a digital health platform and how they collaborate with people across many disciplines. At the end, we talked about entrepreneurship.
Technology is used across many different industries. This is one of the reasons why there are many opportunities for people working in tech. One of these areas is sales. Merrie Williamson, Vice President of Azure Apps and Infrastructure at Microsoft gives an overview of careers in sales within the tech industry. We talked about the advantage of having a technical background when working in technical sales. Merrie also explained what a transition path looks like from engineering to sales. At the end we talked about leadership, and career growth.
Merrie Williamson, Vice President of Azure Apps and Infrastructure
Design in tech is a collaborative process. Angela Guzman, Designer and Entrepreneur based out of Silicon Valley, explained how designers can work together to create unified designs. We talked about her work designing the first set of Apple emoji in 2008. Back then emoji were still in the early days and there were challenges in designing small icons. Angela also explained what diversity and inclusion in design means. At the end we talked about different areas of design that people in tech can focus on and about leadership positions.
Cloud computing is an area where we are constantly seeing new patterns and best practices emerge, especially around the Kubernetes ecosystem. One example is GitOps. Yvonne Radsmikham and Samiya Akhtar, Software Engineers at Microsoft, explained what GitOps is and how it changes the way applications are deployed to a Kubernetes cluster. We talked about different ways of deploying applications and the challenges that GitOps addresses.
The way software companies operate and develop software has changed dramatically in the last decades. Lisa Reeves, Senior Vice President of Product at Zenefits, started her career in technology in the early 90s. We talked about her time at SAP, a company that builds enterprise software since the 1970s and how software was developed at the time Lisa was there. Lisa also talked about her role as CEO of GridCraft, a software company that was acquired by Workday. At the end we discussed software solutions in Human Resources, and how she operates as SVP at Zenefits.
Lisa Reeves, Senior Vice President of Product at Zenefits
Cloud computing technologies are changing how network services are developed. These services had been traditionally deployed in physical boxes and required more maintenance. Heather Kirksey, VP of Community and Ecosystem for the LFNetworking, explains how network services moved from hardware to virtual machines and now to containers. We talked about how this is implemented and the benefits of this approach.
Heather Kirksey, VP of Community and Ecosystem for the LFNetworking
Learning from data is something that is being used to improve processes across different industries. Kelley Rivoire, Engineering Manager at Stripe, explained how machine learning is used for payment processing applications. We talked about what machine learning is, and about Stripe’s real-time machine learning based system to evaluate user risk. Kelley also explained the process of deploying machine learning systems to production and the challenges.
Running software at scale comes with its own challenges. Deepthi Sigireddi, Software Engineer at PlanetScale explained what database scaling consists of. We talked about different types of databases, horizontal and vertical scaling, and how to reason about what to choose. Deepthi also talked about her experience working across companies of different sizes.
Deepthi Sigireddi, Software Engineer at PlanetScale
Technical marketing is an area that has changed a lot with the development of new technologies. Kim McMahon, Marketing Strategies and Communications for McMahon consulting, explained different marketing strategies. We also talked about the importance of the message and how that can affect your market strategy. Kim also explained how social media and messaging tools are being used in technical marketing.
Kim McMahon, Marketing Strategies and Communications for McMahon Consulting
Starting a technology company and leading product development is a process that is constantly evolving. Christine Spang, CTO of Nylas explained various stages of leading a tech company. We talked about developing software in areas like Email, finding initial clients, and evaluating the product. Christine also talked about the importance of wellness and gave advice on things that she does that have allowed her to focus and succeed in a digital world.
There are many paths to working on technology and software development. Some people get exposure when their young, others through high school or college, and others learn after they worked in other industries. Leah Petersen, Engineer at Two Sigma explained her trajectory from professional motorcycle stunt rider to software development. We also talked about cloud computing and Kubernetes, which is what Leah is currently working on. Leah also explained what Two Sigma is and how technology is being used in investment management.
Virtual Reality allows us to experience simulated environments. Mar Gonzalez Franco, Researcher at Microsoft Research explained what Virtual Reality is. We talked about the role of human perception and how sensors create and enhance simulated environments. Mar also explained various brain mechanisms that enable users to believe that a computer generated world is effectively real.
Mar Gonzalez Franco, Researcher at Microsoft Research
Video games allow us to have fun and play with other people around the world. Miriam Aguirre, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Skillz, explained different types of video games and how they can be played competitively. We talked about what eSports are and examples and characteristics of popular games. Miriam also explained engineering challenges around building an eSports platform and how to tackle them. We also talked about a path to a leadership role, and important skills to develop.
Miriam Aguirre, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Skillz
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The combination of art and technology can lead to interesting innovations. Kitty Yeung, Manager of the Microsoft Garage at Silicon Valley, talked about how she infuses technology in fashion. Kitty explained how to embed technology in clothing and the challenges faced by the fashion industry. We also talked about tools and open source projects in hardware.
Kitty’s early career was in conducting research in condensed matter physics while also pursuing painting, music, and creating graphic design novels. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University and a M.Sci., B.A. and M.A. in Natural Sciences from University of Cambridge. After grad school, she worked as a research scientist, hardware engineer and user experience designer at Intel.
Kitty Yeung, Manager of the Microsoft Garage at Silicon Valley
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Product forecasting involves data analytics and making recommendations. Pooja Sund, Data Analytics Group Manager at Microsoft explained the data that financial analysts look at for product forecasting. We talked about what financial models are and how software is being used to help financial analysts. Pooja also talked about management, technical training and diversity and inclusion.
Pooja Sund, Data Analytics Group Manager at Microsoft
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To develop and maintain software we can have systems that allow us to deploy to production and respond to incidents. Hannah Foxwell, Associate Director at Pivotal, explained the impact these systems can have on the developers and their health. We talked about extreme cases where deployments are done overnight requiring the engineers to be at the office. Hannah explained how processes can be improved to avoid this and metrics that we can use for guidance.
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In cloud computing one way to develop and deploy applications is by using containers. Kaslin Fields, Cloud Advocate at Oracle explained what containers are and how they are similar to chocolate chip cookies. We talked about the advantages of containers and how they compare to using virtual machines. At the end we also talked about Software Quality and the role of a Quality Assurance Engineer.
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Cloud computing enables sharing resources between an organization or with entities outside an organization. Multi-tenancy helps enable this. Tasha Drew, Product Line Manager at VMware and co-chair of the Kubernetes Multi-tenancy group explained what multi-tenancy is. We talked about the benefits of multi-tenancy and how it relates to Kubernetes. Tasha also over scenarios where it is used.
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The early days of the internet were very different than what we have today. The internet was primarily accessible only to people in academia or the government. Mitchell Baker, Co-Founder and CEO of Mozilla explained how the internet evolved and made its way to consumers. At the time, Mitchell was working on Netscape, which was the dominant browser for consumers. We talked about the browser wars and how Microsoft later dominated with Internet Explorer. Mitchell also explained why the code for Netscape was released as open source and the impact this had on how the internet is today.
Mitchell Baker, Co-founder and Chairwoman of Mozilla
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The growth of an application leads to changes in various areas of its architecture. Shraya Ramani, Senior Software Engineer at BuzzFeed explained how the growth led to changes in the microservices architecture and in the way these services were being secured. We talked about Single Sign-On ( also known SSO), and BuzzFeed’s SSO open source project. Shraya also explained the process of releasing code as open source.
Shraya Ramani, Senior SoftwareEngineer at BuzzFeed
Shraya Ramani will be speaking at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference on June 10-13 in San Jose, CA. The Velocity Conference is about technologies for building and managing large-scale, cloud native systems. You can network with people working with this space and learn from others. To register and save 20% on Gold, Silver or Bronze, use the promo code WIT. Passes start at $925. Learn more at: velocityconf.com/ca
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Software Testing and Project Management (Nivia Henry)
May 07, 2019
In the early 2000s, after the Dot-com bubble burst, it was difficult for and entry-level software developer to find a job. Nivia Henry, Senior Engineering Manager at Spotify talked about her time as a recent graduate during the Dot-com bubble. We then talked about her experience in Project Management, Software Testing, Quality Assurance, and Bias in Machine Learning. Nivia also explained concepts around leading teams and how to prepare for the growth of an organization.
Nivia Henry, Senior Engineering Manager at Spotify
There will be events throughout the year like going to concerts, sketching, coffee, etc. Pretty chill. First event is a free concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Join The Women in Tech Show – Bay Area.
O’Reilly Velocity Conference
Nivia Henry will be speaking at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference on June 10-13 in San Jose, CA. The Velocity Conference is about technologies for building and managing large-scale, cloud native systems. You can network with people working with this space and learn from others. To register and save 20% on Gold, Silver or Bronze, use the promo code WIT. Passes start at $925. Learn more at: velocityconf.com/ca
Sponsors
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The process of designing a Software Architecture involves different aspects such as the type of project, the organization involved, the people involved and many others. Stefania Stefansdottir, Lead Developer and Consultant at ThoughWorks, explained through a series of examples what Software Architecture Design can consist of. We talked about how one can start tackling a project and the role of the architect and tech lead. Stefania also explained how to validate a solution and the risks of a project.
Stefania Stefansdottir, Lead Developer and Consultant at Thoughtworks
Join the Bay Area Facebook Group!
There will be events throughout the year like going to concerts, sketching, coffee, etc. Pretty chill. First event is a free concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Join The Women in Tech Show – Bay Area.
O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference
Stefania Stefansdottir will be speaking at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference on June 10-13 in San Jose, CA. The Software Architecture Conference is designed for anyone making architecture-level decisions—even if you don’t hold the architect title. Stay ahead of the latest trends in technologies, frameworks, and techniques in software architecture—and build the skills needed to advance your career. Save 20% using the promo code WIT (when registering for a Gold, Silver, or Bronze pass). Learn more at oreillysacon.com/ca
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Security and Compliance with Wendy Knox Everette
Apr 23, 2019
Security and compliance are two fundamental components of software. Wendy Knox Everette, Senior Security Advisor at Leviathan Security explained what security and compliance are. We talked about the software development cycle and how security can be involved throughout the cycle. Wendy also explained what compliant software means and the process of making software compliant.
Wendy Knox Everette, Senior Security Advisor at Leviathan Security
Wendy Knox Everette will be speaking at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference on June 10-13 in San Jose, CA. The Software Architecture Conference is designed for anyone making architecture-level decisions—even if you don’t hold the architect title. Stay ahead of the latest trends in technologies, frameworks, and techniques in software architecture—and build the skills needed to advance your career. Save 20% using the promo code WIT (when registering for a Gold, Silver, or Bronze pass). Learn more at oreillysacon.com/ca
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Human Genome Data with Jamaica Perry and Alisa Lehman
Apr 16, 2019
Data analysis of the human genome is more accessible thanks to advancements in technology. In this episode I talked to two Senior Product Scientists and Managers at 23andme: Jamaica Perry and Alisa Lehman. Jamaica an Alisa talked about the human genome and areas of research in this. We also talked about data that can be generated from analyzing it and the ways in which this can be presented to a consumer.
Alisa Lehman, Senior Product Scientist and Manager at 23andme
Jamaica Perry, Senior Product Scientist and Manager at 23andme
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Cindy Warner, Senior Vice President at NetApp has a career in technology that spans over 30 years. We talked about various technology transformations. Cindy explained how data and data analysis became fundamental to businesses. We also talked about the process of building software, data services, and the ethical side of data.
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Corporate Venture Capital with Vivian Li
Apr 02, 2019
The insurance industry is incorporating technology to reduce bottlenecks, improve experiences and bring to market new solutions. Vivian Li, Principal, Corporate Ventures, Capital & Labs at CSAA, explained recent advancements in the insurance industry. We also talked about Corporate Venture Capital and different types of investments such as early stage financing and seed capital. Vivian explained the finance process and the role of business plans.
Vivian Li, Principal Corporate Ventures at CSAA
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Infrastructure as Code is an important approach used in cloud computing. Kerry Munz, Director of Engineering at HubSpot explained what Infrastructure as Code is. Kerry also talked about leveraging multiple cloud providers and migrating more than 400 SQL databases from AWS to Google Cloud Provider. At the end we talked about ways to evaluate the impact of the new computing environment.
Kerry Munz, Director of Engineering at HubSpot
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Technological advancements are improving many industries, one example is the finance industry. Trisha Price, EVP of Product Development and Engineering at nCino gave an overview of the bottlenecks in financial services and examples of how these can be improved with technology. We also talked about cloud-based solutions for banking leveraging the Salesforce platform.
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Cloud Computing Tools (Priyanka Sharma)
Mar 12, 2019
Running an application in the cloud involves different tools and technologies, a lot of which are open source. Priyanka Sharma, Director of Technical Evangelism and Cloud-Native at GitLab, explained the tooling panorama in the cloud ecosystem. We talked about different tools and the challenges in integrating them to have an end-to-end cloud workflow using GitLab as an example. We also talked about Serverless and Knative.
Priyanka Sharma also serves on the board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has deep expertise in DevOps and observability. A former entrepreneur with a passion for growing developer products through open source communities, Priyanka also advises startups at HeavyBit industries, an accelerator for developer products. Priyanka holds a BA in political science from Stanford University and loves reading, adventuring, and tending to her plants in her spare time.
Priyanka Sharma, Director of Technical Evangelism and Cloud-Native at GitLab Inc.
Priyanka Sharma will be speaking at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference on June 10-13 in San Jose, CA. The Velocity Conference is about technologies for building and managing large-scale, cloud native systems. You can network with people working with this space and learn from others. To register and save 20% on Gold, Silver or Bronze, use the promo code WIT. Passes start at $925. Learn more at: velocityconf.com/ca
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Open Source Marketing (Kiersten Gaffney)
Mar 05, 2019
Open Source Software has characteristics that affect how marketing is conducted for it. Kiersten Gaffney, VP of Marketing at Buoyant explained what Open Source Software is and how it can be marketed. We talked about the objectives of a marketing campaign, the role of the open source community and software tutorials. Kiersten also explained metrics of success for open source projects.
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Kubernetes is one of the main open source systems used for cloud computing. Janet Kuo, Software Engineer at Google explained various Kubernetes patterns. We talked about stateless, stateful, daemons and batch. Janet also explained the declarative nature of the Kubernetes API and examples of its application.
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Cloud Infrastructure Software (Idit Levine)
Feb 21, 2019
Migrating legacy applications to modern technologies in the cloud computing space can be done in different stages. Idit Levine, Founder and CEO of Solo described how legacy applications can leverage a Hybrid Architecture when migrating to the cloud. We talked about migrating a monolithic application to other architectures like microservices and serverless. Idit also explained software tools that can simplify the migration process.
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Communities in Open Source (Karen Chu)
Feb 12, 2019
Communities are an important component of open source software. Karen Chu, Community Manager at Microsoft, talked about communities in the cloud computing space. Karen explained different ways to manage and nurture a community. We talked about marketing, workshops and conferences. Karen is one of the creators of “The Illustratated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes” which we also talked about.
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Nanotechnology and Open Source (Christine Peterson)
Feb 05, 2019
Many technologies that we use today are the product of decades of research. Christine Peterson, Co-founder of the Foresight Institute and CEO at a Stealth company is researching technologies that are of fundamental importance to the human future. One of them is nanotechnology. Christine explained what nanotechnology is and challenges it can tackle in renewable energy, improving health and longevity, supplying clean water among others. We also talked about the misuses of nanotechnology and important things to have in place to prevent them.
In 1998 Christine coined the term open source. She explained how that came to be and the impact it had in the software community.
Christine Peterson, Co-founder of the Foresight Institute
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Women in Business and Technology (Colleen O’Brien and Sonia Dara)
Jan 31, 2019
Podcasts are a way to scale mentorship. Through thoughtful conversations, a podcast listener can learn helpful things. Colleen O’Brien, Executive Communications Manager at Microsoft, and Sonia Dara, Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft talked about how they’re scaling mentorship through the Women in Business and Technology podcast. Colleen and Sonia gave an overview of the highlights of running the podcast, and various topics that have been explored. They explained how the podcast provides actionable advice that individuals and organizations can take to build inclusive environments.
Sonia Dara, Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft
Colleen O’Brien, Executive Communications Manager at Microsoft
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Data Science at DoorDash (Jessica Lachs)
Jan 22, 2019
When you work at a startup, it can expose you to work on different areas in a short amount of time. Jessica Lachs, Head of Analytics at DoorDash leverages data science to improve the business. We talked about what data science is, and examples of how it is used at DoorDash. Jessica also explained what it involved to launch the business in other cities.
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Mechanical Design in Robotics (Sara Wojciechowski)
Jan 15, 2019
Building robots that can interact with the physical world involves a team of scientists, engineers, academics, and business operators. Sara Wojciechowski, Mechanical Design Engineer at Kindred explains the types of problems that robots can tackle and current limitations. We talked about the components of Mechanical Design and how it’s applied in robotics. Sara explained how ideas are prototyped and developed for building robots.
Sara Wojciechowski, Mechanical Design Engineer at Kindred
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Behind some of the software products that we use is a team of researchers. Research in the software industry plays an important role in the development of new products. From coming up with ideas to evaluating existing approaches, researchers work with other teams within an organization to provide insights and direction. Beth Toland, Head of Experience Research at Asana talked about what user research consists of and how this influences how a product is developed. We also talked about the process of conducting research at a software company and some examples of its use at Asana.
Beth Toland, Head of Experience Research at Asana
@asana
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DigitalOcean offers a simple and developer-friendly cloud platform. It makes managing and scaling apps easy with an intuitive API, and multiple options for your cloud infrastructure. You also get predictable pricing, excellent customer support, and access to all the infrastructure services you need to grow. DigitalOcean has a great community, they provide thousands of tutorials that are super easy to follow . This helps you stay up to date on the latest open source software and frameworks.
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Software Growth and Adoption (Katie Guzman)
Dec 21, 2018
Growth and adoption of software involves gathering metrics, evaluating them, and deciding among different strategies. Katie Guzman, Product Manager Lead at Asana explained different strategies in growth and adoption of software. We talked about metrics that can be used to evaluate this and examples of how Asana leverages that information. Katie also explained software monetization strategies and factors that can help determine what strategy to choose. At the end we talked about team leadership and how an internship program in Product Management is structured.
DigitalOcean offers a simple and developer-friendly cloud platform. It makes managing and scaling apps easy with an intuitive API, and multiple options for your cloud infrastructure. You also get predictable pricing, excellent customer support, and access to all the infrastructure services you need to grow. DigitalOcean has a great community, they provide thousands of tutorials that are super easy to follow . This helps you stay up to date on the latest open source software and frameworks.
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Getting work experience while studying in school has become more accessible, especially in the software industry. Safia Abdalla, Open Source Maintainer on the nteract project talked about her experience as an independent consultant while she was in college. We also talked about Safia’s contributions to open source software since she was a first year college student. At the end we explored topics around data science and tooling.
Safia Abdalla, Open Source Maintainer on the nteract project
DigitalOcean offers a simple and developer-friendly cloud platform. It makes managing and scaling apps easy with an intuitive API, and multiple options for your cloud infrastructure. You also get predictable pricing, excellent customer support, and access to all the infrastructure services you need to grow. DigitalOcean has a great community, they provide thousands of tutorials that are super easy to follow . This helps you stay up to date on the latest open source software and frameworks.
sudo shirt is an online store featuring apparel designed by developers for developers. sudoshirt features subtle designs to show your love for technology.
Taking an idea into a product involves steps like evaluation, prototyping and commercialization. Maggie Ng, Vice President at Xinova explained the process of developing products. We talked about projects from different industries and the role of intellectual property. Maggie also talked about project trends from around the world.
Maggie Ng, Vice President at Xinova
Sponsors
DigitalOcean offers a simple and developer-friendly cloud platform. It makes managing and scaling apps easy with an intuitive API, and multiple options for your cloud infrastructure. You also get predictable pricing, excellent customer support, and access to all the infrastructure services you need to grow. DigitalOcean has a great community, they provide thousands of tutorials that are super easy to follow . This helps you stay up to date on the latest open source software and frameworks.
sudo shirt is an online store featuring apparel designed by developers for developers. sudoshirt features subtle designs to show your love for technology.
Product Marketing in Tech with Karri Alexion-Tiernan
Nov 27, 2018
Product Marketing in technology varies depending on the product and the audience. In some cases it involves deep technical knowledge and understanding how developers work. Karri Alexion-Tiernan, VP of Product Marketing at Skytap, explained what product marketing consists of. We talked about effective ways of engaging with enterprise customers and developers. Karri also talked about modernizing and migrating legacy applications to the cloud and how people at Skytap are approaching this.
Karri Alexion-Tiernan, VP of Product Marketing at Skytap
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Software Development with Laura Butler
Nov 20, 2018
The way we develop software is constantly changing. Throughout the decades we see different processes and practices emerge in how we write software. Laura Butler, Vice President and Technical Fellow at Microsoft talked about her time working on Windows 95 and what it was like to write software in the 90s. We talked about debugging, performance, and becoming a better programmer. Laura also talked about leadership and building strong teams.
Laura Butler, Vice President and Technical Fellow at Microsoft
sudo shirt is an online store featuring apparel designed by developers for developers. sudoshirt features subtle designs to show your love for technology.
Developer Relations with Grace Francisco
Nov 13, 2018
Developer relations is a core component of platforms that allow developers to publish applications or games. Grace Francisco, VP of Developer Relations at Roblox, explained what developer relations is and different ways of interacting with creators. Roblox is the world’s largest social platform for play. We talked about how to gather feedback from the community and the different stages of the development process. Grace also talked about growing up in the Bay Area, and her early experiences with technology.
Grace Francisco, VP of Developer Relations at Roblox
Small electronic components enable us to have powerful portable devices. Isabel Yang, Chief Technology Officer at Advanced Energy Industries explained what microelectronics is. Isabel has over 20 years of industry experience in semiconductor research. We talked about what transistors are, their characteristics and their role in electronics. Prior to being CTO at Advanced Energy Industries, Isabel worked at IBM Research for 19 years.
Advancements in the cloud computing space have democratized how software developers manage their product infrastructure. With this, they can focus more on the core components of their product instead. Risha Mars, Software Engineer at Buoyant and Eliza Weisman, Systems Software Engineer at Buoyant explained various components that improve how an infrastructure is developed and maintained. We discussed various topics like: service proxy, service mesh, and the programming languages Rust and Go.
Risha is a Software Engineer at Buoyant and works on the Linkerd 2 control plane, writing APIs, CLIs and dashboards using Go and Javascript. Previously, she worked on the Ads team at Twitter, on internal ads tooling and dashboards.
Risha Mars, Software Engineer at Buoyant
Eliza Weisman is a Systems Software Engineer at Buoyant in San Francisco. She focuses primarily on Linkerd 2’s data plane and the Rust library ecosystem.
Eliza Weisman, Systems Software Engineer at Buoyant
Learning to code opens a lot of opportunities. Even if you decide that you don’t want to code for a living, it helps you understand how software is made and the technical implications of it across different industries. Alex Sejdinaj, Founder of South Bend Code School, explained why she decided to start teaching kids how to code. We talked about the components of an immersive curriculum and the things kids learn as they get older. Alex explained different projects the kids built and the different programming languages and technologies they use.
Technology can be used to improve slow and manual processes. Ritu Vincent, Engineering Manager at Checkr, explained the bottlenecks of the background checks process and how it’s being improved. Ritu explained how a REST API and machine learning are speeding up the process of getting a background check, and reducing the unconscious bias that is present in the traditional workflow of background checks.
Many industries are using technologies to improve their processes and to provide better services to people. Natalie Gray, Co-founder and Lead of Product Design at Cover, explained the bottlenecks in the insurance process and how technology can simplify it. We talked about a mobile-first solution that addresses these problems. Natalie talked about the product design process and how ideas can be evaluated. We also talked about Stylekick, a fashion e-commerce app that she co-founded that was later acquired by Shopify.
Natalie Gray, Co-founder and Lead of Product Design at Cover
Security threats are everywhere. To tackle these threats we can gather and analyze information about potential attacks. Barbara Kay, Senior Director of Security Product at ExtraHop, explained internal and external threats that systems can be exposed to. We talked about different types of threats and how these can be identified using machine learning. Barbara also explained the product development strategy for products in security. Prior to working ExtraHop, Barbara led security operations market research and product strategy for McAfee and was responsible for the threat intelligence and analytics solutions, as well as the security information and event management. Before McAfee, her consultancy helped innovators including Cisco, McAfee, Websense, Good Technologies, and Netgear.
Barbara Kay, Senior Director of Security Product at ExtraHop
Creating and deploying applications to the cloud has gotten a lot easier. With advancements in containers and networking capabilities organizations can adopt a hybrid cloud approach. Lakshmi Sharma, Director of Product Management and Networking at Google explained what the hybrid cloud and the role of containers in cloud computing. We also talked about Ingress, a tool on Google Cloud that makes containers a first-class citizen in the cloud. Lakshmi also explained the process of deciding what tools to build and how some internal tools from Google developed into products that are released to the public.
Lakshmi Sharma, Director of Product Management and Networking at Google
Today’s episode is a mixture of technical and career development discussions. Maureen Zappala, former Engineer at NASA explained what it meant to conduct jet propulsion research at the NASA Lewis Research Center, now known as the NASA Glenn Research Center. We talked about the different experiments that could be conducted there. Maureen also explained the ways in which she experienced Impostor Syndrome and what this consists of. We talked about examples of symptoms and strategies to combat it. Maureen is the author of Pushing Your Envelope: How Smart People Defeat Self-Doubt and Live with Bold Enthusiasm.
As technology keeps evolving, we are surrounded by more devices. These devices can be connected to other devices forming the Internet of Things. Maria Gorlatova, Assistant Professor at Duke University Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering explains what the Internet of Things consists of. Maria also talked about what Edge computing is, and how we can bring intelligence from the cloud to devices that are installed close to the users. We discussed the architecture components for edge computing and how it can be used for machine learning.
Maria Gorlatova, Assistant Professor at Duke University
Blockchain technology is being used in different industries. NASA is using it to improve their communications systems. The finance industry is exploring it in how they do transactions. Jin Wei-Kocsis, Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering at University of Akron explains what blockchain technology is. We talked about the components of blockchain and examples of applications using it. Jin explained the implications of decentralized processing and tools we can use to use this technology.
Jin Wei-Kocsis, Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering at University of Akron
Data is constantly flowing through a system. From telemetry data to data from IoT devices, as the amount of data increases, challenges emerge on how to process it. Holden Karau, Open Source Big Data Developer Advocate at Google, talked about how data can be processed and analyzed in batches or in streams. Holden explained the infrastructure needed to process data at scale and fundamental performance improvements for these systems.
Holden Karau, Open Source Big Data Developer Advocate at Google
When you’re working on a product, an important part of the process is to understand how your customers use it. This helps drive improvements. Avni Patel, CEO and Founder of Poppy explained the role of consumer psychology in analyzing products. Avni also explained the process of launching a tech startup as a solo founder. We talked about how she built and launched the first version without having a background in software development and programming. Avni explained her experience at YC and how she handled rejection the first time she applied.
Avni Patel, CEO and Founder of Poppy
Poppy is hiring. Go to meetpoppy.com for more information.
Sponsors
Blind is an anonymous app for tech workers to discuss, debate and talk about about compensation, corporate policies, workplace harassment, and more.
There are 50,000 companies active on Blind. Check if yours is there and connect with other employees.
A data-driven approach is becoming more common across companies from different sectors. These companies have people that are focused on getting insights from data, such as data analysts and data scientists.
Hanna Landrus, Data Scientist at Usermind explains the difference between data analyst and data scientist. Hanna has experience in both these roles. She explained the types of problems that she explored as a data analyst and as a data scientist. We also talked about the mathematical concepts present in this area, and the workflow and technologies she uses.
Hanna Landrus, Data Scientist at Usermind
Sponsors
Blind is an anonymous app for tech workers to discuss, debate and talk about about compensation, corporate policies, workplace harassment, and more.
There are 50,000 companies active on Blind. Check if yours is there and connect with other employees.
As the amount of data has increased, we have been able to apply other machine learning methods like deep learning. Erika Menezes, Software Engineer at Microsoft explains what deep learning is and the problems it has been able to tackle. We talked about artificial neural networks and how these are the core component in deep learning architectures. Erika also explained how a deep learning project is structured and the different steps in the pipeline.
What does it mean for a machine to be creative? Maya Ackerman, CEO of WaveAI, addresses this question. We talked about the challenges of building systems that have creativity. Maya explained how she began exploring the idea of computational creativity by building a system that makes songwriting accessible to more people. This system, called ALYSIA, plays the role of a creative partner and helps a person write music. We talked about how the system was built using machine learning and the ways in which it is creative.
The workflow of a software developer has evolved a lot throughout the decades. With these advancements we have become more productive and focus on building things that are core to the business that we work on. Simina Pasat, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, explains what developer productivity consists of. We talked about the developing pipeline for building mobile apps and the components that can be automated. Simina also explained the bottlenecks in developing a mobile app and how to monitor apps and learn from data.
Technology is a broad field that touches many other fields. Camille Eddy, Mechanical Engineer explained different areas in technology that she has worked on. We begin the discussion with machine learning. Camille explained different machine learning systems we interact with, how bias can be present in these systems, and ways to combat it. We then talked about Mechanical Engineering and discussed the process of building a robotic hand. Camille explained the design and prototype process. We also talked about the hardware and software engineering components of this process.
When we open Netflix we get pretty good recommendations for content that we may like. This is one example that shows the data-driven mentality at Netflix. Julie Pitt, Director of Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix, explained other ways in which Netflix is using data and machine learning. We talked about using data for creating content, and for changes in the infrastructure. Julie explained how her team is working on improving the workflow of data scientists. We talked about the bottlenecks and the major interface between data scientists and a Machine Learning platform.
Julie Pitt, Director of Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix
Web and mobile applications can become more popular than we had anticipated. If we’re not prepared, our application can have downtime. If we are prepared, it means that our application can scale. Scaling an application comes with numerous challenges. One of those is how we reason about system performance and how that influences architecture changes we make to our system. Kay Ousterhout, Software Engineer at LightStep explains what performance means and why users struggle to reason about it in today’s systems. Kay discussed her work on Apache Spark and how jobs were decomposed to provide clarity about performance to users. We also talked about detecting bottlenecks in a system.
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.
Michele Guel, Distinguished Engineer at Cisco
Mandy Galante, Cybersecurity Educator at Red Bank Regional High School
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.
Paris Pittman, Developer Relations Program Manager at Google
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.
Tammy Bütow, Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Gremlin
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.
Sarah Wells, Technical Director of Operations and Reliability at the Financial Times
As public cloud adoption continues to accelerate, security becomes a top priority for many organizations. Maya Kaczorowski, Product Manager at Google Container Security explains what security consisted of in legacy systems. We then talked about the security panorama in the cloud, specifically in containerized applications. Maya explained various security risks in these applications as well as solutions. One of these is gVisor, a new open source sandbox that provides secure isolation for containers.
Maya Kaczorowski, Product Manager at Google Container Security
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.
Dr. Sue Black, Honorary Professor of Computer Science at University College London
With 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.
Alena Prokharchyk, Principal Software Engineer at Rancher Labs
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.
Marie Hicks, Historian of Technology and Gender, and Author of “Programmed Inequality”
This month’s book give away will be Mar’s book, Programmed Inequality. To enter write a tweet to @techwomenshow about why you like working in tech or what you’d like to see improve or a tech blog post you wrote.
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.
Jenna Wiens, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan
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.
Chen Goldberg, Director of Engineering at Google Cloud
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.
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 powerful 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.
Artificial Intelligence is being used in many industries like manufacturing, entertainment, travel. AI has also been useful in the medical field. It helps identify tumors, diagnose forms of acne among other things. Although we are seeing it more, in other areas of healthcare its adoption has been much slower because doctors don’t use it. Qian Yang, Ph.D. student in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University works on designing AI that doctors want to use. We discussed the role of design and Human-Computer Interaction in a system that is used to decide if a patient should have a heart pump implant or not. Qian explained the process of observing everything at a hospital, and coming up with a solution that uses AI and is used by doctors.
Qian Yang, Ph.D. student in Human-computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University
Evelina Gabasova is developing machine learning models and mathematical models for cancer research. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Cambridge. We talked about how to apply machine learning models in the medical field and the state of AI. Evelina also gave an insight into the types of problems that are being tackled with machine learning and some of the implications on having access to medical data.
Evelina Gabasova, Postdoctoral Researcher at The Unviersity of Cambridge
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.
Manisha Mohan, recent graduate of the MIT Media Lab
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.
Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation
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.
This will be the last episode of the year. I’ll be back in January with some great episodes that I recorded at KubeCon in Austin Texas. This was a great year, I joined Microsoft Research, interviewed many people from the tech industry and got a chance to go to the Grace Hopper Conference. This is the biggest gathering of women in technology. This conference has talks from different tracks, ranging from technical to career development. There is also a big career fair, and attendees can be interviewed for internships and full time jobs.
When I was there I saw some attendees looked stressed and worried because of the job interviews. I overheard their concerns and talked with them and gave them some advice for technical job interviews, which is what this episode is about.
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.
I met Bear at DevRel Summit, a professional development day for industry professionals working with developer communities. Bear was the opening keynote at this event. I highly recommend it.
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.
Michelle Noorali, Co-Chair of KubeCon, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
In the United States, when people have a life threatening emergency, they can make a call and get immediate help from the authorities. On the other hand, people can make prank emergency calls and trigger an emergency response. This costs law enforcement billions of dollars each year. Because of these prank calls, some people that were in a real emergency did not get the resources on time and died. Rita Singh, Research Faculty at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, works on profiling humans from their voice. This work is part of voice forensics driven by artificial intelligence.
Rita explains the information that is contained in a person’s voice, and how the physical environment can be derived. Her work resulted in successfully identifying a person that was making frequent prank emergency calls.
Rita Singh, Research Faculty at the School of Computer Science in Carnegie Mellon University
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.
Erika Ehrli, Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft
Interviews are an essential component to get a job at a tech company. However they can also affect diversity and inclusion efforts from a company due to the biases preconceptions that the people involved have. Aline Lerner, CEO of interviewing.io is making bias-free hiring a reality. Aline explained how bias in hiring can be tackled using technology. We also talked about why resumes are not a great hiring tool, and what she has learned from studying thousands of interviews.
Software development has evolved a lot in the last decades. From shipping software on magnetic tapes to just downloading it with a button, it has transformed the way organizations work. Paula Paul, Technology Principal at ThoughtWorks, explains what it was like to write software on punch cards and her recent work on bringing cloud technologies to different organizations. We also talked about continuous integration and container orchestration.
Images make websites rich and engaging. They are the biggest asset on a website. Because of this, they can be the main thing that’s affecting web performance. Una Kravets, Senior UI Engineer at DigitalOcean, explains how and why we should optimize images. We talked about several performance improvements, and accessibility on the web. Una is also a co-host on Toolsday, a weekly podcast about tech tools, tips, and tricks on Tuesdays at 2.
What is serverless computing? What types of applications can we build with serverless computing? In this episode, Manisha Sule, Director of Big Data Analytics at Linux Academy answers these questions. We also talked about big data pipelines, and how the Linux Academy is using them.
Manisha Sule, Director of Big Data Analytics at Linux Academy
Virtual Reality is transforming storytelling and animation. Maureen Fan, CEO and co-founder of Baobab Studios, explains what VR is and its role in film making. We talked about the technical challenges, how the team works, and how she evaluates VR experiences.
CSS is all about how your website looks. From layout to animation, CSS has been used to make immersive web experiences. Rachel Andrew, co-founder of Perch and expert on the CSS working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), explains how CSS has evolved since the 90s. We talked about the types of layouts in CSS and how mobile affected its evolution. We also discussed some of the aspects covered in her latest book: The New CSS Layout.
Rachel Andrew, co-founder of Perch and expert on the CSS working group of W3C
Brands express themselves through web animation. Some brands can appear playful, while others more serious by using animation effectively. Val Head, Design Evangelist of UX Innovation at Adobe, explains how animation style guidelines can be used to have consistent animation at a company. We also talked about design tools, what she learned from clients as an independent consultant, and how she’s building a community of designers.
Val Head, Design Evangelist of UX Innovation at Adobe
Public speaking is not just about getting on stage and giving a tech talk. It’s also about communicating effectively in team meetings. Lara Hogan, VP of Engineering at Kickstarter presents a path to improving public speaking, especially for people in the tech field. We also talked about engineering teams and leadership and her latest book Demystifying Public Speaking.
Saron Yitbarek went from Pre-Med to learning to code, to founding CodeNewbie, the most supportive community of programmers and people learning to code. We talked about the things she did while learning to code, reading other people’s code and why she started a small code reading club. We also talked about methods of learning, code quality, and building a successful tech community.
Storytelling is not just something for the movies or TV. It plays an important role in how we interact with applications and brands through our phones and the web. Rachel Nabors, award-winning cartoonist, and web developer, compares storytelling through comics with storytelling on the web. We talked about the different areas of design and web animation. We also talked about her latest book Animation at Work. Rachel is a Program Manager at Microsoft.
Check out Rachel’s courses on CSS Animations and Transitions and Practical cartooning for Technical People at courses.rachelnabors.com . Use promo code WIT10 for a 10% discount!
Rachel Nabors, award-winning cartoonist and web developer
What is Data Science? What is the difference between Data Science and Machine Learning? In this episode, Grace Huang, Data Science Manager at Pinterest answers these questions. We talked about complex data sets and building a recommendation system at Pinterest. Grace explained the core algorithms used in a recommendation system and the role of embeddings on this.
We live in a great time to start a company. The resources which were only accessible to big companies are now at our fingertips. Erica Brescia, COO of Bitnami gave advice on how to start a company. We talked about what she learned at YC and the status of the company when it was admitted. Erica explained what Bitnami is building, and pricing strategies. At the end we talked about her role as an investment partner in XFactor Ventures.
Most of us have come across a form of bias when we interact with others. These biases can make their way to a machine learning system, leading to unfair decisions. Rachel Thomas, co-founder of fast.ai and researcher in residence at The University of San Francisco explains the origins and implications of bias in machine learning. We also talked about solutions to limit bias.
Rachel also explained the role of linear algebra in machine learning and how to teach it effectively for people working in ML applications. We talked about the fundamental concepts and how they are applied in machine learning. Check out the Computational Linear Algebra course on fast.ai.
Becoming a better developer is easier than ever. With unlimited resources and the ability to connect with other people, we can learn from other developers. Jess Lee, COO at The Practical Dev, explains how they are building a community to help developers. We talked about how developers are engaging and the type of content they are posting on the platform. Jess also explained the technologies used to build The Practical Dev.
Everyone should learn how to code. Felienne, Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, explains the importance of learning to code even if we are not going to code for a living. We talked about her approach to teach kids about programming and software engineering. Felienne is bringing teaching methods seen in other disciplines like writing into programming. She explained the progress the children make and how to create an inclusive environment that keeps them engaged.
Felienne, Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology
Pokémon Go, an augmented reality game, was released in 2016. The level of popularity it reached was more that the expected. This provided interesting technical challenges to make sure it was available to millions of people. Aparna Sinha, Group Product Manager at Google, and Dawn Chen, Software Engineer Tech Lead at Google, explain how Kubernetes enabled Pokémon Go to quickly scale. We talked about what Kubernetes is, and its architecture. Aparna and Dawn also talked about the Kubernetes 1.7 release.
Nature has its own computers, from worms to bacteria, these organisms use calculus and gradient descent to survive. Sabrina Rashid, PhD student in Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon, explains how bacteria are using gradient descent. We also talked about what computational biology is and the problems that are being explored. Sabrina also talked about her work on RNA sequence analysis and the type of data that she works with.
Sabrina Rashid, PhD Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon
Statistics and Machine Learning are two fields that have advanced Artificial Intelligence. Montserrat Gonzalez, Software Engineer at Google, explains the difference between using traditional statistical approaches, Machine Learning and AI. We talked about the technological breakthroughs that are making machines get smarter and the implications of using statistical approaches.
Podcasts are the fastest growing form of media. I know first hand the process for sharing a podcast is difficult. Kim Hansen, CEO of Signl.fm is building software to solve this problem. Kim explained the challenges as well as the solutions they are working on to improve the technology podcasters have access to.
In the 80s, Compaq became one of the fastest growing companies in American History. Compaq pioneered the idea of building a computer that was compatible with IBM’s software. Back then, IBM was the dominant player in the personal computers space and their software was used everywhere. Karen Walker was Vice President of Operations at Compaq. She controlled capital investments totaling $1 Billion. Karen oversaw the construction of 11 million square feet of Compaq’s offices around the world and helped grow Compaq, which became the largest supplier of PCs in the 90s.
As more robots are available in the market, we are seeing the different ways in which humans can interact with them. Some people think robots are alive they even feel bad when a Roomba gets stuck. Other people find robots that look a lot like humans scary. Kate Darling, Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab explains the different types of human-robot interactions. We talked about how the design of the robot affects how it is perceived and the role of the person’s culture. At the end we talked about questions that lawmakers will need to address in this space.
Kate Darling, Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab
Transforming the culture of one of the largest tech companies in the world has unique challenges. Kathleen Hogan, Executive Vice President of HR at Microsoft, explains why a culture shift is needed even for a successful company. Kathleen highlighted how the logistics change when you run a large organization. We also talked about what needs to happen to accommodate different generations of employees. At the end Kathleen explains why HR is a technical job.
A data-driven organization is more efficient because the company can learn what to focus on. Rya Sciban, Product Manager at Periscope Data explains the needs of data teams in an organization. We talked about what data analysis is and how this changes as the amount of data grows. Rya explained what analytics clusters are and effective ways of sharing data between the organization.
Periscope Data has been successful in retaining women in product and development teams. We talked about effective strategies for this and for having more women in leadership positions.
ChatBots enable us to get things done without launching another application. From buying things, to trouble-shooting a server, we are seeing more companies incorporate chatbots in their workflow. Marlene Jia, Co-founder of TOPBOTS, explains what a chatbot is and how they can be used. We talked about the steps for building a chatbot and the types of tasks that can be automated with artificial intelligence.
At 13 years old, Jasmine Lawrence founded EDEN BodyWorks, a company that provides natural products for the hair and body. These products are available at major retail stores and have paved the way for Jasmine to grow as an entrepreneur.
Jasmine is a Program Manager at Microsoft in the HoloLens team. She has worked in robotics and designing software in the gaming space. Jasmine explained the challenges of building tangible products, and how this is different than building software. We talked about robots in the healthcare industry and about human centered design. At the end we talked about time management, and the importance of planning.
Jasmine Lawrence works on HoloLens and founded EDEN BodyWorks
What is a distributed system? Why is it important to know how distributed systems work? You may be using a distributed system without knowing it. Natallia Dzenisenka, independent Software Solutions Architect answers this questions. We talked about distributed system tools, Data modeling, and the core components of distributed systems. There are many tools that have abstracted how distributed systems work, Natallia explained the benefits of knowing how these systems work. These tools give us the power to build distributed systems easily but when working on this, knowing what happens under the hood is extremely beneficial.
Wearables are everywhere. In the medical field they are transforming lives. Haiyan Zhang, Innovation Director at Microsoft Research, created a wearable for a young graphic designer that developed Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a condition that inhibits movement, and this wearable allows the Parkinson’s patient to write and draw again. Haiyan explained the research process and the technical aspects of how it works.
We also talked about the Internet of Things, the components of these systems and the technical challenges. Haiyan also explained her path from Software Engineering to Design and the process of commercializing products that come from research.
Haiyan Zhang, Innovation Director at Microsoft Research
Contact projectemma@microsoft.com for more information.
Sukrutha Bhadouria is Software Engineering Manager at Salesforce. Sukrutha explained the challenges of working on a product that has 14 million unique users. We also talked about building products that integrate with third-party components and how to effectively work with other companies in these integrations. Outside of work Sukrutha manages Girl Geek Dinners in the Bay area, an organization where women in technology can network and learn from each other.
Sukrutha Bhadouria is Software Engineering Manager at Salesforce
What is DevOps? How does it relate to Operations and Software Development? Bridget Kromhout, Principal Technologist for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal answers these questions. Bridget explained what Operations Engineering is and what she used to work on when she was focused in this area. We then talked about how DevOps emerged and how it differs from Operations. At the end we talked about VoiceOps and ChatOps and the future of DevOps.
Bridget Kromhout, Principal Technologist for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal
devopsdays – Devopsdays is a worldwide series of technical conferences covering topics of software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them. Topics often include automation, testing, security, and organizational culture.
monitorama – An Open Source Monitoring Conference and Hackathon
Machine learning is everywhere, it’s used on email, Netflix, social media and for driverless cars. In this episode, Katie Malone gives an introduction to machine learning. Katie is a data scientist in the research and development department at Civis Analytics. She is also an instructor of the intro to machine learning online course from Udacity along with Sebastian Thrun.
Katie Malone works on Machine Learning and teaches it for free on Udacity.
On March 27th I attended the EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco. This conference is organized by the MIT Technology review who provide excellent insight into the technologies of the future. I have been reading their work since 2008 and it’s one of my favorite platforms to learn about technology and innovation.
At EmTech Digital I learned about the state of the art in Artificial Intelligence. One of the topics that I am interested in is Ethics in AI, and in today’s episode I talked with one of the presenters of the conference, Francesca Rossi. Francesca is Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM research and we talked about the ethical implications of AI and the challenges of embedding an ethics module into this systems. As AI becomes more popular, we are going to start seeing more debates about ethics in AI and who should be involved in defining it.
Francesca Rossi on “AI and the Art of Social Responsibility” at the EmTech Digital Conference in San Francisco.
Photo by: MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital Conference
Charity Majors is Co-Founder of Honeycomb, a tool that allows engineers to inspect and debug complex systems. Charity explained what makes a system complex and how engineers can learn about their systems with a rich data-driven approach. We also talked about pricing strategies for software and company culture concepts, particularly policies for meetings. Charity also talked about selling a company that was not profitable yet to Facebook. At the end we talked about when to sell a company or keep it and grow it.
Jessica Naziri is a Tech Expert, Entrepreneur, and an accomplished writer in Tech. Her work has been featured in LA Times, CNBC, USA Today, CNN among others. Jessica has reviewed numerous tech products and helped brands tell their story and market themselves. We talked about what makes a good product, and why some are not successful. Jessica explained the intersection between fashion and technology and what to consider when building a product for this space. After working at a startup, Jessica learned to code on her own and founded TechSesh. Jessica is also working on improving diversity in tech by having more women work in this field.
Jessica Naziri writes about technology and business and is founder of TechSesh
A team of robots can accomplish tasks that a single robot can’t. They can be in charge of dangerous tasks that are difficult for humans to do and help society. Nora Ayanian, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California explains how robots can work as a team. Nora talked about the components of building a team of robots and gave examples of tasks that they can do as well as the current challenges in this space.
Nora Ayanian builds teams of robots.
Credit: Photo by Damon Casarez Video by MIT Technology Review
Preethi Kasireddy is a Software Engineer with a passion for sharing everything she learns. In this episode Preethi explained how she learned to code in her free time and her experience at a boot camp in San Francisco. Preethi also talked about one of the first projects she built and her initiative to start an email-based course targeted at advanced beginner and intermediate programmers.
Preethi Kasireddy taught herself to code while working at a16z.
Angie Jones is a Consulting Automation Engineer at LexisNexis. Angie explained what test automation is and its importance in the Software Development process. We talked about merging the role of Software Developer and Software Tester and its consequences. We also explored topics on tooling and testing with headless browsers. Angie also highlighted the process of collaboration across multidisciplinary teams.
Web Animation can have personality and character, just like Disney Animation. Val Head, UI Animation Pro, talks about applying Disney Animation principles to web animations. We talked about creating effective and immersive animations by using CSS and javascript. Val also explained what aspects of web animations can lead to poor performance. At the we had an interesting discussion about the future of web animation.
Asta Roseway is Research Designer in the Natural Interactions Group at Microsoft Research. Asta works on designing wearables that are intuitive, engaging, and beautiful. We talked about DuoSkin, a wearable that looks like a beautiful metallic tattoo and its capabilities. Asta explained the different components of DuoSkin as well as potential applications. We also talked about the intersection between health, wearables, technology and fashion and where this is headed.
Asta Roseway with MoodWings, a wearable for detecting stress
DuoSkin a metallic tattoo that can connect to devices
Security vulnerabilities are an important concern in systems. When we specify that we want certain information hidden for example our phone number or our date of birth, we expect the system to hide the information. However, this doesn’t always happen due to human error in the code because programmers have to write checks and filters across the program. In this episode Jean Yang, Assistant professor at the Computer Science Department in Carnegie Mellon, presents Jeeves, a language that allows programmers to specify security policies more intuitively making it harder to leak information that is meant to be protected. Jean explained how Jeeves was implemented and how it can be used. We also talked about what it takes to bring research concepts from academia to the industry and at the end we had a very interesting conversation on how to educate a broader audience on the importance of security. Jean was also named one of the 35 innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review.
Jean Yang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Shuah Khan is Senior Linux Kernel Developer at Samsung. The Linux Kernel is one of the biggest open source projects in the world and it is used by devices that we interact with on a daily basis. Shuah explained what an operating system kernel is and how the Linux Kernel is architected to support different types of devices. Shuah also talked about how quality is ensured, how tests are run, and the process of contributing to an open source project. In a project of this magnitude and with contributors all over the world, it is important to have a consistent and effective process in place. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I learned a lot by talking to Shuah.
Shuah Khan, Senior Linux Kernel Developer at Samsung
Jessica Jobes is the founder of OnTheGrid, a marketing agency which brings data first to decision making. Jessica brings years of experience working at Microsoft as a Program Manager at Bing. We talked about the key insights that she learned during her time and how they helped her launch a company in online marketing. While at Microsoft, Jessica also worked as Chief of Staff with Derrick Connell, CVP at Bing and Julie Larson-Green, Chief Experience Officer at Office. We talked about what a Chief of Staff does as well as the work involved in creating effective demos.
Stephanie Hurlburt is founder and co-owner of Binomial. Binomial is making one of the best texture compressors. In this episode, Stephanie explains what texture compression is and why this is still a bottleneck in graphics engineering. We also talked about what graphics engineering is, and how she began working in this area when she was building art installations around companies. Stephanie also highlighted several open source projects and gave advice on how to get started in graphics engineering.
Stephanie Hurlburt is building a texture compressor at Binomial
Starting a technology company has become easier than a decade ago. Having access to excellent resources to switch your career focus to a different area of technology is also easier now. In this episode Tracy Aiken, General Manager at Galvanize explains how Galvanize is helping entrepreneurs, aspiring technologists, as well as people that already work in technology. Galvanize has beautiful locations in the United states that nurture a community that strives to improve. Tracy talked about what people can do once they are at Galvanize and the variety of opportunities that they give their members. Given Tracy’s 20 years of experience in leadership positions, we also talked about leadership and her work in ensuring that the community at Galvanize remains inclusive.
What is cloud computing? Is this about where we compute or how we compute? In today’s episode, Cornelia Davis, Sr. Director of Technology at Pivotal answers these questions. Cornelia and I also walk through the fundamental patterns in cloud computing as they emerge when a service grows from 1000 users to millions. We also talked about the potential end of cloud computing. I learned a lot by talking to Cornelia and hope that you will too.
Cornelia Davis is Sr. Director of Technology at Pivotal
Alaina Percival is the CEO of Women Who Code. Women Who Code is a non-profit global organization dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. Alaina explained how Women Who Code grew from a meetup to a global organization that has connected over 80,000 women. We also talked about building an organization that focuses on women that already have careers in technology and engineering and why this is important. Alaina also explained how being accepted to Y Combinator in 2016 has helped Women Who Code.
Today’s episode is part 2 of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. On part 1, I talked to three attendees and for this episode I talked with speakers and volunteers at the event.
Liz Hill 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. Liz Hill is a Program Manager in Microsoft’s Skype for Business group. She has worked in a number of roles prior to moving into program management full time, including as a college radio deejay, mobile phone game tester and in mobile content merchandising.
Liz Hill spoke at the Student Opportunity Lab
Bushra Anjum Bushra talked about the Open Source track at Grace Hopper. She 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. Bushra has a PhD in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and is currently serving as a Tech Lead for the Amazon Prime Program. her team is responsible for the timely, accurate and reliable services for millions of Amazon Prime customers across the world.
Bushra has been a speaker twice at Grace Hopper
Sahana Gururaj Sahana was a volunteer on Open Source Day. We talked the projects that attendees worked on, and the importance of participating at the hackathon. Sahana is a Computer Science graduate from UT Austin. She has worked on the Scholarship Application Committee at Grace Hopper and has been a mentor at Open Source Day. In 2016 she volunteered in logistics and worked with sponsors for the hackathon at the conference.
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, and 1,000 of those were men.
In this episode I talked to three attendees of The Grace Hopper Celebration: 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.
Sundas Khalid Sundas is passionate about the intersection of business and technology, and is always looking at learning new things. Currently, she works as a Data Engineer at Amazon’s Weblab Science team, empowering Amazon’s A/B testing platform worldwide with statistical analysis that enables businesses within Amazon to understand customer behavior and make million-dollar launch decisions of critical site features at the flick of a switch.
Sundas and Jack Dorsey CEO of Twitter at GHC 2016
Chih-yu Chao Chih yu is a returning attendee. She received 2 Masters degrees from Carnegie Mellon and a PhD in Computer Science at MIT. While attending Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she explored her career in fields including research (academic and industrial), non-profit, management consulting, and patent law, while helping a start-up that was then acquired by IBM.
She joined Microsoft as a Program Manager in 2011 and used to work on Bing Ads and Cortana International. Currently she is working on Learning Experiences – which provides free online education on Microsoft technologies to empower learners all over the world.
Chih-yu was a returning attendee at GHC 2016
John Kingsly John Kingsly is a program manager at Microsoft building capacity planning systems that power Microsoft’s cloud services. Having worked in Consulting, Services and most recently in engineering roles understanding the lack of diversity needs an eye-opening moment lest an assumption be made it is normal. Seeing leaders who walk the talk in diversity and the effectiveness of their teams at work influenced him to be committed to supporting the cause of women in Tech. As a father of two girls who want to be in Tech, he was thankful for the invitation by his mentor to be part of the Microsoft team at GHC16. He believes that there should be more women in technology as technology shapes the future of humanity.
John Kinglsy was one of the 1,000 men that attended GHC 2016
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.
Cynthia Tee was at Microsoft for 20 years and is now at Ada Developers Academy
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.
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.
For today’s episode I went to the Microsoft Alumni event hosted at Microsoft in Redmond, and met with numerous bright people both former and current employees. One of them was Andrea Taylor, current CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
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.
I really enjoyed talking to Andrea, and through sharing her experiences she helps others be more open and think about people from other backgrounds.
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 one of 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.
Evelina Gabasova is developing machine learning models and mathematical models for cancer research. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Cambridge. We talked about how to apply machine learning models in the medical field and the state of AI. Evelina also gave an insight into the types of problems that are being tackled with machine learning and some of the implications on having access to medical data.
Michele Titolo is a Lead Software Developer at Capital One. Michele has built microservices at Capital One which is a Bank in the United States. We talked about the increasing popularity of microservices, what they are, and the value that they add to an organization. Michele also gave an insight on her experience developing microservices and good practices. We also talked about mobile app development and how it has been evolving.
Katharine Holdsworth has been a Program Manager at Microsoft for 13 years and she is currently part of the Windows Insiders team. We talked about her experiences at Microsoft, the Windows Insiders program and about Program Management. Katharine also gave her advice on career growth and getting involved in speaking at technical conferences. We also talked about the “Meet our Leaders” speakers series that she started at Microsoft along with other women, and how this is helping the community at Microsoft.
Rosario is a Director at The Anita Borg Institute. Our conversation explored the experiences that led her to get involved in communities that improve the careers of Women in Technology. We also talked about how she works closely with businesses to make sure they have inclusive environments to retain women in tech, and the role of men in helping with this effort. Rosario also explained the benefits of being a part of communities from The Anita Borg Institute as well as volunteering opportunities and The Grace Hopper Conference.
Maria Naggaga is on a mission to make a better world through code. She is actively involved in projects to help the community, and this is one of the reasons of why she is in technology. We talked about the diverse projects she has worked on, and also about her work as a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. Maria enjoys building projects, using ASP.NET, contributing to open source, expressing herself artistically and is currently a Program Manager at Microsoft.
Rebekah Bastian talks about the current state of mobile and developing for mobile web vs native apps. Rebekah is a VP at Zillow and has been successfully driving the execution of products. She got an early start on mobile and also saw the potential for building effective experiences in this platform. We also talked about measuring engagement in mobile, her hobbies, volunteering opportunities, and about her blog post titled “Why I’m not a Woman in Tech”.
Kaitlyn Hova is a professional violinist since she was a teenager, a Software Developer, UX Designer, and has been experimenting with 3D printing. She and her husband successfully 3D printed a violin called The Hovalin. We had an interesting conversation about 3D printing instruments and the future of 3D printing. We also talked about Design and Neuroscience.
Tabitha Yong is a Senior Product Designer at Khan Academy. Tabitha studied graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design, and we talked about what graphic design is, and how it is affecting technology. Tabitha also gave an insight on how products are developed at Apple and Khan Academy, the technologies she uses, and her workflow as a designer. I really enjoyed this conversation and hope that you will too.
Blithe Rocher graduated from a PhD in Physical Chemistry and went from being a Scientist to a Software Developer. In this episode we talk about this career switch and the steps she took to get immersed in the field. I liked this conversation a lot because I think these aspects also apply to people that are already working in the tech industry and they are looking at working in a different area of technology. We also talked about her work on APIs for the Hilary Clinton campaign website among other interesting projects.
Vidya Srinivasan is a classical singer since she was 3 years old and has been translating ideas into action at Microsoft as a Technical Program Manager. She is a tech-for-good hacker and has won several awards hacking including the Microsoft global hackathon for the past two years. We had some interesting conversations about hackathon projects, diversity in tech, program management, career strategy and Grace Hopper.
Today’s episode is a bit more on the career development and mentorship side. I had the opportunity to speak with Marrissa Hellesen and we talked about the time when she went from being in a gifted program to taking several jobs through her teenage years while not being enrolled in a high school. As she struggled to get her life back on track for a better future, she emphasized on the importance of mentors in her life. Marrissa has been a volunteer, educator, and mentor and she’s currently a Software Engineer at Microsoft. I hope you like this episode.
Bri Connelly is a driven engineer, product manager and entrepreneur. While at college, she participated in the IBM Watson University competition along with other students and developed an app that makes social services more accessible to people. We talked about this, and also about entrepreneurship, software engineering, product management and Gboard, Google’s latest keyboard.
Jessica co-authored “The Effect of Recommendations on Network Structure” while at Twitter and is currently a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford University. We talked about doing research in the industry and academia, the state of recommendation systems and their implications, and also about careers and technical interviews. I hope you like this episode.
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