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Sukrutha Bhadouria: I am now here to introduce Bhawna and Shalini from Proofpoint. Bhawna is a senior engineering program manager at Proofpoint. Shalini is a group product manager at Proofpoint. We will now be hearing from both these ladies on their unique journeys to cybersecurity and how you too can begin a career in cybersecurity. Welcome, Bhawna and Shalini.

Bhawna Dua: Thank you Sukrutha for the introduction, and thank you folks for joining our talk, demystifying cybersecurity. Today, me and my counterpart, Shalini, would like to shed some light on the somewhat mysterious field of cybersecurity and highlight why it is a good career choice for the times that we live in. In the last few years, we’ve been hearing a lot about these security breaches and hacks. Shalini, why do you think these matters so much, especially to us as individuals?

Shalini Sundaram: Yeah, that’s a great question, partner. We’ve actually seen tremendous progress in the field of cloud computing and IOT in the last few years, right? And what that means for us is really a life of luxury, right? We can answer our doorbells sitting in the kitchen. We can warm up our car seats before we go for a drive. We can have day-to-day conversations with our friends and our relatives across the globe. And my personal favorite is we can actually store and retrieve our most fondest memories right in the fraction of the second. But while the world has become a more connected and a more convenient place for us all to live in, we are seeing that it’s now turned into a gold mine for attackers, right?

Shalini Sundaram: We’ve seen attacks ranging from small pranks all the way to more serious risks where car hackers hijack millions of vehicles and they can control where you drive. We’ve all heard about the Facebook hack, right? All of our personal details were exposed to the world. But what’s very disturbing to me is that some of our most precious moments, like our babies’ first steps, even those are now under attack. But Bhawna, it’s not just us as individuals who are getting impacted by this. We also see enterprises are facing the brunt of this. Don’t you think that the cyber crimes have been increasing?

Bhawna Dua: Absolutely. You are right. Shalani. The rise in cyber crimes itself has been exponential resulting in an equivalent increase in the cost. In 2015, the cost of cyber crimes was around 3 trillion. It doubled itself by 2021 to 6 trillion, and now it is projected that by 2025, it is going to be around 10.5 trillion. Now, these costs include things like theft of intellectual property, personal and financial data, as well as the cost of fraud and reputational harm, just to name a few. As you can anticipate, the demand for cybersecurity professionals is rapidly increasing, and it is projected that by 2025, there will be 3.5 million fewer cybersecurity professionals than the actual number of available jobs. Shalini, how about we give our audience a little bit of insight into a couple of these hacks or attacks and how things unfolded? You have an interesting example to share with us today about software supply chain compromise, right?

Shalini Sundaram: Yeah, that’s right, Bhawna. The SolarWinds hack – this actually happened in 2020, right? The security community community is still talking about it because if you look at most attacks, they go after one organization. What these attackers did is they went after one company that whose, whose products are being used by thousands of organizations, right? The attackers introduced malicious code into one of the software updates, and 18,000 organizations ended up downloading it. 20% of those institutions included federal ones, right? The Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, and it took them over a year to actually discover the attack. As you can see, this was a pretty sophisticated attack.

Shalini Sundaram: Let’s go a little bit behind the scenes to see how the attackers did this. The actors who were behind this was a Russian group called Cozy Bear, and the first thing that they did is they got onto the code base of SolarWinds. They introduced malicious code into one of the software libraries that was being used as part of the update. And this malicious update went out to thousands of organizations. SolarWinds in the meanwhile, was absolutely oblivious to all of this stuff because they didn’t have any security tools that were monitoring their code base for malware. Now, after the updates got pushed out, it’s not like the attackers a acted immediately, right? They took their own time and they were not after these small financial gains. So what they did was they actually monitored all the systems and they were looking for software products, right? They were figuring out which versions were running so that they can identify vulnerabilities in them. Similarly, they were trying to figure out which security products were running so that they can figure out how to evade them.

Shalini Sundaram: Using all these attacker technique, they maintain a very low footprint and they ended up uploading a lot of confidential data, right? And some of that data also included details about the sanctions that the US had posed against Russia. The big takeaway here, right, is that attackers are getting more and more sophisticated and the scale of impact that they have is increasing. But we also saw another attack where these threat actors, they were bold enough to go after critical security infrastructure. Could you give us a little bit insight about that?

Bhawna Dua: Yes, sure. Thanks, char. This was the Saudi Aramco attack, and it was very interesting in the sense that it highlights the threat to our critical infrastructure. To give a little bit of background, the target of this attack was an oil and gas company in Saudi Arabia, in which this huge oil company, Aramco had a big stake.

Bhawna Dua: Now, the attackers targeted an industrial control system using what we call a multi-stage malware. This malware was injected using either a phishing email or a physical USB stick into the company’s network. Now, what was this malware capable of? It could spin the rotating parts of the control system and make it unstable so that eventually the machine would break. And if that machine or equipment breaks, it actually means a loss of life. Now, the reason this attack did not fully materialize was due to a slight misconfiguration on the part of the attackers.

Bhawna Dua: This error actually caused the fail safe mode of the equipment to trigger. And as soon as that anomaly was detected, the whole equipment shut down. Now, obviously that meant a loss of productivity, but it did not at that point mean a loss of life. Now, why does it matter so much? Because this same control system that was targeted is used in thousands of plants across the United States, thus highlighting a major threat to our critical infrastructure. Further analysis revealed that the complete file library of this malware was constructed using five different programming languages, as well as it took more than a year to build the entire malware. So you can imagine to build something of this scale and sophistication needs a huge amount of resources, which obviously points a finger to some nation state.

Bhawna Dua: Now what’s the main lesson here that we need to do much more to protect our critical infrastructure? So Shalini, let’s assume that a few folks from our audience are actually thinking to transition to cybersecurity and help solve some of these very, very difficult problems and prevent some of these crazy attacks. How would we talk a little bit about our career journeys and how we landed in cybersecurity? Let’s hear about your career part first.

Shalini Sundaram: Yeah, sure, that sounds good. My first exposure to cybersecurity was when I took a couple of courses in grad school. I got introduced to cybersecurity when I was part of my computer science program. But what was really interesting is we had a hands-on lab where we were asked to attack each other’s systems. And that was really exciting and I loved it, right? That was the moment I decided, okay, I’m definitely gonna get into cybersecurity.

Shalini Sundaram: One of the early moves that I did was I jumped into a cybersecurity startup. And being in a startup, I had the luxury to wear multiple hats. One day I would be sitting next to the security researcher, right? And we would figure out how to set up the infrastructure so that we can attract attackers and actually study their behavior, right? The next day I would also spend time with the business development team and talk to various security companies trying to understand their use cases and figuring out how we could integrate better with each other.

Shalini Sundaram: One of the things that I remember from my experience at this company was it was my very first cybersecurity conference. And at the on, on there was, this was in 2015, and there were about 400 security companies, right? But then the very next year in 2016, it doubled to 800. I could really see that the security industry was expanding rapidly. And in the next few years, I saw that it was in just that the security industry alone was expanding, but it was also making an impact on the other domains as well. For example, I was working on this networking product, right?

Shalini Sundaram: And it was leveraging a latest networking technology called software defined networking, right? And we were actually able to convince customers that even though this technology was super helpful and growing at the rate of 40% year over year, it still had some major security flaws and they couldn’t deploy it without that.

Shalini Sundaram: All of a sudden we saw the whole security industry and the networking industry kind of collide, right? So we saw the networking guys try to implement security features. And then from our side, we were trying to implement networking features. And we actually ended up hiring quite a few networking professionals to help understand that side of things. And in my current role now, right, I been exposed to multiple other domains, right? Whether it’s endpoint or whether it’s the more recent ones like cloud.

Shalini Sundaram: But what really has left an impression on me is my role as a product manager has taught me that I have to work with so many different individuals in order to build a good security product. For example, Bhawna, when, when things are when attackers change their techniques, right? Like the ones that we saw with solar, wind we have to respond immediately, right? We have to work with people like you so that we can ship our software quickly. Similarly, I have to work very closely with the user experience team so that we are able to develop products that are more intuitive to u to the, to the customer, and they’re not wasting time figuring out how the product works, right? I also have to work with sales and marketing so that they understand the value of our product so that in turn the CISOs, they can explain to their board and their CEO why they need to spend more on cybersecurity, right?

Shalini Sundaram: I guess I would say over the last few years, or like the last 15 years in cybersecurity, I’ve kinda become a little bit wise. And I feel that all you really need to be honest, is a good heart to make the right kinda impact in cybersecurity and, and Bhawna, I think this was a very traditional path for me, right? I came from the computer science program and I jumped across various cybersecurity industries, but you were from a completely different background and you ended up in cybersecurity and it was a bit of a non-traditional path. Could you give us a little bit about what you went through?

Bhawna Dua: Sure thing. Shalini, thank you for sharing your journey. Very inspiring. Well, absolutely. My background is in electrical engineering, and that’s where actually I spent the first nine years of my career, I was working at Schneider Electric in an electrical engineering capacity. And my life at that point was, you know, about these equipments like generators, transformers, uninterruptable, power supplies, or you know, things, all the things that you find in a data center. Now, while I was there, I decided to get my m MBA and started thinking about making a change. Basically, what is it that I want to do in my career next? Now this was around 20 13, 20 14, and it was a very dynamic time. And the reason I say that, because digitization was really picking steam, I took a few classes on disruptive technologies and digitization and did some extensive research in these areas.

Bhawna Dua: The three technical innovations of that time that really stood out to me were one, internet of things (IOT). We had now these billions of devices that were collecting tons of data. Second big data itself, the new data generated every year by these devices was growing by trillions of gigabytes and third cloud computing that reflected the movement of this huge amount of data as well as applications to the cloud. Now, during my research, one thing that I was discovered was that all these areas are profoundly impacted by one thing, cybersecurity. Imagine one of your IOT devices like your Ring camera or your Ring doorbell or your digitized fridge is not protected properly, and the hackers use that to get into your home network and access all the information. Imagine the kind of information we store in the cloud. It could be financial records, health data, personal information.

Bhawna Dua: If that data falls into wrong hands, it can be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. So for me, that was enough motivation. I felt it is an opportunity to make a real difference as well as do good at the same time. Now, the key was how do I make this transition from electrical engineering into the cyber world? During my time at Schneider, one thing that I had done was build a strong base in project and program management and data analytics. And these skills are very transferrable. I thought, how about I leverage these skills along with my MBA and look for a role in cybersecurity that values what I bring to the table, but at the same time gives me an opportunity to learn about a new area? Simultaneously, I started reading a lot on cybersecurity to increase my basic understanding. I did take me some time and a few rejections to really fine tune my message and eventually land a role as a business operation analyst in a onsumer business unit.

Bhawna Dua: Now, at this point, I was really surrounded by cybersecurity professionals and started building some practical understanding in this area. A year later, I was able to transfer into a proper program manager role supporting the development and launch of products in the areas of consumer security and identity protection. Then in 2021, I decided to make a pivot because I wanted to learn a bit more about the enterprise side of cybersecurity. I joined Proofpoint and in my current role, I am supporting development of email security products and gaining some good knowledge and understanding of this domain.

Bhawna Dua: Folks, my main message is if you are thinking of making a leap, put in the hard work, identify your transferable skills, and take a calculator risk and believe that everything will work out in the end. So those were basically our journeys. Now let’s say if you are thinking of making this transition sh and I have a few next steps identified for you.

Bhawna Dua: The first one is definitely to increase your knowledge, and you can do that either by taking online or hybrid courses using one of these platforms that we have identified. If you’re looking to get into more technical stuff, then some of the universities, the very good ones, offer these six month boot camps like UCI, UC Berkeley, and to keep your knowledge up to date on an ogoing basis, Shalini and I and a lot of other cybersecurity professionals leverage podcasts. We have listed some of the good ones here. Discarded is our own Proofpoint podcast, and there are many more, so by all means, please do your research and you will find a lot of resources that are available to increase your knowledge.

Shalini Sundaram: This is a great list, Bhawna, and CISO series is my personal favorite. Well, if you found this interesting, you can read a little bit more about the other cybersecurity companies and maybe get started on your security career! Thank you so much for listening, everyone.

Bhawna Dua: Thank you ladies. This was amazing. Yeah, thank you guys. And in case you have any thank you

Shalini Sundaram: Questions?

Bhawna Dua: In case you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and Shalini and I will try to help you with whatever information we have. Thank you.

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all ELEVATE 2023 conference video replays!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner? Talk to us!

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all ELEVATE 2023 conference video replays!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner? Talk to us!

Angie Chang: She is a senior solutions engineer at HashiCorp. Is that how you say it?

Kelly Kitagawa: HashiCorp.

Angie Chang: Previously, she was at Splunk as a sales engineer and before that she was an IT project manager and Accenture consultant. She is here to unwind the loaded question “Are you technical enough?” And we are here for it! Welcome, Kelly.

Kelly Kitagawa: Thank you Angie. I am so honored to be with you all today and feel so grateful that you all are giving me the next 20 minutes of your time. Let’s go ahead and dive in. So let’s start with a story. I wanna go back in time to the year 2010 where there was a 21 year old woman who thought that she would never be able to graduate from engineering school. But on that day of her graduation, she still felt walking down that aisle that someone was gonna pull her out and say, you still have to take one more class, or you failed that class so you can’t graduate. And nevertheless, she graduated with less than 5% of graduating class being women. She then decided after engineering school to go into tech consulting and work for a large firm cuz she didn’t know what she wanted to do.

Kelly Kitagawa: Fast forward to the year 2016 and she decides that she wants to go back to her technical roots, but she doesn’t feel like she’s technical enough for the job. Somehow. Nevertheless, she continues and manages to convince someone to take a risk on her without a sales engineering experience and to give her the job.

Kelly Kitagawa: Now for those of you who don’t know what a sales engineer is or solutions engineer, basically what I do is I talk to technical people all day, every day and I help them solve their technical challenges with my particular product or learn about new technologies that are coming down the pipe that I’ve never heard of.

Kelly Kitagawa: But I am constantly on the hot seat presenting to customers and especially talking about technologies that I don’t have a large background in years and years of experience in. I have to learn really quickly on the job about that specific topic and go research it and then be able to present until the next day. Then this is when the feelings of not being technical enough really started to creep in hard. And then for this person this unnamed woman she starts getting more confident in herself and she gets voluntold to speak at her company’s keynote in front of 10,000 people on new product features.

Kelly Kitagawa: Fast forward to present day today in 2023, I am now a senior sales engineer and I work with our largest customers in the world to help solve some of their biggest technical challenges. My name is Kelly Kitagawa and I’m gonna share with you how I’ve overcome my biggest insecurity throughout my career, not feeling technical. In the next 20 minutes, I’ll discuss what I’ve learned in almost 15 years of being in tech, years of therapy, countless imposter syndrome workshops, TED Talks, mentors, in the hopes of helping any of you who may have shared those icky feelings before. Here’s how we’re gonna do it.

Kelly Kitagawa: We’ll start with the agenda here on what technical means. We’ll talk about what your limiting beliefs are and how to rewire them. Create an education plan and reframe your story. And apply this talk is for anyone, like I said, who may have said the same things to yourself – “I’m not technical enough” or “I don’t feel as technical as others”, and I want you to know that you have everything inside you that you need. I want you to walk away with something actionable today because presentations are so great and inspirational like so many of the amazing speakers at Girl Geek X today.

Kelly Kitagawa: But the real benefit of my talk you will get when you try some of these exercises out yourself at home. And I invite you to invest the time in yourself so that you feel worth it and that you are worth investing in yourself. Let’s start with what does technical even mean? I’d love to ask you all in the chat to say what, what is your word? Association with technical. Please feel free to put something in the chat, like what does technical mean to you? I’d love to hear any thoughts like what comes to mind for you when you hear the word technical math? Absolutely. Is it coding geek? Yes. What else? Like what? Engineering, coding, math. And so I went through this APIs, absolutely, introductional.

Kelly Kitagawa: I went through this exercise at my company which is a DevOps company and I interviewed and polled a bunch of people, very technical people, of what technical means to them. And these were some of the responses that I got – Having a mindset, willing to dig in, building mental pictures, figuring out how systems interconnect. Also having a strong attention to detail. Architecture. And my favorite one that one of my most senior leaders in my company said is really having a desire to learn, and the desire must be so great that you overcome the obstacles to understanding something difficult.

Kelly Kitagawa: What is the common pattern between all of this? The common pattern is that everyone has their own version of what technical means to them. It is such a washed term. Depends on what product you’re talking about. It depends on which company you’re at. Every role, even at the same company will have a completely different version of what technical means. Every person that you talk to has their own version and association with it. It is just a label. It is a label meant to gate keep you from applying to jobs and feeling less worthy than others. It is just a label. Do not let it have power over you. And a part of that, of letting go of that power is really thinking about a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

Kelly Kitagawa: When I went to engineering school, I had a very fixed mindset. The fixed mindset showed up for me is I’ll never be as smart as that person. They were born. Smart coding just comes so easy to them. They’ve probably, everything comes easy to them on technical subjects, they’ve probably always felt comfortable. And the growth mindset says you’re a lifelong learner.

Kelly Kitagawa: The growth mindset says, I may not know it now, but I can learn it. The growth mindset says I like to try new things and that challenges help me grow. The growth mindset says uncomfortable equals growth, scary equals growth and failure is an opportunity to grow. This comes to exercise number one, which is putting these down on paper helps you to really see clearly on what your limiting beliefs are.

Kelly Kitagawa: My limiting belief was that I’m not technical enough. And so what the exercise I wanting to do is get a piece of paper, spend 10 minutes, write down what the automatic thoughts that your imposter syndrome, your shame monster says.

Kelly Kitagawa: Write it down and put all of them down there on the left hand side, right? Like, I don’t think I’m technical enough to apply for this job. I’ll never be as technical as them. Or if I do this presentation, I will lose all credibility and they won’t hire me. And then what I want you to do is write a reasonable response to that.

Kelly Kitagawa: I want you to pretend that you’re talking to your best friend, your mentor, your mom, whomever that would actually respond to that. And they would hear, I’m not technical, but your best friend would be like, actually didn’t you do a six month coding bootcamp and you learned to be a full stack dev engineer? Or didn’t you pass the highest architect certification? Or didn’t you just give a huge presentation on technical topics?

Kelly Kitagawa: Or it might even look like no one is born with knowledge and skills are not innate. They are developed over hours of practice and I may not know it now, but I can learn it or I’m grateful for this opportunity and if it doesn’t work out, at least I’ve learned something new and I can say I was courageous enough to try.

Kelly Kitagawa: I need you all to go really deep and think about what would make you feel more technical. Be specific, talk about it. Your feelings are not always facts. Gosh, we know that. But when you really look at and examine your thoughts and think about reasonable responses to them, your feelings will become brighter about it. But you really need to take the time to think very specifically and write it down on what it is you’re limiting beliefs are that are holding you back. And once you write down reasonable responses and you do this daily on a practice when imposter syndrome shows up for you in these certain settings, for me it was always going into customer meetings or presenting to my colleagues, analyze it.

Kelly Kitagawa: When does it show up for you? What would make you feel less technical? And change your relationship to this over time. The feelings of my imposter syndrome do not go away automatically. Instead, my relationship with those thought changes.Iit’s not about shoving it down and never feeling it. It’s really about being more at ease with these feelings and rewiring your brain.

Kelly Kitagawa: There are like probably four or five really good TED talks that I put in resources about rewiring your thoughts. It is true, it works and it’s powerful. And being able to have reasonable responses in your mind, will make this become powerful for you.

Kelly Kitagawa: I’ll ask you with the question, what would be the positive consequences of having a realistic and appreciative opinion of yourself? What if you spent all of that energy that you spent telling yourself you’re not enough, you’re not technical enough? What if you spent all of that energy into positive pieces about you? Like I can do it, I can learn it. It’s okay. How would that show up for you in your life if you talk to yourself like that.

Kelly Kitagawa: This goes on to the next part, of being super specific. When you say you’re not technical enough, what you really mean and is, I need to learn more about Kubernetes and clutter cluster architecture. It is so vague for you to say ‘you are not technical enough.’ Stop saying you are not technical enough. Stop saying that you are ‘not technical.’ Instead be specific, and be really clear on what would make you feel more technical and say, ‘I wanna learn more about coding and Go,’ rather than saying ‘I’m not technical.’

Kelly Kitagawa: Stop saying that and ask yourself, what will it take to make you feel more technical? Think about it and invest the time and then write it down and make an education plan. This is three columns that I made in my education plan in a spreadsheet and I have the task I wanna deploy. In order for me to feel more technical with HashiCorp products, I wrote down the tasks – like I wanna be able to deploy Vault on Kubernetes. I wanna use Terraform to manage vault, and I want to pass my AWS Architect exam. And I put the how of I made to do that and the date that I wanna complete it by. And then for me, accountability is really hard.

Kelly Kitagawa: What I did is I found a technical mentor, and I hold a recurring meeting with them every two or three weeks, and I work and it basically builds in, for me, forcing myself to have to do these exercises, and really pushing myself, so that I can take that shame monster and throw to the trash, and realize it actually I just did it. I did deploy bot on Kubernetes. So guess what? Turns out I am pretty technical and you are cuz guess what? The growth mindset says you are a lifelong learner and that you may not know it now, but you can learn it and you can learn anything.

Kelly Kitagawa: Another one that I’m hear a lot, especially for people in non-technical roles is ‘I’m not technical.’ What instead I would like you to say is ‘I’m not familiar with that specific integration.’ Again, stop saying you’re not technical and be really specific about what it is that you wanna learn or what it is that will make you feel less icky about it. Is it really just around integrations or architecture? Take the time to really think about it. And then this is the part of reframing your story. We’ve worked on the internal thoughts, the limiting beliefs, your education plan, but now it’s time to get you ready for the interview. Or for talking to someone about what you’d bring to the table. The thing about interviews, this is a very limiting belief, is people are born good interviewers. The facts are that the people who are best in interviews are the ones that are the most prepared.

Kelly Kitagawa: One of the things that I’ve found to be really helpful for me is, I have a giant document that is reusable and I have a bank of my stories, and so what these stories comprise of are experiences that brought me here, there are experiences like what I’m most proud of in my career that relate to this job, but again, having the big bank of all of these experiences, things that you’re most proud of, and then in my interview, I printed out in front of me, and then I talk about it, and I just have them ready to go, so you don’t like, on the back foot have to remember all of these stories, but I think that the most interesting stories are the ones where you didn’t know something and you had to learn it and overcome it.

Kelly Kitagawa: Make sure you have at least two of those in your interviews and have them ready to go to talk about at any time, especially if you’re career pivoting into a new role that you don’t have experience in in that area. Like so as an example, if when I was applying for a solutions engineer, I didn’t have solutions engineering experience. What I did talk about is here’s other areas where I didn’t know something and I was able to overcome it. One of the best indicators of success is past success. Remember that. Think about all of the other areas that may not be that exact thing, but there are other areas where you’ve had past success to show your grit, your resiliency.

Kelly Kitagawa: It is all about how you frame these stories to show your potential. Stop thinking about what your current background is and start thinking about the potential that you have and sell them on your potential. Don’t sell them on your past experience. Sell them on your potential and what you could bring to the company that they don’t have already.

Kelly Kitagawa: One of the things that I experienced many times, especially being in a interviewing for a job where I didn’t have experience in that role, the best thing that I learned to say is, ‘I have something that you don’t have.’ I have a background that you don’t already have on your team. I have something from a security background. Yes, this is the infrastructure space, but guess what I have experience in it and security. Do you have other people on your team, you know, that have that kind of experience? Frame how much value you can add, not how you would fit in. Think about what you will add.

Kelly Kitagawa: I always say this, especially around culture. I do not wanna go to a company where I fit into the culture. I wanna go to a company where I add to the culture. And making sure that your hiring manager sees what you can add to the team that they do not already have – it is so powerful. Remember, sell them on your potential and what you could bring to the team that they don’t have already – different experiences that you’re bringing to the table. All of these slides are available to you. If you want to look at these for reference, because you’re gonna do the exercises at home, hopefully, and these, I just put on the slide of past stories from my big bank, my document, so you all can look at them later.

Kelly Kitagawa: Making sure that you are able to very clearly say what you uniquely bring. And this is the part about what you could add to the team that they don’t already have. Have these stories, be able to articulate very clearly why you want this job, and talk about your proud moments. Like I said, one of the best indicators for success is past success. Talk about the past successes that you’ve had and sell them all right.

Kelly Kitagawa: Now I wanna take some time to talk about this one because I mentor a lot of women and particularly women of color and I get this so often, which is, oh, I don’t think I’m tech enough to apply for that job. And people are so good at self-deception <laugh>, they’re so good at telling themselves that, ‘oh it’ll probably too hard’ or ‘I don’t wanna make myself uncomfortable.’

Kelly Kitagawa: But again, what would be the positive consequences of having this amazing, amazing picture and confidence of like a white male, cis heterosexual man have = that confidence going into these interviews and think about what it would be like for them? Do they have those same thoughts? So, especially when you apply for a job, I just talked about this with my sister who wanted to apply. She’s like, ‘oh, I don’t, I don’t think it would be good for me. I don’t think I’ll be technical enough for this.’ And I said, ‘You don’t even have an offer. You’re already saying no to the job and you don’t even have an offer. Make the decision that you take the job if you get an offer. And then at that time, then you can decide if you need to take it or not. Let the experts decide if you’re the right person for the job. The people that are in the hiring interviews with you, the people that are interviewing you. Let them decide if you’re the right person for the job, not your inner critic.’

Kelly Kitagawa: Do not take yourselves out of the running because your inner critic says you wouldn’t be good enough for it. Let other people decide that. Do not let those limiting beliefs hold you back from applying. Be brave and be courageous and apply anyway.

Kelly Kitagawa: For my sales engineering job, I did not think I was gonna get the job in most of the jobs that I’ve gotten, again, because I’m working on that inner critic that I’ve always had, especially on technical jobs. But I just said, you know, I’m gonna apply anyway and see what I can learn and guess what, I got the job. So it’s just going in with the right mindset. It’s kind of like, gosh, when you go on online dates and you have the first date, you’re like, oh, I think this person’s gonna be my husband.

Kelly Kitagawa: And it’s like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Take it easy. You know, you wanna say, I have no expectation going into this. I just hope it’s a new cool person that I’ll meet at a pool bar. Right? You cannot put so much expectation and be so attached to outcomes when you haven’t even tried. Put yourself out there, be comfortable. And like I said, let experts decide if you’re the right person for the job. Now you’re inner critic. You can decide if you want that job, if you get an offer.

Kelly Kitagawa: What are my main takeaways? Technical is just a label. Don’t let it have fear over you. Stop saying you aren’t technical cuz you are. You have everything that you need in front of you. And remember the growth mindset. If you aren’t specific or if you don’t feel like you have that specific technical expertise on this specific thing, guess what the growth mindset says that you can learn anything.

Kelly Kitagawa: Write down your limiting beliefs, rewire your thoughts, have compassion for yourself, and then create an education plan and make it actionable for you. And lastly, reframe your story and apply for the job. Want it more than you fear it. Let discomfort and growth be where you learn the most and invest the time in yourself.

Kelly Kitagawa: And my last slide is really about this beautiful quote that your private voice is what determines the quality of your life. And the stories we tell ourselves are our re reality. Be courage, courageous, and tell yourself that you’re worth it and that you’re worth investing in yourself.

Kelly Kitagawa: Thank you so much. Find me on LinkedIn, email me if you have questions. Please take the slides and do the exercises at home. And I also have the resources that I like to use a lot like Ted Talks, workbooks, articles. But thank you so much for being here with me today and I hope you have a great rest of your conference.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Kelly. I had, I took notes, so many notes. Thank you so much for our all of your pro tips. We’re gonna move moving to our next session, so we’re gonna say bye. But hopefully see you in this online conference. Thank you again, Kelly.

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi everyone. We have Shanea here. Hi!

Shanea Leven: Hi. Hey!

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hope you all are having a wonderful time in the conference so far. We are going to continue on with our journey of lifting as we climb up. Next we have Shanea, who’s the CEO and founder at CodeSee, a developer tool that helps developers and teams better onboard, refactor, and understand code bases.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Today, she will be leading a developer workshop for those of you who want to stand out by creating a visual map of your code piece to help you plan, automate, and review your next feature as well as refactor or code review, whatever it is that you just want to re have a special pair of eyes on. Welcome, Shanea!

Shanea Leven: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited today. Visualizing things and helping people understand like how they go through code changes and walking people through their code changes is a really great way to kind of stand out in this job market. Also this workshop is gonna have some tips. We only have 20 minutes together. A couple things before we start – if you wanna head over to CodeSee.io to make an account with us, it’s totally for free. You can go ahead and do that, and I’ll remind people as they kind of trickle in during the workshop.

Shanea Leven: If you are creating a visualization of any of your code changes, we will also give you a certificate to put in on your LinkedIn profiles or on socials or on your GitHub that you can link to that you can add that as a resume builder as well. We do this all the time. If there’s any support that you’ll need, you can let us know.

Shanea Leven: We have a Discord channel if in case you want to be around other folks that are adding things to open source or how to contribute to open source or any areas where you need some support for visualizing things, you can always go to OpenSourceHub.io. That’s our open source community. All things open source. I’ll say that in another couple minutes as people trickle in. Wanting to make sure that you all see that you’ll get a certificate. If you in if you email Ana@CodeSee.io, think she’s in the, in the chat as well she’ll be able to make sure that you get a certificate and that we can highlight you all.

Shanea Leven: Some tips while I get started in this workshop. As you all are kind of creating your accounts you wanna make sure that to stand out in the job market, the whole basis of this is to stand out in two ways. The first way that you need to stand out is to optimize your resume for algorithms. Turns like not sure if folks know this, but a lot of people use applicant tracking systems. They use a lot of AI and ML to be able to find the different keywords to surface your resume up. Just like a Google search engine or marketing search engine optimization applicant tracking systems use a lot of algorithms to help the recruiter make their jobs more efficient.

Shanea Leven: In order to optimize your resume to make sure that you are at the top of the stack, you wanna make sure that your resume and and your history and all of your projects are optimized for applicant tracking systems or algorithms within those applicant tracking systems. And then you also, at the same time, you also wanna optimize and think about recruiters. Once you get past that first initial screen of an algorithm, like your p zeros to optimize for algorithms to get to a person, you then wanna stand out to that person and a visual walkthrough in case that recruiter isn’t technical, which is probably 95% of technical recruiters aren’t technical themselves. You wanna be able to walk somebody through in order to stand out.

Shanea Leven: How to walk somebody through how to understand your code changes, why your code changes are significant, what can you really do, and a visual walkthrough on top of your code is a great way to do that. That’s kind of what we’re gonna talk about today. When you first optimize for algorithms, you want to add as many keywords as you possibly can, as you have the ability to, to get through that.

Shanea Leven: ATS is the first tip. It, trying to make sure that, one, it makes sense, but two, making sure that if you can add different languages at different buzzwords, if you are trying to add more technologies, trying to get as many of those things on your resume as possible to kind of help you optimize for that, it’s basically very keyword driven. This is the way to go, you wanna list out as many technical skills as you can in very clear headings and settings like this.

Shanea Leven: Here are couple of examples of how to optimize for algorithms. If you wanna say, you know, your technical skills, map out any programming languages in separated by frameworks and databases, any kind of cloud computing, any tools making sure that they are com separated so that the algorithms can basically easily delineate. You don’t wanna use like semicolons, you don’t wanna use any of that. Cloud comma separated is probably the easiest way.

Shanea Leven: For professional experience, you also want to make sure that that is keyword optimized. Making sure that, you know, work that is software development projects using the framework that you have listed down below – ‘developed and maintained, you know, microservices, collaborated to you know, design and implement solutions requirements’ – adding those types of keywords kind of separated out in very clear, bulleted form so it’s snippets of code and not necessarily like long exhaustive paragraphs, optimize for algorithms, it’s very, very helpful to be able to do that.

Shanea Leven: Here’s a reverse tip. What you wanna do to get to this point, you’re probably asking like, what keywords do I add, <laugh>. You can essentially reverse engineer the keywords that you should have as a starting point. Go to LinkedIn, grab 50 job descriptions that you are hoping to apply for, line them up in like a spreadsheet and grab the skills and the keywords directly from the job descriptions, and that should give you a very good comprehensive list of how to optimize from there.

Shanea Leven: A pro tip is once you have that list, then you can actually go to other people’s profiles, like on LinkedIn and see how they describe their projects and how they how they talk about their resume, and you can basically kind of cut and paste things that might sound good to optimize the keywords, and then you wanna test that strategy out. Apply to as many things as possible. You might have heard probably in the conference today that you wanna apply to things even if you don’t necessarily qualify. Cause the more things you have in keywords, the more things that you can optimize for as well.

Shanea Leven: That’s just a pro tip. I’ve personally have tried this strategy with roles that I’ve applied for, so this is a tip that I highly, highly recommend. And once you have optimized for the algorithms, you also want to optimize for the people. Again, as I mentioned showing off your skills in a digestible way for a non-technical person at first will help you stand out to get past those gatekeepers with more technical roles. You wanna have a section on your resume that says visual examples of your skills. Most people have most people try this out because it is a unique thing to see. They’re like, oh, I can someone, I can show this off visually. Typically recruiters, when there are unique things particularly skills that they can look at and see examples of it is very helpful for them.

Shanea Leven: What sometimes what recruiters do, sometimes what good recruiters do is they’ll use a software like Gem which basically aggregates links for you when they’re for, for the recruiter to go to your GitHub, to go through your Twitter, to go through like your other social media profiles to try to reach out to you to make it easier to do that. There are already tools that kind of aggregate all of your things together, and by having a visual example of how you put your effort together for them, it actually helps make their lives a lot easier. The more you can do for the recruiter, the easier it will be to make it through that check mark that they’re looking for.

Shanea Leven: Here is as an example of what you see once you go to CodeSee, I’ll pause here. If you haven’t already feel free to go to CodeSee.io and make an account to be able to create visual walkthroughs like this.

Shanea Leven: We also have our open source hub community all about visually adding visualizations to your pull requests, walking people through contributing to open source so that you can use those contributions as examples for your resume. Typically open source contributions are a really easy check mark to show off your experience to recruiters and to show contributions. And the way to optimize that is to visually walk people through those code changes. Feel free to, you won’t be alone in doing this if you join OpenSourceHub.io, we have a Discord. There’s lots of folks there that will also be able to be on their onboarding visual walkthrough journey. That’s my PSA. Back to the talk!

Shanea Leven: For visual tours on your code changes, being able to walk people through why something is complicated, how to understand what they’re looking at is what you want to be able to do. CodeSee allows you to make this visualization. And if in the event the recruiter is technical or if they forward that code change over to the hiring manager, they can use this visualization to very quickly and optimally understand what your code change is doing. That’s why a visualization like this will save them time in understanding what you did, but also your added notes and comments will also even supercharge that understanding very quickly and gives you a really good edge that we’ve seen people add to their resume.

Shanea Leven: Just as a highlight, CodeSee is a visual code visualization platform, we do more than that. But this will definitely help you all to make sure that you can walk someone through your code changes and help you stand out both for algorithms and for people.

Shanea Leven: We do have some ways of walking through the comments in this workshop. The three things that you would do in order to do that. Very, very simple. OpenSourceHub.io or our Discord will be able to provide you some support to make sure that you all, all optimizing standing out for your recruiters will be able to help. And I think I’m outta time, is that correct?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: If you need it, feels like you’re also done.

Shanea Leven: Okay. <laugh>, yes.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you Shaneel. This was wonderful. Awesome.

Shanea Leven: And please let us know if if there’s anything that we can do you have access to all of our team and all of the people in the community to be able to help you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right, thank you ladies. Bye. Bye.

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Angie Chang: We are here with Arathi Mani, who’s an engineering manager at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. She works in the science division. I’m sure she’ll go tell you all about herself. I’m gonna just hand the mic over to her and say, welcome Arathi!

Arathi Mani: Well, thank you so much. I’m really excited to, to be here today. My name is Arathi. I am an engineering manager at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation, and I’m excited to talk to you today a little bit about how we build multidisciplinary teams at CZI. Before I start, I just wanted to say please pop your questions, comments into the chat, into the Q&A. I’d love to kind of get that feedback. I won’t be able to quite see the questions with the wave my setup is, but I’m going to try to end a little bit early and then get to all of the questions at the end. Please, love an interactive session. I’m kind of sad that I can’t see all of you, so please go ahead and, you know, use the chat, use the Q&A.

Arathi Mani: All right. A little bit about myself and my team. I’ve been at CZI for a little over four years. I started out as a software engineer and then transitioned into engineering management, and I lead the single cell engineering team. I’ll try to make sure I get to all of the jargon, but at a very high level, single cell biology is the study and analysis of genomics, which is comes from DNA proteomics, which comes from proteins and transcriptomics, which comes from RNA at the individual cell level. And right now our focus is primarily on transcriptomics, which is the study of RNA.

Arathi Mani: Before coming to CZI, I didn’t know a lick of biology. My background is in computer science through and through. And so, you know, anytime I talk about science today, I really have to thank my, my team for being patient with me with teaching me so much about cellular biology. I just wanted to share a few photos of my team. We actually just came back from a week in San Francisco. Our team is actually primarily remote, half on the west coast, half on the east coast. And it comprised of many, many different disciplines. We have folks who have a PhD in molecular biology, people who have a background in physics, folks like me who come from a computer science background, and we come together to try and build and bring together science and technology in a way that really accelerates science forward. I’m going to talk a little bit about our mission and vision, just as a backdrop to have as a to have as a backdrop for all the conversations forward. CZI’s science mission is to cure, manage, and prevent all disease by the end of the century.

Arathi Mani: We are very ambitious. One of the things I love about CZI is we’re doing something a little bit unusual by pairing together science and technology. A lot of groups in the science world are primarily kind of academic labs, or they might be part of the biotech industry which, which tend to be for profit. And the cool thing about where I work about the CZI Foundation is that we are a non-profit foundation. All of the software that we build is really focused on trying to accelerate the cutting edge work that a lot of the academic labs are doing, where technology can really help make that go faster, make their workflows go faster, and we build everything as open source software. We don’t sell it or anything like that. Iit makes for a really unique organization with a diverse set of folks who are trying to all kind of push this vision forward.

Arathi Mani: The single cell mission is to create knowledge about what are the mechanisms at the individual cell level that cause human disease. And then by making that knowledge accessible and available for all scientists to then accelerate the generative generation of curative treatments. Our vision is to create a reference of human biology. Our goal is to try and sequence all of the different cell types in the human body and make that data accessible for anyone to use. And then also pair it with visualization tools to enable, you know, biologists and physicians who may not know how to work with big data to be able to quickly get insights out of different cell types and to understand the cause of each disease. We have a very kind of big mission and vision, very much rooted in the science.

Arathi Mani: We do have a multidisciplinary team to try and push this forward. I’m actually going to just jump to the punchline of this entire presentation because I want you to have this this notion in your head as you’re listening to me speak. But I think the key thing about what makes for a successful multidisciplinary team is all about empathy. It’s this idea that if you try to understand where other people are coming from, to try to understand their culture, to understand their background a little bit and walk a mile in their shoes if every person on your team does that, it’s what creates cohesion. It’s what creates a better environment from which you can have discussions and make decisions and really push push something forward and create something that is, you know, bigger than the sum of its parts.

Arathi Mani: I hope you keep this in mind as I continue to talk throughout this presentation. I wanna talk a little bit about the challenges first. I know that not everyone here is working in a very science focused domain. But I do think probably all of you all have been working with at least one individual that comes from a different background than you. It could be as simple as just engineering and product management or engineering and design or, you know, any kind of combination. I hope you kind of get a little bit out of this presentation, even if the scope of the multidisciplinary work isn’t as broad as it is at CZI in order to achieve our mission for every single project we may have individual that come from upwards of five specialties.

Arathi Mani: They could come from engineering, product management, user experience research, product design, computational biology product analytics, so many different specialties that are all involved into making one project successful I kind of see three different challenges that can manifest. One is that each specialty can come from can have a different sense of what is important to them. What are their culture and values? And they may not recognize what that other specialties culture or values might be. There might be just like general lack of awareness about what the different, what the differences are.

Arathi Mani: The second thing is around language barriers that can result in miscommunication. As somebody coming from tech, I think I often will accidentally use a lot of tech jargon forgetting that not everyone in the room might necessarily know what I’m talking about. I definitely felt like that when I first joined CZI. And, you know, a word like transcriptomics, I would sit there and be like, I don’t know what that means. You know, it happens very often where you sit in a room and somebody’s speaking and you don’t quite understand exactly what they’ve said because we’re so used to using our own jargon.

Arathi Mani: And then the last little bit is that the responsibilities at the intersection of the specialties can be a little bit murky. When specialties need to collaborate very, very closely together, it can be sometimes a little bit difficult to understand who does what. And I’m gonna spend just a couple of minutes going through a specific example, kind of demonstrating two ways that building this particular tool where we had some of those challenges. I’m gonna switch over to sharing another tab, which I hope you all can see.

Arathi Mani: This is a tool that enables folks to to understand what are the cell types in any tissue, and what are the genes that make that cell type unique?

Arathi Mani: In the spirit of International Women’s Day, let’s pick a very cool tissue – the uterus! You can see here all of the different cell types in the uterus. Uterus is also an incredibly cool muscle. That’s what enables it to expand from the size of a lemon to the size of a watermelon. And I’m gonna add all of the marker genes to the plot.

Arathi Mani: Marker genes are genes that are specifically unique to that particular cell type, which in this case I picked a muscle cell. You can see a plot rendered here, and if you’re a scientist, you can start to understand, ah, these genes are specifically unique.

Arathi Mani: There are certain genes that, that may not be unique or are prevalent in other cell types. Some of the challenges in getting this tool out the door. One thing was figuring out the algorithm to actually compute this.

Arathi Mani: We had a computational biologist who went out into the field, did some literature research to understand what the algorithm should be. Ultimately it was a software engineer who implemented it. There was a kind of a discussion about like, who owns this algorithm moving forward? Who owns the the writing of it, but then the long-term maintenance of it like how does that exactly work? And even trying to figure out who writes the first draft of the algorithm was a point of discussion.

Arathi Mani: Another kind of discussion that happened is, when was this good enough to ship? When was it good enough to, you know, remove the feature flag and make it available for all scientists to use? We had very different perspectives from our computational biology folks saying, oh, we need to kind of validate this against scientific literature to make sure we’re not accidentally you know, making bad science available.

Arathi Mani: We had product managers who are kind of in the middle saying, we should validate it for, you know, certain popular cell types, but don’t need to do it kind of comprehensively for every single one. And then you had engineers who were like, well, the unit test passed the smoke test pass. We’re good to go and let’s ship it. We had a very, very different you know, theories on when this was good enough to ship. All right.

Arathi Mani: Going back to the presentation – so how do we get over this? I think, you know, number one thing is culture building. There are different aspects of culture building. One of the things I really love about CZI is the clarity in our unifying mission and vision. I think having that vision and mission is what sets the groundwork to have productive disagreements, because it kind of gives the team confidence that everyone in the room has the why behind their work.

Arathi Mani: As a leader, if are in the position of being a leader, but even if you are if you’re not, you want to be able to repeat and re-articulate this mission as as often as possible and make sure that everyone really understands it. If you have the same why, that’s your common framework, and you have a, you know, a baseline.

Arathi Mani: Establishing a strategy is the kind of second thing. A strategy should be clear, easy to understand. I think at the start of developing that strategy, you should make sure you have generative conversations where people have a voice and have an input into the strategy. And I think it should happen across all different levels. And then ultimately, when that decision is made on what the strategy is, it’s okay to say like, not everyone not everyone may agree with the approach, but it is important that people disagree and commit. And it kind of goes back to setting that groundwork so that if people understand the why and what our approach is going to be, then you have at least a baseline from which you all can start discussion.

Arathi Mani: And then the last thing is around team values. Establishing and intentionally establishing team values is incredibly important. It helps keep everyone on the same page in terms of how we wanna work and what do we care about the things we build. The conversation about what is good enough to ship was a great conversation to have. And out of that came kind of a set of values from which other projects can use to say, ah, like, this team did it, you know, establish this particular values for this set of values for what is good enough to ship. We can kind of borrow that and move that forward for future projects.

Arathi Mani: The next thing is around expectation management. It is really important to spend the time to kind of define roles and responsibilities. And then in this kind of remote working environment, documenting them is, is really important to kind of alleviate any issues around miscommunication. And then even once you have that at a high level, establishing who does what ahead of a project I is really important. The conversations around who develops the algorithm and who does the maintenance of it was very productive to have, even if we had it a little bit later in that project, once we actually stumbled across that that, that blocker, once you have that and documenting it, people are on the same page that can really help in, in fostering a positive team culture. And then if you’re not sure who should do it, I really think that people should feel empowered to try it themselves and really feel ownership over the, over the project that they’re do, they’re they’re working on.

Arathi Mani: And that kind of goes to the punchline of, once you’ve actually established all of these roles and responsibilities and who’s doing what, then find opportunities to cross the lines and break the rules. You know, be thoughtful about how the way, the way that you do it you know, you should have the conversations with, with folks from other disciplines. But it’s a great way to build empathy and to understand the culture and the perspective of somebody else by kind of stepping over the line a little bit. And for example, in this case, having a software engineer develop an algorithm or implement an algorithm that is from scientific literature. And then the last thing I wanna talk about is communication. And this is kind of, I’m gonna talk about things that are a little bit very much tactical here. One thing that we did at CZI recently is delete all Slack channels that were created for specific specialties and only have Slack channels that are for whole projects or whole teams.

Arathi Mani: The reason that we did that is that I really believe that you can create and really foster cross pollination and the sharing of ideas. We had a Slack channel previously just for computational biology where they were sharing papers, but now it goes into a broader team channel where, you know, folk engineers and product managers and designers all have the opportunity to see what papers, what scientific papers a computational biologist thought were interesting, and make an attempt to read it. And then, you know, in my role as an engineering manager, as I develop goals for my reports, creating incentive structures for individuals to learn about other domains is really important. Making sure that it becomes part of their goals, making sure that they have the time to go and try and read a a paper or go and attend scientific conference.

Arathi Mani: I think making space for that is incredibly important. And again, kind of go, goes back to building that sense of empathy. I’m going to try and quickly wrap up here, but I hope you heard this throughout the presentation, this kind of focus on empathy and trying to build that in many different ways as much as possible throughout your entire team. I think that this really is the key aspect of building a successful multidisciplinary team. With that, thank you so much for, for listening. And I’m gonna switch over to try to see what’s in the q and a and chat and answer some questions. I love, I love the comments here. Very, very cool background in clinical data management and program management. That’s, that’s awesome. Well, thank you all so much. It’s, thank you so much for the the interaction. I’m so sorry that I you know, it’s not to face, it’d be so cool, but yeah. Thank you.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Arathi. That was an excellent talk. All right, we’re gonna break now and go to employer booths! We have Autodesk, Cadence, Dematic, United States Digital Service, and CodeSee in employer booths. If you go back to look at the schedule, you can click on the link to go to a booth, or you can go to the navigation to the top and click on employer booths and just find them there. They’ll be there for the next hour till one PM Pacific. And yeah, thank you so much again. All right, see you at one for the keynote. All right, bye.

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• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Amazing. Next session, we see the number of people just increasing and climbing up <laugh> with every nanosecond. I’m not gonna waste any more time. I’m gonna jump right into introducing our next speaker, Alison. Alison is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at DoorDash and founder at Atas Fun, currently at DoorDash Labs. She’s the technical lead of simulation and evaluation and is working to improve autonomy. Alison will be speaking about how she created three different games of different genres and was covered by engagement while on her sabbatical. My goodness. Welcome, Alison. Take it away.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Thanks. Welcome to my talk today. I’m gonna talk about the games that I created during my sabbatical and kind of the, the lessons learned from that. I’d like to start my top with the key takeaways. Here are kind of the takeaways. First is that taking a sabbatical really helps tremendously with burnout. I was very, very lucky to be able to take a sabbatical, and it really helped me a lot there. The other thing is that I learned that developing games can be really, really fun but it can also be a lot of work. And lastly, community building is hard, but it’s important and ultimately very rewarding. First I’ve got to give a quick introduction to myself. So who am I? This is kind of how I usually describe myself.

Allison Liemhetcharat: I’m a proud mom. I’m a roboticist. I’m a software engineer. My education is my background is in robotics. I had a PhD from CMU there, and I’ve been doing software engineering for a number of years now. And if you look at my LinkedIn, you kind of have a look at my career path. Iit looks like a straight line. I think if you look at people’s resumes in general, this is kind of how it looks for people with careers just have one step after another. But, you know, is it really a straight line? I think you know, kind of like what Ola says, I think this, this will all make sense when I’m older.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And the way, the way I think about it is you know, in our life, whether it’s a career or like in general, there’s a lot of twists and turns. But ultimately, it’s how do we want to tell the story? How do we want to plot the line with all the data points all over the place? In the previous slide, you saw a straight line. If you’re interested, I can tell you all the twists and turns in there. But ultimately I just want to say, you know, if, if you feel that you don’t know what direction you’re going, if you feel like it has a lot of twists and turns, I think that happens to everyone. But so, essentially, why did I end up taking a sabbatical? I think one, one of the big reasons I did a sabbatical is that I hadn’t really taken a real gap from work since before my PhD.

Allison Liemhetcharat: The way it happened was that after, after I did my PhD, I started my next, and then after that I’ll take, you know, I start my next one and so on. Maybe there was like a week or two in between, but not an actual like, gap to take, to take a real break. So that was one, one of the big reasons I felt like, you know, I really wanted to kind of take a gap. The other thing was COVID-19, so I’m sure everyone was affected by COVID-19. There’s a lot of burnout because of it. This also affected myself and my family a lot. One of the kind of interesting things that happened was I flew back to Singapore. This was early 2020 before, before the vaccines and all that. And at the airport they were doing tests, and I happened to have a fever.

Allison Liemhetcharat: They put me in an ambulance. That’s kind of the picture is, you know, top right there. And then they, they drove me straight to the hospital for like, covid testing and everything. It turned out it was negative, but it was quite an adventure. I actually wrote a Medium article about, about the whole process. But, you know, COVID-19 was, was a big thing, a lot of stress, so I needed to kind of take a break from it. The other thing was that I was working for a number of years, and the company itself had just been acquired by GoPuff. So I worked at GoPuff for a number of months. We did, you know, handover and all of that, and I kind of felt that now it was a good time to take a break.

Allison Liemhetcharat: That was part of the reason why in terms of sabbatical, it was kind of a good, good spot. I wanted to have more bandwidth for my wife and my daughter. Working, you know, you, you have a little bit of time at the end of the day and our weekends, but not, not that much mental bandwidth. I really wanted to have, have more time for them. And lastly, I’ve always wanted to create games, especially with, with my daughter. She’s, she’s 10 now. And this is, I have a video here that I’m going to show. This is a game that I actually worked on when I was working at, right away. So this is like, I did this in my free time. Then it’s kind of a game a little bit inspired by like Animal Crossing: Harvest Moon and things like that where essentially you, you, you play, you play a character, you can gain relationships, you can do things like harvest minerals built things and all that.

Allison Liemhetcharat: This was kind of the scope of the game that we, we wanted to do. But it turned out that, you know, as, as is the case with a lot of like first time game developers, this is what I learned after the fact. We actually create, create games that have two large of a scope. This was Mystery Queen is kind of the game that I still want to do one day. And my daughter keeps asking me when we’re going to continue working on it. But essentially the scope of the game initially was too big. We never quite finished it, at least, at least right now. So, so then I was like, okay, I’m gonna take a sabbatical, I’m going to, going to do a whole bunch of stuff. But before I started my sabbatical, I had a bunch of thoughts in my mind, right?

Allison Liemhetcharat: One of the big thoughts was, you know, am I going to get bored? Right? What, what I was worried about is, okay, if I, if I gonna take a year, will I get two bored? Will I get easy to work? Cuz I’ve heard stories where people are like, you know, after a while they’re like, oh no, I don’t know what to do. Maybe I should just go back to work, and things like that. That was something that I wanted to figure out if that would happen to me. The other thing was, would I get too anxious about not earning income? Remember I said like, since, you know, before my PhD I’ve been working without, without a big gap. This was the first time that I’m going to have like a, a big gap and I’ll thinking, you know, is it going to cost any anxiety there?

Allison Liemhetcharat: And lastly a very important question is, if I take this sabbatical, like would I be able to find a job afterwards? I think it, it, I was lucky that I did this sabbatical before all the tech layoffs. At the time the market was still pretty hot, so this turned out to be oka, <laugh>. But, so that was how I thought my sabbatical was, and this is how it actually started. So I mentioned that there was a lot of burnout, right? After, when I started my sabbatical, I actually had a lot of sessions with my therapist and we walk through a whole bunch of work issues.

Allison Liemhetcharat: I want to say, mental health is very, very important. Make sure you prioritize it. And on the right of this slide is a poster that I saw, I think this was taken in Singapore, and I think this is one of the best posters I’ve seen about mental health. And it’s really, really good.

Allison Liemhetcharat: When I talked through a lot of the issues with my therapist, I think one of the big one of the big pieces of advice she gave me, with regards to my sabbatical, was to actually write a letter to myself, about why I took the sabbatical. And you know, when, when she told me to do it, I was like, why bother to do this? I know why I’m doing it. But in hindsight, it was great advice because during the course of my sabbatical, I actually asked myself multiple times things, why did I take the sabbatical?

Allison Liemhetcharat: Maybe I should have just continued working things like that. And then I would read the letter to myself and like, yep, you know taking a sabbatical was the right thing to do. You know, if you ever take a sabbatical, I said, I’d highly suggest writing a letter to yourself.

Allison Liemhetcharat: The other piece of advice that she gave me was to actually have a bunch of savings, move it, check more money from savings to checking monthly to simulate a salary coming in. Even if all you do is after that, after it comes in, you can move back to savings. And when, when she told me this again, I was like, why? You know, ultimately I’m just moving money from one account to another account. And then back again, like, why, why bother? Right?

Allison Liemhetcharat: She told me that it makes a difference mentally to feel that you’re still getting some sort of income. And it does work, surprisingly. This is something that you can consider doing it if you ever want to consider doing a sabbatical. But overall, what I want to say is mental health is really, really important. So you do prioritize that. Okay? Onto the games that I created. I mentioned Mystery Queen just now where it was a game that ended up scoping a bit too large.

Allison Liemhetcharat: I wanted to create my first kind of actual game, kind of a full fledged like game. And I called it, You Are What You Eat. And the idea is that I wanted to do something simple. Something with a very, very small scope that, so I chose to have a game with a single input and is inspired by Ninja, where it was a mobile game that I played on my phone. The concept of the game is pretty straightforward. You can just hit the screen and the jump, sometimes you get a little bit of abilities with this. But the scope of the game was small enough that I could finish the game play through it, improve it, and all of that to finally close the loop of creating, creating a whole game, right?

Allison Liemhetcharat: This was my first full, actual game, and at the time, I also bought myself a Lioness. And if you, if you’re not familiar with the Lioness, it’s a smart vibrator with AI and biofeedback. When I saw the ad for this, the keywords really struck to me, right? Because it’s smart AI and biofeedback. I was like, oh my gosh, this is a robot <laugh>. I got myself one, it’s wonderful for what it does. And what’s, what’s also really nice is that it uses Bluetooth to connect to your phone. Then, I reached out to the Lioness team on LinkedIn and they were really, really helpful. They provided me with the API, so that allowed me to actually connect my team with the Lioness.

Allison Liemhetcharat: What this means is that the Lioness itself has sensors and has vibrators, so I could actually control the control the slime with the Lioness. Here’s a little video of how that works, right? Whenever the slime eats something, the Lioness itself would vibrate. There are different kinds of vibrations. And also, when you squeeze it right, you can control the slime to jump,

Allison Liemhetcharat: Right? If you hear the video a little bit, you can kind of hear the vibrations happening. There are different kinds of vibrations to indicate what’s happening in the game. I realized that from the original game to the Lioness version, you actually had to tweak it to be a little bit slower, because tapping the screen is.. you can do that a lot faster compared to compared to squeezing it. That was how I incorporated the Lioness into You Are What You Eat. That was kind of like the first first game that was was wrapped up with two different versions.

Allison Liemhetcharat: The second game that I wanted to create was called Set Simulator. This was around November 2021. GitHub does a Game Jam I think every year. It’s a month long Game Jam, where essentially at the start of the Game Jam, they gave you a team and for 2021 the team was Bucks. And you, during this one month, you’re supposed to create a game. And then I wanted to create a game with limited scope. So I created You Are What You Eat, which was a small game. And I was like, okay, now that I’ve done that, let’s make a game that’s a little bit bigger. I was like, okay, one month is a lot of def time, so that will allow me to create a a pretty decent game.

Allison Liemhetcharat: How did I pick the game? Essentially I love simulation. If you look at my, like, what I’ve done professionally, I’ve done a whole bunch of simulation and it was near Christmas. I said, okay, let’s put the two things together and create center simulator. And kind of the idea of the game is that Santa Claus is sick during COVID 19. He’s asking for help to help to distribute gifts for Christmas. And in order to do that you can hire different bucks to help you.

Allison Liemhetcharat: There are two different roles. You have preppers that wrap the presents,and movers that deliver the gifts. Each buck has its own statistics in terms of how fast it moves and its capacities. And when you actually hit sorry, when you actually hit play, you can see that the bots kind of move around, move around the world to distribute the gifts. And what’s actually interesting about that it actually uses the OSM Open Street maps for the bots to follow the roads, except the bees that fly directly there.

Allison Liemhetcharat: They have different capabilities as well, so by choosing like which kind of bots you want to hire and all that, you can actually affect your final steps, which they show. The game is kind of an optimization type game if you’re into that kind of things. And it allows you to kind of figure out what is the optimal set of bots that you should hire for, for distributionof presents on Christmas.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And this was Santa Simulator. I created that and this was kind of what my day-to-day looked like during that one month game gym, right? And if, if you look at the, the, the schedule that I have, you’ll start to think, Hmm, this looks like a little bit like a full-time job. And it is, I would say maybe a little bit worse than a full-time job because I was working on Santa Simulator like during like office hours and also at night.

Allison Liemhetcharat: This was, it turned out a little bit worse than, than I taught. My lesson lessons learned from doing Santa Simulator is that a Game Jam is a wonderful experience with a great community. There are a lot of people that are really, really nice. They’re really helpful. We shared our progress. We talked about what we did things like that. It was wonderful.

Allison Liemhetcharat: I really enjoyed the process and the community, but I’ve learned that it’s possible, it’s very, very possible to work too hard even during a sabbatical. And one of the questions I asked myself multiple times during this month was like, why, why does this feel like a full-time job or worse? And, you know, I didn’t really want to, I took a sabbatical to get a break, not to find myself in, in the full-time job, right?

Allison Liemhetcharat: Ultimately I was proud of what I accomplished, but also very, very, very tired. Then what I needed to do was to actually take a break during my sabbatical, which is kind of funny in hindsight. It happened that my mom came to visit the States for three months cuz I was on my sabbatical and I said, you know, it’s a perfect time to come visit. We decided to go on a long road trip so you can kind of have a look at our path that we did for winter break. My daughter was off school, so we did this for long road trip. That was wonderful. I also took the time to play some video games that had on my list for for ages. I played like Horizon Zero Down Wonderful Game and a bunch of other games as well.

Allison Liemhetcharat: This break during my sabbatical was wonderful. I enjoyed it and it felt like an actual holiday at this point, right? Back to the takeaway. I’ve talked about those two and now, we’ll, we’ll talk about the, the last point about community building. I mentioned You Are What You Eat earlier, I created the game, but at that point around when I started on Santa Simulator, I finished the game, but I hadn’t actually launched it yet. And the reason why I didn’t like actually launch it was that launching a game on the mobile app stores was a little tricky. I wanted to set up LLC and, and all the kind of stuff, and there’s a lot of process involved.

Allison Liemhetcharat: In October, 2021, Liz who is the CEO of Lioness, actually reached out to her journalist contacts about the game, and I was interviewed by Cherlynn Low at Engadget in December. This was, this was a great experience. You know, she talked, she asked me about what the game was about you know, how, how do you get in touch with it? How do you play and, and things like that. If you’re interested, you can have a look at the article, it was published in January 2022.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And once she published this video, my YouTube video, the one that you saw just now, the views actually spiked up by 10,000. I’m not a like social media person, so 10,000 views to me is, is a, a ton <laugh>. Usually my videos that I post on YouTube get like, if I get a hundred views, I’m pretty happy. So 10,000 was awesome and till today it hit like 19,000. That’s pretty cool. The article itself created a whole lot of interest in the game and all that. To me, that was wonderful. And once the the game was on the app stores and people started downloading it, I had people reach out to me with like what they thought about the game and things like that. It was a wonderful experience.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And then now that I’ve done two games, I was like, okay, there’s still, there’s still time in my sabbatical. Let’s, let’s do a third game, right? One of the key things I wanted to, to do was to actually unconsciously decide not to overwork <laugh>. Santa Simulator was where I worked too hard. This time I was saying, okay, let’s do game number three but make sure that, you know, I actually spend more time with my wife and my daughter. What I did was I started following some really nice to streamers, so shout out to Treecle and Cptn_Sumi. I have their, their portraits over there. The two of them are really, really nice people and they have very, very nice communities.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Twitch was a really, really fun way for me to develop Feisty Fauna. I could do it at a leisure pace, I could get to know the community and, and so on. And both Treecle and Cptn_Sumi have been great at promoting the game.

Allison Liemhetcharat: If you’re wondering what Feisty Fauna is, it’s kind of a casual road light, like a Vampire Survivors, but like a very, very cute version. This is like the trailer that I have. If you’re interested, the game is on Steam, the demo is available for download, so you can give it a try.

Allison Liemhetcharat: And one cool fact about about the video that I just saw is that my daughter, who’s been involved in doing all the games that I showed you. She did a whole bunch of sound effects for this game as well. For example, when the Fox jumping, that’s my daughter, the Cats meowing and all, that is also my daughter. I usually I call her the creative director for the games because she’s the one that comes up with most of the cool ideas that we have in the game itself. And she’s great at finding bugs. I’ll create a version and I’ll be like, okay, you know, come play the game.

Allison Liemhetcharat: She’ll try it, and then she’ll, she’ll immediately find a bunch of bugs for me to fix. She’s really great at that, so I created Feisty for now, or at least part of it, and I wanted to be able to publicize this. And what I did initially was to use Twitter to post about the progress of Fif Fauna. The main audience was fellow game developers, which is a great community. But not quite the target audience. I heard that TikTok was a great place to do publicity. I posted a bunch of videos, not, I know, haven’t had like a great hit yet. Maybe I haven’t got the formula right or something.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Twitch has been wonderful. I talked about the streamers and the other players and a bunch of people who’ve played it have been, have been really, really very engaged. They reach out to me with the comments and let me know how they feel about the game, and all of that. And one of the things I added was to actually add Twitch integration to the game. This allows like streamers to play the game and their viewers to play along. In the next video you’ll see a whole bunch of creatures on the screen. All of them have name plates above their heads, and those are players that that joined in. This is kind of a short clip about that. This is bullet house, like Vampire Survivor, that sort of thing. This is like that. And I would not normally play these sorts of games, but this is a ridiculously cute version. It is so full of cuteness, it almost hurts how cute it is. Look, look at it. 

Allison Liemhetcharat: Alright, so, so that’s, that’s trickle off playing, playing on stream. And you know, she’s been wonderful and it, it is really fun to watch her players actually get engaged with the game as well. The other thing was to participate in steam festivals. Like I created a Halloween level for the Steam scare fest, and that was also a great way to publicize the game. There was like most of my sabbatical and in summer that’s kind of where I paused work on fight and started talking to companies to find my next role. And eventually I joined DoorDash Labs. If interested, join us, we are hiring my team and as well as other teams. Reach out if you’re interested. What I found is that, now that I’m working at a full-time job again doing, working on the game in my free time is actually really, really hard.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Progress has been slow, but, but very, very rewarding. Overall, here are the kind of the lessons learned from my sabbatical. You know, I started wondering whether I would get bought. It turns out that, you know, I realized I wouldn’t get bought. In fact, I might get even, I might even get too busy. And the next lesson is don’t get too busy <laugh>, cuz then, you know, it’s not quite a break if, if that happens. And family time is precious, kids grow up very, very quickly.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Iif you have kids and try to involve them in your interests if possible. These are pictures of my daughter over the years. We had her like play with robots from, from a young age. I have a video that I’m going to show where if you’re familiar with like machine learning and reinforcement learning, this is where you try to give rewards when something or someone does the right thing, positive reinforcement. As background, my daughter came from daycare one day and she, wherever we asked her anything about colors, she would say green. And we were like, okay, she’s learned to associate the word green with the word color with green. We need to teach her other colors. This is what we did.

Person In The Video: What color is the mango? Yellow? What color is the mango? What color is the Ingle? Yellow? What color is this? Is this green <laugh>?

Allison Liemhetcharat: Right? By doing that, my daughter learned to say yellow. It turns out that over training is also possible in human. After the exercise, she associated the word color with yellow. We had to do a whole bunch of other examples to say like, there are other colors in the world too. With that I’m ending my talk.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Thank you for listening. Here are some of my links. The first one is my personal web pitch. And the second one, Atas Fun, is where I have links to, to the different games. Thank you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much. My goodness personally, your daughter is so cute. And secondly, you have so many comments, people praising your game and obviously your talk in, in, in general. Thank you for your time. This was wonderful.

Allison Liemhetcharat: Thank you.

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Angie Chang: We have our keynote speaker, Elena Ringseis, who will be talking to us about design ops, and she’s a leader in the field, and I’m gonna just hand her the mic so she can tell us all about it. Welcome, Elena.

Elena Ringseis: Hi, everybody. My name is Elena Ringseis, and I’m happy to share that it is my very first time speaking at a conference right now, so I’m super excited. And I’m also really grateful to all of you for being here, so hopefully you can see my slides. I wanna today I’m gonna talk about creating a strong team culture in a hybrid environment. But before I start, I wanna say a little bit about what I do. It’s design operations. It’s program management for UX design and research. And it’s really focused on creating process and systems that allow designers and researchers to focus on their work and not worry about how to, how to get things done, or how to get from point A to point B. And today I’m gonna share five examples of building community on a team.

Elena Ringseis: The point is for you guys to steal these ideas and use them on your own teams. To that end, I’ve, I’ve created a five star rating system, and at the end of each little story I give, give my take on whether it was worth, whether the impact it had was worth the effort that it took. Look for that at the end of each, at the end of each little section. Let me start with some context. At the end, towards the end of 2021, my org was facing similar challenges to probably what a lot of you were facing on your teams, which was that we had been a distributed team then we were fully remote, and then now we were navigating how to be hybrid. And all of the nuances that that entailed. There had also been lots of changes in leadership at our org level and at the company level.

Elena Ringseis: We also had a variety of types of relationships. Some of us had worked together in pre pandemic, some had joined during the remote years, so there was just a wide variety of how we, how we knew each other. We took our biannual company culture survey in October and then received our org scores. And what we found was that we were siloed and we, people were not feeling like their contributions were recognized or appreciated. We were just like it, 65 people. We weren’t a cohesive team. And this was especially true for folks who had been with the company for only one or two years, which maps back to 2020 and 2021, which were super hard <laugh>. The design ops team, which consisted of me, another program manager, and our manager, the director of design operations, decided to do a listening tour.

Elena Ringseis: And this was to give us more more of the why behind the scores. We have the scores, but we needed to understand what the sentiment was what what was behind those numbers so that we could make sure that what we were doing from an ops perspective was spent in the right areas. What did it look like? It was not complicated. Two and a half weeks. We intentionally invited people that had been with the org for one to two years, but we also made sure there was folks invited from a broad range of tenure. We used small groups and did six sessions. And an important piece here is that we did separate sessions for individual contributors and managers. We really wanted to create a space that was safe, that people could speak openly and, and blatantly if needed.

Elena Ringseis: We wanted to recognize that that can’t happen if your managers there. So, and for managers, they needed to just be with other managers because they have a unique place in the org and they need their own space as well. It was re really well received, and we even got feedback that just by having the listening tour, it made people feel better about being with the company and made them feel seen and heard. And so we hadn’t even done anything with the findings and we had already helped. That felt really good. Speaking of findings, our analysis found four different seams. How work gets done, how people grow, a sense of ownership of their work, and how people interact with each other. These four themes influence the operations roadmap for the year. But today I’m just gonna talk about the relationships theme.

Elena Ringseis: I created a couple of guiding principles for myself when thinking about like, what was I gonna be doing to focus on that relationship bucket build community across teams, celebrate great work already being done, and inspire new relationships. These were my objectives and guiding light through the year. Let’s look at this timeline. This is what the year looked like for the examples I’m gonna share today. We started the year with the listening tour in March. We awarded our first design award in April. I launched the Operations Digest in July. I launched the Shining Examples Library, and in September we had our first design party day. So let’s get started.

Elena Ringseis: Let’s start with the design award. This, this connects directly back to that listening tour theme of relationships. We heard that people needed to be recognized and appreciated. And so I created an award program that was fairly straightforward, a monthly award. Anyone can nominate anyone. It didn’t matter what role you played in the org. The recipient received the award at our monthly All hands and it celebrated our company values as well as a, a sixth value that we added ourselves, which is empathy. Empathy is what UX design and research bring to our products, and it’s also what that org brings to a company. We felt like it was really appropriate to celebrate empathy. The other piece of this is that anybody nominated got like a kudos email to their manager and their skip level managers and directors. It had the text of the nomination in it, that way there was like no question that we were providing visibility of what that person contributed.

Elena Ringseis: It was a success. We had 70% participation in the first nine months more at this point, it’s been going for a year over 131 nominations to date, 47 unique nominees, 11 average nominations a month. And we’ve awarded about $12,000 in cash bonuses to speak about that one point a little bit more. Initially, we offered like a very modest amount of money to donate to the charity of your choice, because it was something that we could do from our own budget. Within like two months, our VP was so impressed with the, with the award program that he shared it with hr, who also felt like it was like embodied what the company wanted folks to be doing. And we were leveled up to be able to offer a really significant cash, cash bonus, which just felt, felt great.

Elena Ringseis: We were so glad to be putting some weight behind recognizing people for what they were doing. It of course, increased visibility of individual contributions to leadership and to, you know, across their, their peers as well. It also gave us something to celebrate as a whole org. It really gave us tangible wins that we could be proud of, even if it was somebody that we didn’t work with day to day. And the last point is good vibes. It feels really good to write something genuine that you appreciate about your coworker. It feels good to read those things about yourself. It really shifted the morale and the general feeling of the team right away. Was it worth it? I’m gonna give it four stars because it was, it’s a medium effort. It’s ongoing recurs every month, so there’s logistics that need to be taken care of on a regular cadence, but it was a big impact.

Elena Ringseis: It really, really, again, like lifted up the vibe on the team Operations Digest. Let’s talk about this next. Initially incidentally, this one wasn’t even meant to address the relationship theme from the listening tour. Just felt like an easy way to keep people informed. But what I found was that it was a really important piece of the, of the puzzle for our team culture. What it was, was a twice weekly slack post to like our all design channel, and it highlighted stuff that was happening in our org and, you know, key company announcements and activities.

Elena Ringseis: I also launched a shared Google calendar so you could subscribe to the calendar and get everything on your calendar that was in the update. But what I found after a couple months was that it, it really again, contributed to that sense of belonging to something larger than your immediate team. It encouraged new connections, like people reacting or commenting on those posts, interacting with people that they don’t talk to each day. It brought, it brought visibility to what was going on in our org and to show that it’s more than just the meetings on your calendar.

Elena Ringseis: You are part of a vibrant organization and company where there’s a lot going on. You know, like all of the great programs that ERGs host wellness programs put on through, you know, our people partners. So really just bringing awareness to that life and vibrancy that was already there to help people feel like they were part of more than just their team. And then this one is my favorite. It amplified these extra activities that ICs were doing. So a lot of people were, for example, hosting a monthly gathering about data visualization or a deep dive into a certain product. And this is a time an individual is acting as an SME and taking leadership and, and taking initiative. And so this gave visibility to leadership that those individuals were really taking that, that extra step. Was it worth it? Yes, definitely. It was a Slack post, so it was fun to pick out emojis and it was not a heavy lift at all.

Elena Ringseis: Okay. Shining Examples Library. This was a way to not just recognize individuals, but also teams for innovation and for problem solving. It came out of like an operations needs assessment that I did. I ended up uncovering all these great resources and tools that individual teams had made. It seemed obvious to collect them all, put them in a showcase on Confluence where everyone could access them, try them out, and adapt them for their own team. One note, it’s called Shining Examples because it’s not called best practices because it was only one team doing each thing. So we thought we’ll share them all, encourage everyone to use each other’s solutions, and then maybe we’ll come up with some best practices that we can standardize for our org.

Elena Ringseis: The result there was, there’s currently over 20 examples in the library. 10 unique views per month is great for any Confluence page, I think. It’s really about amplifying ideas that are working for some to everyone. It’s a benefit of being part of a larger team, so like another way to bring us together part of something greater than our individual teams. It also gave us pride in homegrown solutions. These were resources and tools that were made within the constraints and nuances of our company. They have a, a good chance of succeeding on another team. And so it’s nice to be able to look at home first before you scour the internet for some something to help you with your problem. Was it worth the effort? This one gets three stars in the right situation. I think this is a great idea. I had already uncovered all of those tools through the assessment that I did. I think it could be a much heavier lift if you had to find all of those examples yourself. So that’s what gets three stars, but it really, it still had a big impact.

Elena Ringseis: Okay, we made it to design party day. These are actual photos from the day. It was really, really great. Hopefully some of these folks are even watching this presentation right now. This was an, an investment in our relationships aligning directly back to that relationships theme. It was a full day dedicated to team building. The first part was virtual. We got together, we split everyone into like mixed up teams. We competed in like Olympic style events such as geo guesser or there was like a hex number guessing game, and then teams collected points and, and got gold, silver, bronze at the end. And the second part of the day was local parties. We organized simultaneous local activities for folks that were comfortable getting together in person. Some of the examples were one team did mini-golf. A team did a pottery class.

Elena Ringseis: There was a catered picnic at at the beach and, and one team did go-karting. So it was really across the board. And there were also activities for folks that were remote or, or didn’t want to get together in person. They had their own second part of the day as well, we had 85% in-person participation at the local parties. That was really, really great. We celebrated in five locations. And we had 15 people from within the org help coordinate it. With the virtual part. The every local party had like two individual contributors helping to coordinate it all and figure out budget, et cetera. And then of course, memories upon memories were made that day.

Elena Ringseis: Some of the impact it had was that it gave us a chance, again, to work outside of our immediate teams. Whether, whether you were just participating or you were one of the coordinators, it gave us a chance to meet our coworkers in person for the first time or first time in a long time. And it overall, it strengthened our relationships hands down. Even for the folks that, you know, weren’t able to be in the in-person get togethers, we tried to make sure that there was geographically friendly activities for everyone. It really was an investment in the relationships that we thought it would be. And for those of us that did see each other in person, it was one of the huge perks was that it wasn’t on Zoom.

Elena Ringseis: Was it worth the effort? I gave this four. It was a really heavy lift, but it had a huge impact. There was multiple coordinators, there was budget approval, there was, you know, planning way ahead so that our partners knew we wouldn’t be working that day. But again, it, it had a lasting impact that I think folks really, really valued. Back to the timeline. In October, 2022, we took the survey again and our scores had increased by 28%. This was really encouraging and the vibe on the team, you could tell that it was a much closer knit team.

Elena Ringseis: I think I’m getting close to time. I wanted to share, you know, takeaways for you all. But then I, was thinking, okay, what did I take away from, from being part of those initiatives?

Elena Ringseis: A little listening goes a long way. The listening tour showed that we were invested, made a big impact and was pretty lightweight. Strengthening the relationships doesn’t have to be hard. All of these things kind of came out of what we were already doing. Felt like fitting puzzle pieces together and they, each one didn’t seem like a huge undertaking.

Elena Ringseis: And lastly, community happens in small gestures too. The Operations Digest it, it took me a couple months, but I realized that it was my voice in putting together those updates and my creative emoji choices. Of course, that gave people a gathering space and a place to connect, to use Erica Pisani’s term, it was “glue work”.

Elena Ringseis: These are a couple more practices. I know, Angie, you’re here. Leverage discussion prompts in different ways and try to meet live or in person wherever you can. Take a screenshot of this, connect with me. Let me know how some of these ideas worked on your teams. And then I’m gonna be at the program management table in the lounge right after this. Thank you all so much for being here.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Elena.

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: She’s a Senior Director of Developer Experiences within the product organization at PayPal. Before PayPal, she was a strategic technical partner to eBay’s chief architect and VP of Developer Ecosystem. She has a master’s in public policy and a business degree in information technology. Mudita is passionate about empowering customers by deploying initiatives for financial literacy and enablement. We’re so excited to welcome you Mudita. Thank you

Mudita Tiwari: Thank you so much for making time to attend this session today. It’s truly a great honor to be doing this during the International Women’s Day Week. To all the wonderful people who are joining, please make sure to say a big thanks or a pat on the back to the wonderful women in your life who support you and are great advocates for you. So with that I wanted to talk a little bit today about how do we think about developer-centric design and technical approaches when we build out a solution for this audience.

Mudita Tiwari: The way I’ve structured the discussion is to ensure that we get through the persona who is a developer how do developers typically interact with systems, and how do we really champion a developer when we build out solutions that are specific to this technical audience. Please throw in the chat in case you’re not able to hear me because I’m not able to get the response back. Or if you have any questions, please make sure to put them on the chat as well. This session goes for about 20 minutes. I’ll try to end within 15 minutes or so so that we can get some questions at the end as well. Let me move to the next screen.

Mudita Tiwari: A warm welcome again wanted to share just on this wonderful week, wonderful occasion. A couple of things that I’m admiring about women women that I look up to. There’s definitely a, a tech journalist, I’m a big fan of these days. Kara Swisher who’s been really smart about the, the changes that are happening in the tech industry. And I follow her podcast, so quite interested in what she has to sa that is she’s definitely a person I wanna call out.

Mudita Tiwari: And then of course, a big fan of Eleanor Roosevelt. And a quote from her that always inspires me, but certainly inspire me in these days is the future belongs to those who have those who believe in the beauty of their dreams, which is always true, right? I mean, there’s something beautiful about things that we build and things we aspire for, and absolutely fighting for that future and believing in that future is something that we dearly hold hold to our hearts. Last but not the least, I read a book very recently. It was recommended by my mentor who’s a woman. It’s called power and Why Some have it and others don’t. It was a very different way of thinking about power dynamics and how to think about your your life as a leader. Kn case you’re looking for something fun to read, this might be a good easy read and a book that you might enjoy.

Mudita Tiwari: With that, let’s get into the details of the presentation. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the developer persona. Oftentimes we think of developers and as engineers or, or folks who are coding actively working on technological pursuits. And that is actually the right framework and the right way of thinking about developers. But essentially the role of a developer and what a developer does, has truly expanded, especially since Covid. As you know, Covid resulted in mass digitization and essentially that led to quite a bit to scarcity of developers. But at the same time, also their influence in deciding the technical solutions for businesses increased quite a bit. Folks who are developers know that, you know, you are prized possession by by businesses, so certainly developers who who identify themselves with technologies, language, languages or specialties, also often take pride in self-sufficiency.

Mudita Tiwari: There’s a lot of pride in learning and developing and coaching themselves as they, as they build out solutions. And in order to self-service, of course, then developers need systems that are reliable, performant systems that can be learned, systems that you can scale your technical solutions with. That’s typically what we think about when we think about the developer. And in some studies we’ve found that over 35 million folks, a across the world, identify themselves with developers. And I bet the number is actually much higher because there’s this category of business developers, folks who don’t do coding and development as a full-time gig, but certainly are savvy with technology and are often putting out technical solutions for their own needs or the business needs. That’s the developer persona. And then I just wanted to quickly touch on developer trends. The image on the right that you see was developed with with Midjourney AI.

Mudita Tiwari:  Fun fact. I had a lot of fun. I’m having a lot of fun playing with some of the AI tools, but certainly that is the trend we’ll talk about in today’s discussion. We talked about the need and the scarcity of developers. Ergo, the importance of developer productivity is equally important, and making sure businesses build tools, platforms that can increase developer productivity is increasingly seen as an important area. In addition, developers themselves think that their role and their influence in business decision making is growing and will continue to grow. And the last two points, point number four and five are really interesting. Low-code technologies that you can think about, modular technologies that can be assembled together and then customized to scale are really where the future is going. And in addition, you must have heard everything I don’t need to repeat in this intelligent forum of the impact of ai.

Mudita Tiwari: And so certainly everybody’s thinking about how to embed AI technologies in the development lifecycle and what that means for the next generation of developers. Those are roughly the trends that we are seeing in the market. And I’ve attached some reports as well that you can Google and, and look up. But certainly Gartner and Forester talk a lot about these trends in the market. All right, so even if we’re, we are building for a technical audience, the fundamentals of product design, product development, lifecycle don’t change. Cross-functional collaboration with your researchers, with designers who are thinking about the segment and the audience with your engineering partners does not change. Understanding what your customers want or your developers want does not change. You need to make sure you understand the voice of the developer, their technical needs and how they’re thinking about the lifecycle is still important.

Mudita Tiwari: And then of course, product development is never a linear journey. You learn a little bit, you do early MVPs, you put out a product in the market, you learn from the market, you bring back the learnings, and the product should essentially keep its rating. That’s truly, you know, the product journey that we go on, which does not change. So the fundamentals are still there. However, what I wanted to do today is just talk about the developer’s journey as a hero’s journey. We hear about the hero’s journey. When we listen to Marvel comics, we watch Marvel movies. Think about the developer’s journey in your organization or an organization that’s that’s, that’s part of another industry to be very similar. Typically, a developer is working on a business problem. They’re trying to understand what is it that the business wants from me, and that’s what they’re trying to solve for.

Mudita Tiwari: They may start an early journey by putting together a prototype, a proof of concept, and then start aligning with their adjacent teams in order to validate their assumptions, their buildouts, their early proof of concepts and prototypes. At some point, there is a decision that is made in the journey about whether the, the ecosystem can scale or not, whether it’s a viable product or not. And this part of the journey is very important. That’s the pinnacle of the hero’s journey, getting the sponsorship from the right leaders and making sure your product is set up to scale. This is an area where we see a lot of products needing that brute force, essentially that tenacity commitment to communication community, commitment to the art of telling the story about your product to the right stakeholders and leaders, and making sure that you take your product on a movement by through those cross-functional partnerships that you’ve been thinking about from the early get-go.

Mudita Tiwari: And then, of course, should everything fall in place, and usually it doesn’t. There is an iteration that we go through anytime we put a product, there will be a successful implementation or there will be an implementation in the market. And the journey kind of repeats itself again and again because there is no such thing as putting out a product and being done. The second course of the journey starts when we scale the product or expand the product based on geos or on segments that we have not reached before. If you think about a, when, when a developer is going on a journey, they’re doing the same thing. They’re trying to solve a business problem based on the company that they’re serving, based on the merchant they’re serving, based on the business they’re serving, they’re aligning with their stakeholders. They’re trying to get spon sponsorship from their leadership teams.

Mudita Tiwari: They’re building out the solution and then putting it out in the market, very similar to how we think as in-house developers, in-house engineers, there’s a parallel story happening for people who are consuming your product, integrating your product, and taking it to the market. Then let’s talk a little bit about when you design for a technical audience, what are the best practices that you should use? Certainly that outside in approach, walking a mile in your developer’s shoes is critical. And that brings us to the point of customer centricity. Reliance on your UX research team can actually be hugely advantageous, but in case you do not have the right resources, they have many ways to talk to your customer and making sure you always are listening to what the market is saying. This can be done through social channels. This can be done through actually just having some surveys run.

Mudita Tiwari: This can be done by running large scale studies or market research as well, and understanding what are we baselining against, where do we wanna go and how do we see the delta of our product and how do we slowly get there? There’s another huge value add statement for for developers when we build for our technical audience, which we, we have to think about how a technical audience’s journey fits in the larger business ecosystem. Let me take an example from PayPal. Folks come to PayPal. Developers come to PayPal because they often want to implement a payment system for their merchants or for a business there that they’re working with. And they typically start by trying to understand, does PayPal fit into my narrative into my business? How will I make sure that PayPal as a payment pro service provider fits with the rest of the back office management that I have to take care of?

Mudita Tiwari: A developer’s thinking end to end, they’re thinking about the business process and a payment service is part of the entire journey. So it’s almost like when you are thinking about a developer’s journey, you have to understand from their shoes what is their end to end, and that is truly the customer empathy and truly walking a mile in your customer’s shoes, that is important. And of course, that requires patience. That requires honing in the craft. That requires us speaking to a lot of our stakeholders to really understand what’s going on with the journey, because we’re just one human obviously, and it’s hard for us to know everything about everything. Therefore your relationships will very key when you lay out the groundwork in order to support any persona and especially the developer persona.

Mudita Tiwari: Last but not the least I would say taking action. Of course, you don’t wanna be in an analysis paralysis. It’s very important to communicate with your technical audience, with your developers. They’ll give you very quickly what they like, what they don’t like. I’ll tell you, it’s a very, very vocal audience the developers and, and that’s actually truly advantageous. While the feedback might be, might feel sour sometimes, but it’s very important to listen actively because developers want to be heard. Their time is precious. Their efforts are precious for the business as well. And therefore ensuring you study and listen and communicate with the audience and your developers regularly is absolutely critical part of your mission. And then, of course, the traditional product principles. Please keep an eye on your competitors. That is extremely important. And seeing what’s happening in the industry.

Mudita Tiwari: And of course, making sure that your executives are continually on board and they see the win in, in your efforts is equally important. And I cannot emphasize this enough. Oftentimes when we’re leading passion projects, we are leading and building products that we truly care about. Making sure managing upward, managing laterally and managing our teams is critical component of the way we scale our ideas and our product. I just talked about that so I won’t belabor the point. But essentially making sure that our sponsors also understand that a successful implementation is truly never done. And this is an iterative cycle is an opportunity for education and alignment with the leaders early on. But through that sponsorship, through that alignment, what happens is an opening and essentially an opportunity to make sure that executives are able to provide us the resources as our product needs skilling over time or might need a different time of lateral shift over time.

Mudita Tiwari: Let’s say if you’re moving from one market to another market, you will definitely need a lot of guidance as your product scales. So therefore making sure you align with your stakeholders and especially your sponsors is extremely important. And this is my last slide. Designing for developers actually starts with bold collaboration a bold vision and certainly an okayness with, with learning iteratively through your experience. An outside approach outside in approach is very important.

Mudita Tiwari: Being able to listen to your customers and your developers is extremely important. Sitting on that feedback and executing on that feedback is equally important. That’s where the virtuous loop of product iteration it comes in. This never stops. That is truly the joy of building a great brand, a great product is making sure that folks who are using our products are truly listened to. Last but not the least your first MVP always is important, but so is the executive sponsorship so that you can fly high and fly bold. Thank you so much for listening to this quick presentation about how to scale and design systems for, for developers or technical audiences. I’m happy to take questions and happy to dig into any point that you found interesting.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much. This was wonderful.

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Angie Chang: I have with us today Sheri Byrne-Haber, who’s a Senior Staff, Accessibility Architect at VMware. She’s a prominent global subject matter expert in the field of disability and accessibility, and known for launching digital accessibility programs at McDonald’s, Albertsons and VMware. And she writes a popular blog called “This Week in Accessibility”. Welcome, Sheri.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Well, thank you so much, Angie. I’m really excited to be here. I always like to drop the Sheri’s secret fun fact before I start events like this, which I was the first Girl Scout in the US to get a badge in Computer Science coming up on my 45th anniversary of that event this August. I’ve been doing tech for a long time.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: I did my first degree at Cal in computer science back when it was, you know, 90% guys, and I was basically the diversity in the room. Been doing this for a long time. Went and got a law degree 10 years after my computer science degree, then did an MBA 10 years after that. I’m here today to talk to you about why access. Yeah, Go Bears, Angie <laugh>. Why accessibility, what it is.. Okay, so the the brief 50,000 foot version and why it is a great career, especially for women.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: When most people think about accessibility, if they’ve heard that word, accessibility means making stuff work for people with disabilities, that’s kind of the TLDR version. They think about visible disability. You might think about somebody with a prosthetic arm.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: This is actually me practicing in my wheelchair on my Olympic range at home. I’m trying to qualify for the 2024 Paralympic games. People with service animals. People with hearing aids. Something that you can see. Accessibility has to take care of a lot more things than that.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: First of all, we have to deal with hidden disabilities, disabilities that aren’t obvious, that can’t be seen. That might be, I tell people all the time, you see me in a wheelchair, you assume, you know what my disability is, right?

Sheri Byrne-Haber: My real disability is type one diabetes kicks my ass on a daily basis. It interferes with everything I do. My wheelchair is just a way to get around. And I’ve been doing it for a very long time.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: You need to think about hidden disabilities. And some examples of hidden disabilities include Millie Bobby Brown, who’s deaf in one ear. Bono wears tinted sunglasses because he has a glaucoma. It’s not a rockstar affectation.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Neurodiverse statuses. Mental health issues. The reason why all of the colors in Facebook are blue is that it’s the only color that Mark Zuckerberg sees. When you’re thinking about disability for starters, you really have to broaden the definition to make sure that you’re including both visible disabilities and invisible disabilities.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Then you need to add two different types of disability. A permanent disability might be a limb difference, but if somebody tears their rotator cuff temporarily, they’re gonna have the same disability as somebody with a limb difference. They’re not gonna be able to use their arm or situationally you might be holding something that prevents you from using an arm.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: When you take permanent plus, temporary plus situational disabilities and, and look at it from both the visible and the invisible perspective, you’re talking about 30% of your potential users. And accessibility is about making technology work for that 30% of users.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Okay, so what do accessibility testers need to learn? First of all accessibility testing is a lot about interacting with assistive technology. You may have heard from other people talking about software testing as a field that automating is the greatest thing ever because then you can just push a button and repeat all those tests and not have to do anything that requires manual intensive interaction. It’s not so easy to do with accessibility because only about 30% of the tests can be executed in an automated manner by inspecting the code.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: 70% actually require being able to interact with the assistive technology. And so that includes things like screen readers which is what the woman in the middle graphic is using. She’s listening to her iPhone, tell her what’s on the screen in front of her that she can’t see. Some other forms of assistive technology are not using a mouse. Using alternative input devices like keyboards touch pads you know, those graphics pens things of that nature captions, magnification.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Then we get into a little bit more obscure, slightly less used assistive technology that would include things like sip and puff devices, which is how people who are quadriplegic interact with the internet. Obviously speech recognition is becoming more and more popular and, and actually better and cheaper than it used to be in the past. Once you know how to use assistive technology, you have to learn about the accessibility guidelines.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: There’s something called WCAG, which stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The version that’s just about to come out is version 2.2. And that is a standard WCAG that has been adopted pretty much globally. Anywhere that you have a law that requires inclusion of people with disabilities, usually it references one of the WCAG versions, not always the same version. That’s would make things too easy, right?

Sheri Byrne-Haber: The EU, Canada, Australia, the us India, some countries in Africa, they all use WCAG as the standard to determine whether or not you’ve made something accessible enough. That is, that, you know, the majority of people with disabilities would be able to use it just as if they didn’t have a disability. These are the two basic things that entry level accessibility testers focus on.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: What do they do once they know how to do all that stuff? Well, they participate in designing, building, and testing software, but a hundred percent through the lens of accessibility, not whether or not does it work which is the functional side of the fence, but does it work with assistive technology that people with disabilities are likely to use? And do those people, are they having an equal experience? Okay.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Those are the two things that the lens of accessibility provides for an accessibility tester. Other than that you’re participating throughout the entire life cycle, just as if you were a, a designer, a builder, or a tester. You’re just looking at it with a very particular point of view, okay? Women are really well represented in the accessibility space. There’s five times as many women in accessibility as there are women in non-accessible roles, just traditional straight up software testing you know, analytics coding, program management, things like that.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: It’s actually a good place to be because there are other women that can help you support your careers who have been there and done that. And you, you may get a better level of, of understanding from getting mentored by other women than you might be by getting mentored by somebody who doesn’t have the lived experience that you do trying to survive in your career. Okay?

Sheri Byrne-Haber: There is a significant demand for accessibility testers. Unless you work for Elon Musk, chances are you are not gonna get laid off, and that’s because the demand for accessibility testing is being driven by regulations and litigation, especially in the us. So the Americans with Disabilities Act require it, it, the language of the law itself doesn’t require accessibility, but it requires equal access. And the litigation, and we have about 4,000 plus or minus cases per calendar year in the US is focusing on WCAG as that standard to determine whether or not something’s accessible enough.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: As long as there’s laws and there’s long as there’s litigation, there is going to be a demand for accessibility testers. And right now we’re in a place where colleges are not turning out a lot of people skilled in accessibility testing because it’s not required as part of the computer science program. You barely even touch on it if you’re in a graduate HCI program. This is something that’s very much self-taught, and to be honest with you, it’s also very much passion driven.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: A lot of people get involved in accessibility because they have a personal experience with the disability. Again, don’t make assumptions. People see the wheelchair and they’re like, ah, I know why Sheri got into accessibility. Now, I actually got into accessibility because I have a deaf daughter and my deaf daughter you know, experienced a lot of issues when captions weren’t made available to her.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: There a lot of times there’s this, like I said, personal connection that makes people passionate about being in this space. Keep in mind disability is the only dimension of DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion – that everybody is guaranteed to experience at one point in time or another in their lives. Unless you die getting struck by lightning, never having broken a bone in your life, chances are at some point in time, if you’re not disabled right now, you are going to be disabled.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: When you’re working inaccessibility, you’re working to make the make the place better for your future self. That’s a, that’s another way to look at it if you don’t have a personal connection to disability currently. Okay. being disabled is actually a bonus when you’re working in the field of accessibility, because not only are you bringing the things that you learned about screen readers and, and other assistive technology and the things that you learned about WCAG, you’re bringing lived experience.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: And that’s something that’s very valuable for this type of work. The other thing is work from home has been a thing for people in the field of accessibility. Long before the pandemic 30% of people with disabilities can’t drive. And so work from home is critical, especially if their disabilities prevent them from being able to commute or make it harder or more expensive for them to commute.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Other than the usual, you get paid well, it’s a fun job. You get to make the life lives of other people better. But this is, this is somewhere where we’re having a disability and being willing to talk about that disability actually helps. And if you need to work from home or if you would benefit from to work from home it’s something that the accessibility managers in the world are very accustomed to.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: There are a broad range of employment opportunities government and education anything attached to federal money, okay? Including money that passes through states and cities and counties has to be accessible. There are strings attached, and those strings are called Section 508. Universities have to make things accessible. Hospitals have to make things accessible. Courts, anything municipal, anything federal, all has to be accessible. The nonprofit space also wants to be accessible because they don’t wanna say, oh, we’re here to help out this group of people, but hey, you people with disabilities, you get in the back of the line. There is typically you know, NPR has somebody dedicated to accessibility. Washington Post, New York Times, they all have accessibility specialists. Those aren’t exactly nonprofits, but it’s places that you see accessibility thought about where you might otherwise think that it wouldn’t be addressed.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: There’s lots of accessibility consulting companies all the retail operations on the internet. If you’re selling in the us it has to be accessible or, or you’re probably going to get sued at one at some point in time. And then, as I mentioned, healthcare is another big field. For each one of these areas, you’re still taking the same domain knowledge that you have on assistive technology and the WCAG guidelines, you’re just applying it to one of these vertical markets. It does not take a whole lot to get started. It doesn’t, being in the field of accessibility does not require a college degree. There are apprenticeship programs for people who wanna get started in accessibility. There’s quite a few resources that are available for free or for low cost online.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: You don’t have to go out and get a college degree in accessibility. In fact, such a thing does not exist. What you have to do is you have to care enough to go learn about all this stuff yourself, invest time, go to meetups, talk to people who are already in the field. I think of accessibility today as where Quality Assurance (QA) was, you know 35 years ago when I had just graduated from Cal 35 years ago for QA, there were no degrees in QA. There was no Six Sigma. These things didn’t exist. You had to apprentice yourself basically to somebody who was really, really good and, and learned from them. And now you can get a degree in QA. You can get all kinds of certifications in QA.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Accessibility today is where QA was 35 years ago in terms of how to, to, you know, get your foot in the door for the career, so to speak. You can easily evolve from accessibility into more senior careers. A lot of people who spend three to five years in accessibility will then move on to design or UX or UI and front end development, because you will learn a lot about these three things as you’re doing your accessibility testing work. And so if, if this is, if you’re interested in these three areas but don’t have the time to go back to get a degree or go to a boot camp or something else, you can use accessibility as a way to get into the door for some of these other careers, there are I’ve got here a list of some starting points if you’re interested in accessibility.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Siri was actually invented for people with disabilities. And the iOS voiceover, which is kind of twined with Siri is the screen reader. If you don’t have an Apple platform, then NVDA is a free screen reader that you can use on Windows. Spend an hour not using your mouse. Lots of people can’t use mice. I can’t use a mouse because I’ve got pretty bad arthritis in my hands. That will give you a pretty quick perspective on what it’s like to be a keyboard only user.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: There’s a couple of places that you can register to be a crowdsourced accessibility tester that will help you learn more about how to find bugs, how to report bugs what is it that people are looking for. Most major city centers have a Lighthouse for the Blind, or Center for Independent Living. They usually have ways that they can point people to learn more things about accessibility. And we’ve got meetups all over the place.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Thanks to the pandemic, most of the meetups are actually now hybrid. If the accessibility group in Orlando is meeting up, you know, it doesn’t matter you live in Portland, you can still go because they’re, like I said, largely hybrid these days. I wanted to give people my contact information.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: I have a website, which is sheribyrnehaber.com. It’s got a free archive of all the blogs that I’ve written over the years about accessibility. There’s probably 200 or 250 articles on there right now. If you don’t see something, ask me because I’m still writing, I’m not writing quite as much as I used to but I get a lot of my ideas from people pinging me and saying, well, what about, you know, how do you make a toast message accessible?

Sheri Byrne-Haber: One of my most popular articles I ever wrote came out of a question that somebody gave me on LinkedIn. And if you use that QR code, it should take you to my LinkedIn profile. I don’t use Twitter. LinkedIn is my only form of social media but I love to connect with people who are interested in accessibility, and you can always ask me questions.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Sheri. That was a really informative talk and accessibility. I love all the resources and the, the the knowledge you dropped on us today. This is the last talk of this career track. Thank you so much for being a part of ELEVATE and for everyone who’s still here with us after two days of nonstop talks, developer workshops, networking, meeting recruiters.

Angie Chang: Thank you again. Networking is gonna start. We’re gonna have some fluid networking, so if you’ve seen Everything Everywhere All At once, it’s gonna make some sense to you, or I think it makes sense to someone who’s in that movie. It might be something else to you. I’ll see you in networking. Thank you Sheri, for being so open and willing to connect on LinkedIn. And yeah, I’ll see you on the other side. Thank you.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Much. Okay. And I just answered the one question that came in about IAAP certifications. Disclaimer, I’m on the certification committee. I actually help write the test. So yes, I believe that they’re worth worthwhile. They are standardized. They’ve been around for going on seven years now. But they’re not cheap, right? It’s $375 to take each of the tests. Plus, you know, if you wanna sign up for a membership, that’s another a hundred bucks.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: If you can’t afford the IAAP memberships, another path you can go is with the US Federal Government. It’s called Trusted Tester. It’s free, it requires a significant investment in time. Took me about 120 hours to complete it. Most people actually go faster. I had to struggle to unlearn everything that I knew and only respond in the way the government wanted me to respond. That was really hard to do. But if you’re new to accessibility, you should actually be able to get your Trusted Tester certification faster.

Angie Chang: Thank you.

Sheri Byrne-Haber: Thanks everybody.

Angie Chang: Thank you.

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