CodeSee Girl Geek Dinner – Female Founders of Developer Tools Panel & JavaScript Talks! (Video + Transcript)

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Transcript of CodeSee Girl Geek Dinner – Panel Discussion:

Angie Chang: I’m glad we are still finding the opportunities to get together and hear from amazing Girl Geeks about what they’re working on. Tonight, we are having a panel of female founders of dev tool startups who will be sharing about their stories and what some industry trends are and really educating us in that space.

Michelle Ufford: Women innately just want to help. We want to help solve other problems in other people and when you’re in dev tools, you get to interact with your customers a lot more than you might be in more of like an external facing product role. I think that there’s a strong opportunity to recruit women to dev tools.

Renee Shah: I love the connection too, between new dev tools and getting more women and under represented groups in the dev tools world. I wouldn’t have thought of that.

Shanea Leven: We need to be able to just support more women in developer tools and there just needs to be a few pioneers to just say that it’s cool!

Marissa Montgomery: You can get started whenever you want, even if you just want to start it as a side project. You don’t really need anyone’s permission. Invest in the people that are cheering for you. I would say go for it if anyone wants to.

Shanea Leven: We just need to say, “This is what we’re doing. Hey people, come join us.” Learn from all you amazing women in what you do and just have some people to say, “Yes, let’s all do this together.”

Angie Chang: And then we’re going to have three JavaScript engineers talk really quickly about some things they’re working on or have worked on.

Karin Goh: A lot of my days definitely spent in Chrome Dev Tools, so I just wanted to share some tips and tricks that I’ve learned along the way that have really helped me get my job done on a day to day basis.

Palak Goel: Ember.js is an open source free JavaScript client side framework, which helps us in building web applications. There are different kind of other JavaScript frameworks like React and [inaudible] that you might have heard of.

Pearl Latteier: My goal is to answer for you two questions. First, what is a progressive web app? Or PWA as the cool kids say and why might you want to build one?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, I’m Sukrutha. I am CTO of Girl Geek X, I also work at Salesforce as an engineering manager by day. Super excited for tonight’s virtual dinner, or should I say “dinner” in air quotes, not the virtual part. Obviously, with Covid and everything, we have taken it virtual, but we used to have these in real life. Angie, how does it feel to be doing these virtual dinners?

Angie Chang: It feels good. I’m glad we are still finding the opportunities to get together and hear from amazing girl geeks about what they’re working on.

Angie Chang: Tonight, we are having a panel of female founders of dev tool startups, who will be sharing about their stories and what some industry trends are and really help educating on that space. And then we’re going to have three JavaScript engineers talk really quickly about some things they’re working on or have worked on.

Angie Chang:We are going to move on to the panel portion of the evening, we have four panelists, actually three panelists and Renee who’s going to be our moderator tonight. Renee is a principal at Amplify Partners where she focuses on developer tools and infrastructure startups. She graduated from Harvard and also an MBA from Stanford GSB. Welcome, Renee.

Renee Shah: Hi, guys. It’s great to be here, thank you for having me. Angie, are we ready to kick it off?

Angie Chang: Yes.

Renee Shah: Great. I am so excited to moderate this panel just because we have so many fabulous women on it. Without further ado, I thought that all of our panelists could introduce themselves and talk about their path to becoming CEO.

Shanea Leven: I can go first. I’m Shanea, I am so excited to be here with really great personal friends and people who are inspiring me every single day. I’m the founder and CEO of a company called CodeSee and we are a code comprehension platform that helps professional developers quickly explore, understand, visualize, and reason about their codebases. And we’re just really, really excited to help JavaScript developers really understand, onboard into new codebases, really understand how it works with our new system. We’re really, really excited to be here and chat about our journey. Michelle, why don’t you go next?

Michelle Ufford: Oh, sure. Hello, I am Michelle Ufford. I am the CEO of Notable, which is a early stage start up that is focused on collaborative Jupyter Notebooks for data driven enterprises. I am very excited to be here, this is actually my first talk as a CEO officially. This is going to be fun, thank you.

Marissa Montgomery: Hi, everyone. I’m Marissa Montgomery and I’m the founder of Instantish. We’re building an issue tracker that is for small teams that move quickly and it’s different in two ways. One is that it’s designed for everyone in the company to use, so not just engineers or designers. The second thing is that integrates really closely with Slack. Yeah, also excited to be here, thanks.

Renee Shah: Great. Those are wonderful intros and my first question would be, other than building something meaningful for the world, which all three of you are doing, what do you love most about your day to day?

Shanea Leven: Okay. I get a chance to talk to developers just like everyone here, basically every day. And I get to hear about their problems, I’ve personally experienced their problems. The same problems that we’re solving and as we’re building CodeSee, understanding large scale codebases is exactly what everybody else deals with. I get a chance to not only learn a lot, but just build something that I know that my people need, essentially. That’s probably the most fun.

Michelle Ufford: For me, it’s everything. I feel like I am having the time of my life, living my best life and that sounds cheesy, but it’s true and even the hard days. There’s a lot of long days, a lot of hard things and challenges that come up, but yet it feels different. It feels different because we have built such an amazing team, it’s such an positive environment and it’s really much more focused on problem solving and how can we rather than focused on all the reasons why this might not work. It’s been such an extraordinary experience.

Marissa Montgomery: I feel very much the same way. I just feel very creatively fulfilled every day with what I’m doing. It’s cool because as a CEO, you obviously wear many different hats, like you’re hiring. I code probably three to four days out of the week still, so I really enjoy that. Also, just working with an awesome team and getting to talk to customers is really exciting and inspiring.

Shanea Leven: I think all of us have probably worked at big companies before. I feel like it’s just this really awesome transition to be able to not be at a big company, but then you get a chance to create your own company. It’s a really awesome experience to be a part of that.

Renee Shah: I can imagine. Got what you love and maybe in the opposite fashion, what do you feel like is most misunderstood about being a CEO in dev tools or just an early stage CEO generally?

Shanea Leven: I think, for me it’s a lot about the sales aspect of it. That you don’t just get to code every day, because I get a chance to code and I get a chance to work on the product just as much particularly, at this stage, as any other person in the company. I think that particularly if you’re venture-backed like we are, I actually get a tremendous amount of help often by a lot of people. When we were raising, I texted Renee and Michelle very often. It’s not you have to do all these other things, sure there’s new things that I’m doing like learning about HR, learning about accounting and finance, but those are all just a really great opportunity to learn new things. I think that part is misunderstood, particularly when you’re building a product for your own market. The “selling” part of it is just like you’re just talking to your people, essentially.

Michelle Ufford: I would agree with that. I think that what I did not fully understand was how much of the job is really just communication and translation between your engineers and your potential customers and your investors and your advisors. It’s just a completely different way of communicating and even though I got into a pretty good place, in terms of speaking with engineers and with business leaders. It is very different when you’re trying to do sales calls. The way that you approach it or the types of things that you talk about are very different and you really have to shift and evolve and then yet, still be able to go back and talk to the engineers and business leaders. I think that was something that was unexpected, but has been very positive.

Marissa Montgomery: I would definitely agree with that. It’s a lot of context switching and when I envisioned building a company, I envisioned spending a lot of time just designing and coding with the team, but it’s a lot of communication and finding the people that are most excited about your product and communicating really closely with them and keeping them updated. Also, I was surprised just at how much time hiring and interviewing takes up. Obviously, a super valuable exercise and great use of time, but that was definitely something that surprised me.

Renee Shah: Those are great answers. I wouldn’t have thought about how much selling and hiring and just overall… I thought my cross-functional communication days were Google only, but it sounds like they keep going. Because a lot of the folks on this call are technical and we had some fantastic technical talks, I would be curious what trend everyone is most excited about in the dev tools world that’s upcoming. Marissa, do you want to maybe kick us off?

Marissa Montgomery: Sure. I don’t know if this is a trend or maybe a theme, but I’ve been really excited when I see the blending of the different stages of the engineering life cycle. You’re discussing what work you want to build, you’re creating issues, you’re writing code and then there’s the whole PR and code review process ,and then deploying and monitoring. It’s been really cool to see, there’s the typical concept of linting where while you’re in your IDE editing your code, you have this tool that’s making suggestions that you normally catch in code review, which is a later stage.

Marissa Montgomery: I’ve been seeing a lot of interesting things like that, like design linting and it’s been cool to see GitHub’s code scanning feature as well, which is they scan your codebase, I think it’s opt in, obviously, but they scan your code base for secrets that you might have published publicly which you would have caught much later. It’s kind of cool to see new tools and features that blend those stages together.

Shanea Leven: Michelle, you want to go next?

Michelle Ufford: Sure. For me, I’m a data person, it’s the convergence of the data and machine learning and data visualization with dev tools. I find that really exciting because when I was doing a lot of development work, there was so much stuff that was tedious, it was just the routine stuff or just trying to track down and understand the codebase or all of these things that were tedious and were not really value add to the company. I thought, man I just wish I could get to the cool stuff a lot faster. I see with the convergence of these things and I think of the kinds of dev tools that Marissa and Shanea are building, I think we’re going to see that you get more time to spend on the fun stuff and less time worrying about, why did my codebase break again?

Shanea Leven: Yeah, thanks. I was actually about to mention that I am actually very fortunate to get to ride this trend. As new types of people, women, under represented people, get into engineering, our dev tools need to evolve with it and I get a chance to build a developer tool to help people learn how large scale codebases work, so that we can spend more time building the things that we were meant to be building, as opposed to spending 60% of your time figuring where this line of code is. Actually there are a bunch of startups that are popping up in that space to really help you understand and build features faster and help you understand in a very different way than traditionally you’ve had to understand a codebase because you’re — traditionally, the way that you get it in your head is you read code one line at a time, you hold it in your head, you imagine data as it flows through your system.

Shanea Leven: That just doesn’t work for everybody. I’m excited to solve a problem like that because I’ve personally struggled with that problem of holding whole codebases in my head and I see that as a starting trend as these tools start to merge together. How we add visuals, how we add visualizations and just make it easier for people to comprehend so that we can do our jobs better.

Renee Shah: I love the connection too, between new dev tools and getting more women and under represented groups in the dev tools world. I wouldn’t have thought of that and that’s a nice segue too, of just what do you think we can do to get more women in dev tools? And maybe, Michelle, you can kick us off.

Michelle Ufford: Okay, so I have a theory. You guys tell me if you agree or not. I believe that we actually will see more women in dev tools, we’re seeing a decent surprising amount there, because women innately just want to help. We want to help solve other problems and other people and when you’re in dev tools you get to interact with your customers a lot more than you might be in more of like an external facing product role.

Michelle Ufford: I think that there’s a strong opportunity to recruit women to dev tools, but we need to make sure that we are supportive of them and we are explaining the problem space to them and the opportunity in a way that really resonates for them. I think a lot of this stuff is more like a language barrier, I know I’ve had many conversations with females about what does dev tools really mean and once I explained it to them they’re like, “Oh, that actually sounds more fun than this other stuff that I’m doing.” I think there’s a real opportunity for us there.

Renee Shah: Shanea, what about you?

Shanea Leven: I’m quite prolific in my thoughts. Basically piggy backing on what Michelle said, we need to be able to support more women in developer tools and there just needs to be a few pioneers to just say that it’s cool and it’s really awesome, particularly with dev tools — I think they are basically force multipliers because you enable developers to do something better to enable their end users.

Shanea Leven: We just need more women in Dev Tools. Snowflake had the biggest freaking IPO ever and it’s like, there’s no women there on their founding team. We just need to say, “This is what we’re doing. Hey, people come join us.” Learn from all of you amazing women and what you do and just have some people say, “Yes, let’s all do this together.”

Renee Shah: Totally.

Marissa Montgomery: I would… Sorry. Yeah, I definitely agree. There should definitely be way more women in dev tools. I get really excited when I meet female founders, it’s super exciting to me, all of you. One thing that I think is helpful too is talking about the different between a sponsor and a mentor and I think a lot of people talk about how they think, “Oh, I should mentor this person to help them get to the next stage of their career, to find the confidence to start a company.” And it’s really about sponsoring them. Talking to their manager about the great work they do, putting them up for opportunities. If they’re starting a company, advocating for them when you’re talking to other investors to get funding. Stuff like that.

Michelle Ufford: Can I just add on one more thought? This is just more generally with women in technology and something that I think that we really need to do is, we need to have real honest conversations with our leadership when we’re not happy and be willing to walk away. Being willing to leave that job or leave that team because it’s not a good fit, rather than leaving the industry, which actually might be a good fit if you were on the right team. I think that there’s a lot of people that just feel like, “I’ve got this job, I’ve got this team, I’ve got this project, I’ve made a commitment. I have to see it through.” The reality here is that employment is a two-way street and they need to be treating you well and you need to be performing for them and if one of those pieces is not working, then it’s not the right fit for you.

Shanea Leven: Yes, snaps.

Renee Shah: I love it. I can see in the comments, you’re getting a “well said.” Totally agree with that and I can’t think of a better group of three women to lead the way, especially for female CEOs and just CEO in general, let’s be clear. When I think about early stage startups, I’m also fascinated. You have incumbents that you’re competing with, you have other early stage startups and in dev tools particularly, you have open source projects as well. Which aren’t mutually exclusive from companies, but they’re there. What do you see as the biggest threat to early stage dev tools companies? As leaders, how do you think about mitigating those threats? And maybe, Shanea, you can kick it off for us.

Shanea Leven: Yeah. I think, honestly… Okay, this is going to be spicy. I think that the thing that’s the biggest threat is just the reputation of our industry. A lot of companies do a lot of really shitty things and there’s a lot of things that could be threats. I can talk about the big companies. I’ve worked for the big companies, I’ve worked for Google and all the places, but I think if we don’t do the things that require creating a good business.

Shanea Leven: If we don’t think about our users, particularly in developers, if we don’t think of all of the different types of developers or we aren’t thinking about the people that we’re serving or the teams that we have in our companies and making sure that we support them, that’s the biggest threat to early stage companies. There’s plenty of opportunity, there’s plenty of things left to build.

Shanea Leven: There’s plenty of problems that need to be solved. We need to be able to get a group of people together and support them and make sure that they can live their best lives building solutions for the world and not doing really kind of shitty things to them.

Renee Shah: Yup. Marissa, what do you think?

Marissa Montgomery: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I’d also say, something that came to mind for me was just focus and discipline for companies, but that’s not a threat, like a certain trend or something. Especially with developer ttools, you have so many choices with what stack you use, which services you integrate with and there’s a lot of different things that you could build, but I think it’s important, especially in the early age to simplify that mentor model for the user and really double down on what your product is best at.

Michelle Ufford: I agree with both of those. What I’ve seen is it really comes down to two really big things and there’s a lot of different threats like the team that you build and who you choose as your investor. There’s a lot of potential challenges, but there’s a huge opportunity in the marketplace and what you really need to do is make sure that you are really thoroughly understanding your customers.

Michelle Ufford: You cannot assume that just because it worked at that one company or two companies that you were at, that it’s true of the general industry and so having lots and lots and lots and lots of conversations with potential customers and not even that you’re trying to sell to them. You’re trying to understand the problem space and if this idea that you have really makes sense for them.

Michelle Ufford: And the second piece of this is really making sure that you have a business model that’s going to work and it’s going to scale. I think that a lot of people have these really great ideas, but there’s no really good way to monetize them and if you take that time to think about it up front, you can kind of shift the business in a direction that would be more viable.

Renee Shah: I think those are all great answers. Just doing a lot of up front work and understanding the dev tools industry and being really focused. Awesome, awesome answers. Sort of similarly and piggy backing on that topic, I’m sure a lot of folks on this call would love to be CEO someday. What is the one piece of advice you have for a new founder? And maybe Marissa, you can kick us off.

Marissa Montgomery: Sure. I guess I would just say, you can get started whenever you want, even if you just want to start it as a side project. And you don’t really need anyone’s permission and there’s going to be people early on who try to reduce your idea or dismiss it. Probably more people than are excited about it, but just listen to the people who are excited about it and invest in the people that are cheering for you. I would say, go for it if anyone wants to.

Renee Shah: Michelle, what are your thoughts on being CEO and your advice for new CEOs?

Michelle Ufford: I think trust and transparency go a long way and you need to find partners and advisors and potentially invite those advisors to be investors in the company. If they are people that feel like they are up front and honest and direct with you and people that you can trust just to give you the truth, I think that is so huge to find those right partners. People like Shanea and Renee who have given me advice as we were starting. I think that those things are so incredibly valuable and it makes all of the difference.

Michelle Ufford: The other piece of this is really, don’t try to do it alone. Go and find a network of support and find out people who have done this before because if you pull all of that information, you’re going to find a lot of very common themes and those are really good lessons for you to learn vicariously through others, if you can.

Renee Shah: Yeah.

Shanea Leven: I’ll speak to that. The advice that I would give, because I would say very similarly to what Michelle said. Most of us are really just learning as we go and that’s very similar to if you’re a CEO or you’re a junior dev.

Shanea Leven: In addition to what hasn’t been said, what has really, really helped me besides my support system, it’s reading a lot. I read a lot, I listen to Audible a lot and getting frameworks and getting information in as quickly as possible has really helped me to grow my career and I didn’t just one day decide to be CEO. I kind of stepped up over time and grew over several years until I had the confidence to do it. And the same things that I do today are the same things that I did five years ago.

Shanea Leven: I think that all the things that we’re talking about today, finding your support system, being transparent, actually communicating your needs, are relevant at any stage whether you want to be a CEO today or if you are just getting your first developer job.

Renee Shah: Yeah. I think all of that is well said across the board. You made me think of something, which is just how much content there is out there right now. Whether that’s articles and podcasts and Twitter, and I think it’s an awesome time to learn, particularly in the dev tools space. Very curious what everyone’s favorite thing is, your most helpful thing is to read, whether that’s for company building or just to your domain specifically. Open to recommendations and maybe, Michelle, I’d love to hear your recommendation first.

Michelle Ufford: This is a great question. I don’t have any one source that I go to, in fact I try to aggregate across a variety of sources just so I can make sure that I’m not missing something. I would say some of the ones that I enjoy reading the most would be articles on Medium, taking the time and just liking the stuff that you like and you’ll continue to get good recommendations.

Michelle Ufford:There’s also something called Stratechery, if you’re not familiar with that, and that has been also just something that I really enjoy reading and hearing Ben’s thoughts on it.

Renee Shah: I’m a big Ben Thompson fan as well. I’m right there with you. Shanea, what about you? What’s your favorite thing to read?

Michelle Ufford: She’s muted.

Renee Shah: Oh, yeah I get it. I was in that boat earlier on the panel.

Shanea Leven: I was trying to move my chair and not disturb anyone, so I muted myself. Actually, what I’m reading right now is not related at all to dev tools, so I’m going to share anyway. Unapologetically Ambitious is what I’m reading right now, it’s about… Her name is escaping me, but it was just released. She was a female CEO of color at a tech company. She used to work for IBM, and it’s just about how to be…unapologetically ambitious.

Shanea Leven: I’m not really podcast person because it sounds like talk radio without the music, but my very first podcast that I actually really love is by Bethenny Frankel, she just launched a new podcast [Just B]. She had SkinnyGirl Cocktails and she’s had some pretty amazing people on. Bozoma Saint James from Netflix, CMO Netflix and she’s pretty famous. Mark Cuban was on there and it’s just a really awesome, just fantastic person to listen to, very entertaining while I run. As far as business and how to just live your best self.

Renee Shah: Love it. We all need to be a little bit unapologetically ambitious.

Shanea Leven: For sure.

Renee Shah: Marissa, what’s your favorite thing to read?

Marissa Montgomery: My go to recommendation, it’s kind of a timeless book. It’s High Output Management by Andy Grove and I actually read it once a year, every year. I’m probably due for my re-read. It just has such great advice in it, I especially like the first chapter where it talks about this manufacturing process. I think it’s called the breakfast factory and it’s really cool because it talks about how you assess quality at each step and I think it’s just a great framework for thinking about any sort of process. And then it also has a great section on one on ones and how they’re really under valued as a management tool and it talks about different strategies for how to invest in them. Every once in a while, I’ll still Google some notes and re-read the notes and re-read the book.

Michelle Ufford: Actually, Marissa, you just made me think of another book that I absolutely love, which is called Principles by Ray Dalio. If you’re not familiar with that, that’s just a book that really describes different principles that they use to articulate what the goal is at Bridgewater so everybody has clarity. When you really, truly break it down, it’s like this makes a lot of sense because there’s so much miscommunication in the organization, that by defining your principles up front. Everybody knows, here’s how we’re going to make decisions and here’s how we’re going to operate. Saves a lot of confusion and misunderstandings down the road. If you’ve not read that, I would recommend it.

Renee Shah: I’ve read Principles too and I will +1 that one. There’s a question from the audience, so I want to ask it, which is, “there’s a perception that dev tools should be free, at least for individuals.” I totally agree with that. “How do you tackle it and get your first customers?” Shanea, do you want to kick us off?

Shanea Leven: Yeah. I agree. It’s weird because in order to get customers at all, you have to meet their expectations. If everyone determines that it should be free, then you should have some free component. What we do, what we’re playing around with is our data flow, which is our first visualization, is going to be free. It’ll be based like a credit and usage system that they’ll be an amount of credits that you can use, just try it out, understand what’s going on and then they’ll be features for larger teams and enterprises that features that most individual developers don’t give a crap about. And then those things are things that you pay for. That’s basically how I would tackle it.

Renee Shah: Marissa, what do you think?

Marissa Montgomery: Oh, sorry. The question was about free tools?

Renee Shah: Right. Is there a perception that dev tools should be free and what do you pay for? Is it an open core model, bottoms up?

Marissa Montgomery: Yeah. We have thought about offering a free tier. One thing that we have done until then is we invest in open source projects, which is really just energizing because anyone can contribute and give feedback and ideas. That’s been something exciting. These projects are geared toward solving the larger problem that a lot of our customers face, so it’s kind of like if Instantish can’t address that problem completely right now, at least we can give you these resources or free tools in the meantime. It’s one of our company values, is just generosity. So when you’re doing something, not always thinking about how is this going to directly lead to revenue extremely quickly, it’s more about proving to our customers that we’re on their side and actually trying to solve their problems. Even if that’s doing some free tools. I’m just really excited about open source in general, so definitely wanted to incorporate that.

Renee Shah: Michelle, I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts as well.

Michelle Ufford: I agree. I think that there is certainly a perception that dev tools should be free and I agree with Shanea that they should be up to a point. There is this expectation, but I think that also, we should look at giving away dev tools for free in a different light. Which is that we really need to level the playing field here for small/medium sized businesses. In our case, we’ll be giving away a community edition that’s going to be fully functional Jupyter Notebook that’s very collaborative and it’s meant to be good for a single individual or good for a team and then you can grow all the way up to the enterprise.

Michelle Ufford: When you’re in that single person mode, you usually don’t have a lot of support. You don’t have a lot of understanding from management about why you need to buy these things. It’s not really until you start growing that you’re able to get those types of budgets behind you and then you got other companies that are non-profits or that are small businesses that just don’t have the money or can’t afford it at all. And yet we need to give them the same kind of tools so that they can continue to compete and stay in business.

Michelle Ufford: I’m a strong advocate for open source, I’m a strong advocate for some sort of freemium type of model for a lot of these dev tools or generally just software tools in general.

Renee Shah: It makes a ton of sense. I know we’re about at time, so I was going to get to our very last question, but I want to read a comment from the audience first. Which is, “Marissa, Shanea, Michelle, keep speaking, building excellent companies. You have the right stuff to grow and create.”

Shanea Leven: Aww. We heart you.

Michelle Ufford: Thank you.

Renee Shah: My final question, which I am actually personally dying to know the answer to is that, any tips or tricks to hire and sell? Because I certainly see it with the companies that I work in and I think those are the two of the absolute hardest things to do, particularly at the early stage. I couldn’t think of a better group of people to crack that for us. Michelle, maybe you can start off with your thoughts.

Michelle Ufford: Sure. For both the customer selling and for hiring when you’re in this early stage, it comes down to transparency and spending the time. If you have somebody that is an amazing employee, that’s at some company that it’s a very prominent company and you’re trying to recruit them or just some place that they are that they’re not quite sure that if they want to make that leap, especially in today’s times. You need to give them all of the information so that they can really make an informed decision. It’s not really about pushing them one way or the other, it’s about really laying out your case and saying, “Look, here’s why I think this is a great opportunity. Let’s talk about the company and the company culture. Let’s talk about the team. Let’s talk about the customers. Let’s talk about what this is going to look like in the next year, in the next five years, in the next 10 years.” When you take that time to answer all of their questions and really lay out your case, we’ve been very, very successful with recruiting taking that approach.

Michelle Ufford: Similarly with customers, the same thing. Just being transparent about where we are, what our goals are and trying to find things that are win wins for both of us has been very effective as well. Also, on taking the time with customers, take the time to research them, take the time to read their blog posts or watch their videos or trying to understand the business. If you’re in the super, super early stages and you really need those customers, take the time to personalize your demos. It’s going to take time, but when they look at those demos, it’s going to feel familiar. Now they’re not sitting there trying to understand, what is this all about? They can see things that feel familiar and they can immediately start to grasp the benefit of your product.

Renee Shah: Great tips all around. Especially the piece on personalized demos, that’s one I haven’t heard yet. I’m going to definitely hang on to that in my back pocket. Shanea, what do you think?

Shanea Leven: Funny story, I definitely stole Michelle’s job description. That was the key piece and everybody that we interviewed loves it by the way. I think that it’s our responsibility as people on call that grow into leadership positions to create culture from the beginning and we have had heavy time and energy put into making a good interview process and making sure that it’s fair, making sure that we are bringing in people who are kind, self-aware, who provide good feedback and good communication skills in addition to their tech skills. Because as we decide to grow the company, we want to make sure that we actually walk the walk, is that the phrase? Walk the walk of having an inclusive culture and we have turned down some really awesome people because there has been some red flags in our interview process.

Shanea Leven: Just personally and it’s really, really important to us and I think that that carries over, not just in candidates, but also in our customer calls. The way that we do business, the people that our customers interact with, they can clearly see that we desperately care about our people and really care about the problem that we’re trying to solve and that just makes everything a lot easier, to be honest with you. I think that’s generally kind of the way that I’ve approached things throughout my career, before building a company, if that makes sense. Even on just teams.

Renee Shah: Marissa, what do you think?

Marissa Montgomery: Yeah. I would definitely agree with that. Authenticity goes a long way in showing that you care about your customers. Selling was definitely something that I had to adjust to, I’ve never done it before. I’ve been in engineering all my career, so it was very different and I try to default back to just listening as much as possible. Which is interesting because sometimes I’m really excited about talking about features that we’ve released and things like that. I think just listening to the people that you’re talking to as much as possible is always a good thing.

Renee Shah: +1 to everything, and I see a question. I’m assuming Angie will give me a warning if we’re very over time, but I may just get this one question from the audience so that they can participate too, so actual last question — “would love your insights on pivoting your business. How hard is it when you try to love the problem you are trying to solve?” I’d be curious because I actually don’t know this, but I actually don’t know if any of you have had to pivot, so I will just let the first person, if somebody wants to just chime in.

Shanea Leven: I had to, not necessarily pivot, but because I have experience in products, we did a lot of, “What could we build to solve this problem?” first. And so we initially had an idea and then we pivoted before we built it, which made it a little bit easier. In the event that we talk to our users and we talk to the developers and they were like, “No, this is hella stupid. You shouldn’t build this.” We would have absolutely thrown it out without question and built what is important for them and I will still do that today. Everything that we built, I could probably throw out tomorrow and start again. We just need to make people happy. We just really want to make people happy.

Michelle Ufford: I do think that there’s something to that, do what you love or love what you do and I couldn’t be an astronaut, so I decided to be in dev and to love that and it’s really worked out well for me. It actually was a conscientious choice for me to sit there and say, “This is what I’m going to do. I think this is a great career and I’m just going to really go with everything and really embrace it.” It’s been really great. I think that whenever you’re trying to start a company, you have to have the same mentality. You truly have to love what you’re doing or you’re going to be miserable. If you’re not finding the right problem space or if something doesn’t feel right, I think you just need to continue to try to solve that problem and pivot until you can find something that works for you and for the market and for your customers and as a business model.

Michelle Ufford: The way that I’ve seen it in my experience has been that there’s always a path forward, always. You just need to sit there and take the time to look at it, think about things from different perspectives. If you can’t see it, go talk with others, get their input and see if that opens up your eyes, but I truly believe there’s always a way forward.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, ladies. This was super insightful for me and to everyone else. I’m sure you’ll be able to get a chance to look at the amazing comments that everybody had to share. Thank you all.

Angie Chang: Why don’t we get right to it? Our first lightning talk is from Karin, who is a Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce and she graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science and minored in Human Rights. We’re really excited to welcome her to give a quick lighting talk, so welcome.

Karin Goh: Hi. Let me share my screen. Cool. I’m Karin, I’m a Software Engineer at Salesforce, where I’ve been doing front end web development for about two and a half years. A lot of my day is definitely spent in the Chrome Dev Tools, so I just wanted to share some tips and tricks that I’ve learned along the way that have really helped me get my job done on a day to day basis. For those of you who aren’t really familiar with what the Chrome Dev Tools are, it’s sort of like a browser in built IDE that allows you to explore everything that’s on your page. This is everything from the DOM to your source code to all the network requests that are going out among a lot of other cool things.

Karin Goh: I’m just going to jump straight into a demo. This is a super simple web page that I have. It’s just a bunch of inputs and some buttons and it’s sort of like a calculator, except instead of adding numbers, we’re adding strings based on these different inputs. For example, if I take these two things and I hit this build query button, we get some output. Straight off the bat, it looks a little suspicious because we’ve hit na here and eu, but we’re seeing two na’s. What I would do from here is I would open up the Chrome Dev console and you can either do that by doing command shift I or what I personally usually end up doing, is right clicking and hitting inspect.

Karin Goh: Now that I have this open, I can use this nifty little tool and sort of explore all the different elements on my page and so what I usually like to do is select the button that did the thing that looks incorrect. If we look down here, we can also see the console and some suspicious looking things and you can actually just click straight on these things and it’ll take you to that line of code and you can easily see what’s happening. In case you have a lot of things, for example, there’s just a lot of noise because I clicked the button a lot of times, you can actually filter this. And this is really helpful because you can just really filter by type or even by source file. If you’re working in a large codebase, you probably have way more than just the one file and you can see exactly where your console logs are coming from.

Karin Goh: But back to the bugs that we’re trying to figure out. In this case, I know there’s only one file so it’s definitely somewhere in this demo.html file, but if you’re new to a team or you’re new to the code, you might not know where to look to actually fix this bug. What I like to do is I actually, again, like to go to the button and I think a really easy way to figure out where the code is, is if you go over to this event listeners tab you can actually see a whole list of all the event listeners on something. In this case, I just have a simple click function and I can jump straight to the code. Then from here, what I would do, is I would stick a break point in, and you can do that just by clicking on the line number. You can also make this a conditional break point.

Karin Goh: Other things you can do are adding logs, so if you don’t have a console.log statement, but you want one, you can actually do that straight in the console here. I’m going to go ahead and click this button and now we can see that our debugger is paused. From here, we have some pretty basic IDE functions, so I’m just going to go ahead and step into my code. Now we see a whole bunch of stuff appear. These are all my variables and my local scope, this is pretty badly written code so there’s a lot of things here and they’re pretty poorly named, but we’ll just go with it. You can also see the call stack.

Karin Goh: Again, this is really simple code, but if you’re working in a more complex code base, this becomes really helpful because you can just jump around and it’ll take you straight to that line of code and it’ll open up the file so you know exactly where it is. We’re going to just jump ahead and now we’re trying to figure out why it says na twice instead of the expected eu. Again, this is pretty trivial code, you could probably eyeball it, but you could also just step through it and what I like to do personally, is add these watch expressions. You can actually see the variables down here, but obviously there’s a lot here and I know that can become pretty overwhelming. If I know I’m looking for something in particular, I’ll just go ahead and add it up here.

Karin Goh: In this case, I want index list. There’s also a console down here, so theoretically you could type what you want to look at every time you step over a line of code, but that becomes pretty inconvenient if you’re really stepping over a lot of code. You can also hover, there’s a lot of ways to view the same information and there’s definitely easier ways and harder ways, but there’s a lot of ways. This is sort of how I would begin to approach a bug if I had one, just looking at all these different things, looking at what’s happening with variables, stepping through code, stepping through my call stack. That’s sort of just an introduction of what you can do there.

Karin Goh: One quick thing I want to show, also, is sort of how you can play with these DOM elements and style them straight in your browser. From here, you can actually just drag and drop your elements in case you want to see what it looks like somewhere else. You can also pop over to styles and you can do CSS straight in there. For example, if I want to change the color of the button, you can see here it’s green now and I can just sort of play around and it’ll immediately update. You can also update classes or edit HTML. There’s really just a bunch of really powerful stuff you can do straight in the browser so that you don’t have to keep going back and forth between your IDE and the browser. You can also force state, so this is helpful if there’s something that’s only happening when you’re hovering.

Karin Goh: And there’s definitely a lot of really cool things to explore in the Chrome Dev Tools console. If you haven’t already, I would highly encourage everyone to explore all the different tabs, all the different buttons. They also like to hide things in the little things, so just definitely look around. There is lots of neat things you could do. Hopefully that was a good introduction and you learned something and you’ve all been inspired to use the Chrome Dev Tools more. If you have any questions, you can ping them in the Zoom chat or you can connect with me in LinkedIn. Thanks.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Karin. That was awesome. Our next speaker.

Palak Goel: All right. The topic of today’s session is UI automation with Ember.JS. Before I talk about testing what exactly is Ember.JS? Ember.JS is an open source free JavaScript client side framework, which helps us in building web applications. There are other different kind of other JavaScript frameworks like React and [inaudible] that you might have heard of. A very important aspect of development is that we want to make sure that every time we are bringing light to the production, the existing functionality is working as is. There are no regression bugs introduced and in order to do so, either we maintain a manual checklist and execute those test cases every time we are going live or we’ll be a little smart and use all those online infrastructure and tools that are open source and automate these test cases.

Palak Goel: Talking about testing. Ember provides three types of test out of the box, unit, integration and acceptance. Unit test actually forms the foundation of your test suite. Whenever you are writing tests to actually test the method, you’re actually writing test to test your code, those kind of tests they fall into category of unit test. An example is like, you might have a function in your [inaudible] which is taking a string import and string has comma separated numbers and after taking that as an import it is stripping the numbers on the string and returning the sum.

Palak Goel: If your unit is like a lot of possible combinations around this method that you can have. Like the import can be empty string or that import of the string can have decimal numbers or fluid numbers or it doesn’t have numbers at all. If you’re actually testing your method with various combinations, those kind of tests they would fall into category of unit test. If anywhere you create unit [inaudible] like model or [inaudible], adapters in your web app and Ember auto generates the file for you.

Palak Goel: You would have to definitely build those test cases on that. Talking about the integration category. Whenever you’re developing a web app, you will be adding component to your applications. An example is like, your web app can contain an image tile where you click on the image and it enlarges and you click again on that image and it restores back to its normal size. If you’re having test cases around a component, a single entity, those would be categorized under integrational rendering test.

Palak Goel: The code category application or the acceptance test, they actually refer to test where you are actually mimicking the user interaction where you are actually mimicking the user story and automating that as your test case. I’m going to give you an example of how can we add an acceptance test case. I have this web app in my local, it’s a super simple web app, it has Super Rentals home page and there is about and contact. You click on about, it’s going to land you on about page. You click on contact, there’s contact page. On Super Rentals home page, you can see the listings of a few different properties.

Palak Goel: Let me tell you the source code is available online on GitHub, so in case you want to explore it after the session, feel free to download the source code and explore it for yourself. Here is the source code for this app and this is where test resides. There is this folder called test and as I mentioned that there are three categories, unit, integration, and acceptance to categorize the test. Let’s try real quick automating a scenario where if a user types about, we want to make sure that he lands into the URL is about and that this about page gets [inaudible] and let’s say that it’s this contact us button on this particular page.

Palak Goel: How would we automate that scenario? First things first is that under acceptance test you would have to create a test file. Either you can create via manually new file or you can use the power of EmberCLI that gets installed when you set up Ember on your end. You would have to install it explicitly. We’re just going to run this command. It’s a simple, simple command which is going to create a file for you. I named my test file as about. You could name it anything you want. This is how the test file got created with a boiler plate called [inaudible] into it. I want to explain these three statements that we have in our record and so the first thing is importing the [inaudible] Q unit. Q unit is the actually test framework that comes by default with Ember.JS.

Palak Goel: There other testing frameworks that are available in market you can use it too, but this one is default. What it does is like you see that there is a third method, this third method has support from Q unit. There are other things that Q unit support is like organization of test, maybe you want to label your test or you want to skip your test. All those organization of test cases, all that support, you can get that from Q unit. The second package that we’re importing over here is Ember test helpers, this is a super important package because it provides you support to mimic all those user interactions that I talked about.

Palak Goel: For example, you want to mimic a click event in your test, that click event comes from this Ember test helper package. A really important point about this is that this package makes sure that whenever an event is run, all these events are asynchronized, so whenever these events are run, it makes sure that Ember is returned into it’s synchronized state. Before execution under the step after the event would make sure that even that has currently been executed is completed. There is a promise that is being returned and then only you move to executing another line. This particular set of line set of application test is helping and [inaudible] the application instance and all these interaction helpers that I just talked about in Ember test helpers.

Palak Goel: You get this test case and what this test is doing is it is just visiting this about URL and making sure that the current URL is this one like /about. You can add test case further and you can just make sure that, as I mentioned we want to automate the scenario where contact us button is getting rendered on this particular page. I have this code already, I’m going to just copy paste it to right [inaudible]. What this set of code is doing is it is finding the DOM element, which is referring to contact us button, this is the CS selector for this particular button and once it finds a button, it is clicking on this particular button. Once you click on it, it is going to navigate user to this particular link so we can add in a solution for that also that user gets navigated to the current URL after the button is clicked is getting in touch.

Palak Goel: One more thing is like the current URL, this support is also again coming from Ember test helper and it is asynchronous helper. This supports both synchronous and asynchronous. Since I’m using this click, I would have to mention that we that we are… We have just created a simple test case where we are trying to automate that if user lands on this about page, there is this particular button and if he clicks on contact us button, he gets to getting in touch page. Now, before I wrap my session up, let’s see how can we run the tests. There is this particular command and where tests are [inaudible], this is going to spend the server [inaudible] and all those test cases that are here in my project are going to run.

Palak Goel: Just going to execute this command and the support for this particular command also comes from CLI. This is how the test server looks like and imagine I had 28 tests including all integration, acceptance, and unit test cases. They all ran in a few milliseconds. If you notice that I have this set of code where I’m mentioning them with you, this helps in actually scoping of your test cases. If you do not want to run all your test cases and you just want to filter out by a particular [inaudible], you can just click it from here and then maybe just apply it just to run the particular test file. That’s what I had, I’m going to wrap my session up now, but let me tell you whatever I just said, it’s very preliminary information, but I hope this can act as a primer and everything that I showed you is open source.

Palak Goel: It’s there on GitHub, the source code file at Ember is open source. You just go ahead and download the source code and install Ember at your end and keep exploring. That’s it.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: We’re going to hand over the mic to Pearl next. Pearl, I’m going to do your intro. Pearl is a Senior Front End Developer at Propeller Health in Wisconsin Madison. Welcome, Pearl.

Pearl Latteier: Thank you. What a fantastic panel. I was really thrilled to be able to hear your experiences.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Can see your screen and we can see your video and hear you so go ahead and get started.

Pearl Latteier: All right. Well, I’m thrilled to be here and thrilled to have just heard that fabulous panel. Let me get started here. My name’s Pearl, I work at a digital health company in Madison, Wisconsin, so a couple hours difference, so it’s almost my bedtime. I won’t doddle. Whoops, sorry. Technical difficulties.

Pearl Latteier: In the next five to seven minutes my goal is to answer for you two questions. First, what is a progressive web app, or PWA, as the cool kids say, and why might you want to build one? I’m not going to talk about how to build one, there’s no code in this presentation. We don’t have time for that, but I’ll point you to some resources to get started.

Pearl Latteier: What is a PWA? A PWA is a website, this website that I’m showing you is a PWA. It’s also the site for a conference that I’m organizing, so you can take a look at that later. But getting back on track, a PWA is a website that can act like a native mobile app in some important and interesting ways. For instance, a PWA is installable. Here’s an image of that website that I showed you installed on my laptop and you can see it looks like any other app that you would have installed. You can also install a PWA on your device’s home screen, it will live like any other app you’ve got on your phone in a little icon and when you click the icon, it will expand without the browser Chrome around it.

Pearl Latteier: It will display just like any other app will display. Not only is it installable, but PWAs work offline and this work offline stuff is super important. This brings us to the heart, really to the magic, of the PWA. The superhero of the PWA is the service worker. A service worker is a web worker, like Spider-Man, but unlike Spider-Man it’s written in JavaScript and it acts as kind of a proxy between your web app and the network. In our normal day to day, our web applications interact directly with servers on the network.

Pearl Latteier: You can drop a service worker in there that can mediate those interactions. Service workers can intercept network requests and this means that some pretty cool things can happen. For example, say your web app makes a request to a server and you’ve got a service worker, the service worker could see that request, pass it onto the server and then when the server responds, the service worker can take whatever assets are in that response. Images, data, HTML, CSS, it can take those assets and tuck them in its cache. The service worker has it’s own cache and it can put assets there and then the next time it receives the same request, the service worker could say, “Oh, well I already have the assets that I need to respond.” So it can just respond with the assets in the cache.

Pearl Latteier: And that’s pretty huge, that means that your application can respond to a request without making a round trip to the network. It can even respond when there is no network access at all. I think that this is super exciting, I think the implications of this are pretty huge. A service worker can make your web application super reliable, regardless of network connectivity, and it can also make your web application super fast. Because the service worker can serve assets from the cache without having to make the round trip to the network, it can load almost instantly if it has the assets it needs in the cache.

Pearl Latteier: Even if you don’t really care about installability, a progressive web app can really help you have great performance. I think that’s pretty cool, right? This is just only scratching the surface. Service workers aren’t the only tech involved in progressive web apps and there’s a lot more that service workers can do. But enough about service workers, let’s talk about you. Should you build a PWA? PWAs aren’t the solution to every problem. For instance, if you need to interact with device APIs that aren’t supported by browsers, then it would make a lot more sense for you to make a native app.

Pearl Latteier: But if your use case allows it, a PWA can be a great alternative to a native app. First it’s a lot cheaper and easier to make one web application than multiple mobile apps plus a website. And in addition, if you’re a web developer rather than a native developer creating a PWA is working with a completely familiar web stack. It’s HTML, JavaScript, CSS. Even if your target isn’t mobile and using the progressive web app techniques can make any web application quicker, more reliable, and installable and all together more awesome. There are lots of resources out there for getting started. These are a few that I would recommend, I would start with the free course on Udacity. It’s a good course and a great place to start. If you have any other questions about resources or anything else, we can do what a good service worker would do and take it offline. Thank you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Pearl.

Angie Chang: We are now going to roll into breakout sessions. We’re going to get off the Zoom and go to a Zoom meeting where the breakout sessions can commence. We’re going to have girl geeks in groups of four to six. This is the feedback we got last time, which is that people like to meet in small groups so we’re going to be doing that! Just follow the link in the chat, it’s also in your email that you received when you signed up for this event. So we will just click on that and head over and meet you at that Zoom meeting. Which is again, the link in the email that confirmed this event at about 5:00 Pacific Time. I’ll see you on the other side!

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

Speaker submissions for Elevate 2021 are now open!

We are seeking session proposals for the 4th Annual Girl Geek X: Elevate 2021 Virtual Conference to be held March 8th, 2021 – inviting women technologists, innovators and tech leaders from around the world to participate in  Elevate to share the latest in tech and leadership with fellow mid-and-senior level professional women.

This virtual conference is FREE for attendees – last year, over 3,000 women signed up to attend – tuning in from 42 countries around the world – to be inspired by speakers on the latest in tech trends and leadership on International Women’s Day.

Sessions may reflect the theme of this year’s conference – “Resilience” – and content typically covers the following topics:

  • Lightning Tech Talks – Dive deep into an area that’s unique / critical to your business or role, from engineer to PM.
  • Technical Skills & Tactics – Tutorials, walkthroughs, or deep dives into a skillset or tactical approach to how you solved a real-world challenge.
  • Learning & Development – Topics include negotiation, mid-career job searches, interviewing tips, managing up the chain of command, self-awareness, management, overcoming ageism / return to work bias, etc.

Work on a unique technical project or have interesting insights you’d love to share with other women & allies? We want to hear from you!

Tip: The best proposals include 3 key takeaways — things attendees can expect to learn from your talk!

Submit your proposal for a talk or panel here by Nov. 2nd, 2020 (11:59pm PT) for 2021 Elevate virtual conference.

Both first-time and experienced speakers are welcome to apply. 

Why Speak at Elevate Virtual Conference?

  • Share the technology you’re working on and tough problems you’re solving.
  • Increase your visibility within your own organization and position yourself as a subject-matter expert in your field.
  • Share what you’ve learned the hard way so that other women can more easily navigate their own careers — your talk will reach thousands of viewers!
  • Highlight issues unique to women in technology/leadership, and issues you’ve experienced or are passionate about.
  • Connect with other great women leaders, peers and mentors.
  • Elevating other women is a fun and rewarding experience.

Female Founders to Watch Building Developer Tools

Here are female founders solving problems for developers. Developer tools run the gamut from Chrome DevTools, to solutions for all kinds of issues. Check out the innovative features these inspiring girl geeks have built for teams!

1 – CodeSee CEO Shanea Leven

Shanea Leven founded CodeSee, a developer platform helping developers and development teams visualize codebases. She has over a 10 years of experience of leading teams, delivering high quality and innovative features for consumers and developers at Google, eBay, and Cloudflare. Follow her on Twitter at @shanealeven.

2 – Noteable CEO Michelle Ufford

Michelle Ufford is Founder & CEO of Noteable.io, an early-stage startup building next-gen analytics infrastructure. Before starting Noteable, she led the Big Data Tools engineering team at Netflix, where she was responsible for platform innovation and analytics tooling for Netflix’s industry-leading data platform. Prior to that, she led data engineering, data management, and platform architecture for GoDaddy, where she set a TPS record for SQL Server and helped pioneer Hadoop data warehousing techniques. Follow her on Twitter at @MichelleUfford.

3 – Instantish Founder Marissa Montgomery

Marissa Montgomery is Founder of Instantish, letting you do your issue tracking in Slack. Before starting Instantish, she led engineering at Zebra Intelligence. Prior to that, she was a senior software engineer at Spoke — and before that, worked at Google as a software engineer. Earlier in her career, she founded Swingset Labs. Follow her on Twitter at @MarissaMary.

4 – Chrysalis Cloud CEO Kate Whitcomb

Kate Whitcomb co-founded Chrysalis Cloud, the first low cost, light-weight streaming platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for real-time video processing and AI. The company was spun out out of smart baby monitor maker Cocoon Health, which used computer vision to inform new parents. Before that, Kate was a partner at HAX hardware accelerator — and before that, she led Growth and Innovation for Target’s Consumer IoT team.

For more inspiring women in tech:

Confluent Girl Geek Dinner Lightning Talks & Fireside Chat (Video + Transcript)

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Transcript of Confluent Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: We have people joining us. Very exciting. Let’s just catch up, Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi.

Angie Chang: Hey, good to see you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Good to see you, as well. Happy Sunday.

Angie Chang: I feel when we were talking about this Confluent, I’m like, “There’s a confluence of events.” We have the pandemic and now we have these California wildfires, and we’re all set to run at any moment, but we’re all here and we’re really excited to host this event with all of these amazing Girl Geek speakers. First of all, I wanted to first talk about why it is so important, and it means so much for women to be speaking about their expertise. When we started Girl Geek dinners, about 12 years ago, we were just so thrilled to have all of these women speaking on stage at places like Google and Facebook, and talking about their expertise, whether it was product design, product management, engineering, venture capital, entrepreneurship. We kept getting all these requests to have more of these events over and over again. Here we are, in 2020, hosting over 250 events, at over 150 companies. Since the pandemic has started, we’ve taken our events online, and we are so thrilled to be able to continue to do this work of bringing amazing women on screen, sharing their expertise and the challenges that they face in the workplace.

Angie Chang: Because as we know in the tech leaver study that the Kapor Center ran, the reason why women and underrepresented people leave tech is because they feel that there is a bias or there is some unfairness. We want to help people understand, and level the playing field so that they can succeed and they can continue to be awesome in the workforce, and with the help of a community. That’s really what we are. We have over 23,000 women now on our mailing list, who are excited to go to events like this and continue to support each other, and share what we learn so that we can help people who are earlier in their career. We don’t always mean earlier as when you’re out of college or anything, but I feel there are so many women that we talk to, who are trying to get back to the workplace after having a kid or two, or care taking responsibilities, and want to help be able to give these women a pathway and inspiration, and connections to make that step, and continue to work in this industry that we love, that’s called tech.

Angie Chang: It’s also super interesting because there’s so many types of job titles. I didn’t know until going to all these events that there were titles like—When I met Sukrutha, she was a software engineer in test. I was like, “Tell me about your awesome job of yours.” Now, she’s an engineering manager. It’s been a super interesting ride to learn so much. I think now, it’s 6:03, so hopefully everyone has joined us. It is our first… This is our second Confluent Girl Geek Dinner. We are so excited to have all of you here. My name is Angie Chang, I am the founder of Girl Geek X. It was formerly known as Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners. Over the years, we have actually expanded what we do beyond dinners, to podcasts, to our annual conference, to all of these different initiatives that we’re actually going to be talking about later. First of all, I’ll introduce Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Thanks Angie. Hi, everyone. I’m Sukrutha, like Angie said. Girl Geek Dinners and now Girl Geek X, the goal is to bring us all closer together, and this is more important now with the pandemic, with all.. I would say, living at work, not even working from home anymore. We have difficult situations, all of us, where we’re not white boarding or in a conference room, and so that opportunity that we would have otherwise had, where we would have been able to network with people within our company, or even across companies, is getting harder and harder. The availability of opportunities, or the visibility of it, reduces when you don’t meet and talk to other people. This is why we’re excited that we’re able to even live in a world where we can do a lot of what we already were doing, virtually. We encourage you to get your companies to sponsor a Girl Geek, a virtual Girl Geek dinner, because with all the craziness of the week, you want to disconnect, and you want to be able to meet other people who are like you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria:That’s the feedback we would oftentimes get from people who would come to their events. They would tell us that it was such a great escape. They would come to these events, meet other cool people, and then feel energized and charged to go back and ask for what they need to do to get that next promotion, and get that next raise, and learn tactics on how to deal with the glass ceiling, or the sticky floor, or the broken rung, or whatever challenges that they might be facing. One of the big topics that keep coming up is the fact that we don’t always notice opportunities because we just don’t even know about them. Sometimes people are often offered opportunities just because they are the first person someone thinks of just because they’re right in front of them. These are things that we definitely deal with through all of our events. Before we go any further, Angie and I always ask this question. Who’s attending a Girl Geek dinner for the first time? Please comment in the chat below if this is your first dinner, virtual or not. We’d love to know.

Angie Chang: Also, we want to do a roll call, see where everyone’s dialing in from today. Berkeley, California here.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. I’m dialing from San Francisco.

Angie Chang: Cool. I see people from the Bay Area. People were texting me talking about packing up their cars and getting ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Thank you for hanging in there with us.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I’m seeing some interesting locations. Mexico City, Sydney, Singapore. Wow. I’m loving this. This is awesome. Auckland, New Zealand. The chats are going so fast I’m doing my best. I’m not a girl, that’s okay we welcome everyone.

Angie Chang: For sure. We do Girl Geek Dinners because we want to give women the opportunity to be on stage as speakers at these events, but they are attended by everybody. We like our allies, and we’re very inclusive at the end of the day. South Korea, thank you for joining us.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Oh, that’s awesome. We’re getting more and more people telling us where they’re from. This is so fascinating to me, to see how the minute we go virtual, we’re able to reach more people, which is part of why we wanted to do our annual conference virtually. That’s why we dropped the tag Bay Area in the first place, because we were going way beyond the Bay Area at that point. Someone’s talking about how their car is packed and ready to evacuate if needed. Good luck and stay safe, everyone. Angie, what’s on your mind right now? Besides the wildfires and the pandemic and the heat.

Angie Chang: Actually, Sukrutha and I have been chatting, she’s been itching to apply to be a Tech Fellow. I looked into the opportunity and I was, “Sukrutha, it’s perfect for you. We could come up with a great talk for you.” At the same time, we get so many Girl Geeks who come to us, really excited to become speakers, who want to be able to share their story, figure out their own narrative, and to be able to be established as an expert or a leader, or a speaker. We’re actually putting together, right now, the beginnings of a program that will be launching this Fall, that we’re piloting for small groups of women who are like minded and with similar goals, to meet several times to help each other get to that next level, and create that narrative and establish those goalposts, so that they can go toward it and have accountability buddies. Stay tuned for that, we’re really excited. Let us know via email or Twitter, if you are interested in this. This is something that we are planning on announcing in the next month, so stay tuned.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Angie and I were also talking about how, for me, I was consistently… Initially, I would have that one goal, and then I would go after it and then I would have this void. It was really important to me to continuously move the goalposts that I had in the first place, but also appreciate the one that I just accomplished. Think about that, think about your goals, but also appreciate how far you’ve come. Oftentimes, I feel once I passed the goal, I’m like, “Oh, that wasn’t that hard.” And I discount it, but it’s pretty impressive every time you look back to see how far you’ve come. Don’t forget to do that in respect to that regard, too.

Angie Chang: For sure. We are actually going to have to move on to tonight’s Confluent Girl Geek speakers. We have an exciting night of women giving lightning talks and then a fireside chat. Stay tuned for that. Our first speaker is Anna McDonald. She is going to… Sorry. Anna McDonald has over 20 years of experience, and she will be speaking tonight to us about how popular and necessary event streaming has become.

Anna McDonald: Hi, everyone. I’m going to go ahead and share my own screen here. All right. How’s that looking? Good?

Angie Chang: Looks great.

Anna McDonald: All right. Excellent. I’m here, I’m going to talk about event streaming in seven minutes or less. Hopefully, people will time me because I timed myself and I made it three out of four times. I am a customer success technical architect at Confluent. Hello. There we go.

Anna McDonald: Prior to this, I was a principal software developer at SAS Institute for 16 years, which is a super long time for most people to stay at one job. Then I met Kafka two years ago, I like to talk about her like it’s a person, but it’s not, I know that. I’m well aware. I’m working on it. And decided to work on it full time at Confluent. I’ve been here for almost a year, and I love it. I could not love it any more.

Anna McDonald: Other things about me, I love event streaming, integration architecture, and I take horrible photos. I like this slide because I just want anyone else out there who also takes horrible photos to know you’re not alone. That’s about me.

Anna McDonald: The way that I want to run this presentation is, we’re going to start and talk about three of the most popular patterns in event streaming. Then we’re going to talk about how you might bring that into your organization. And then we’re going to talk about once you’ve decided to do that, and you know what events to track, what goes into an event in terms of a schema. What’s important to track, no matter what. Let’s get started.

Anna McDonald: The first event pattern that’s pretty popular is event notification. And that’s where you just kind of throw out an event and that’s it, you’re done. This could be something like, “Hey, an address got updated.” Or, “Hey, an order was placed.” Maybe there’s something in your organization that you need to do every time someone places an order, no matter what. It’s very simple. It’s easy. It’s a great first step for eventing, and this is one of the main ways people get started into events.

Anna McDonald: The next one is event carried state transfer. That’s where you go one step further and you say something like, “Okay, I’m not only going to tell you that an address was changed, but I’m going to give you enough information about that change to let people downstream update, maybe a local cache, or a steet store.” That really becomes a more valuable event. Then the third one that people talk about quite often is event sourcing. Event sourcing is very, very wonderful, and very, very complex. It’s not a good fit for everybody. It basically comes down to tracking every single change that’s ever happened to an entity.

Anna McDonald: The way to know if you’re doing it is, is your state optional. However your application is maintaining state. Can you blow that away and then rebuild it from an event store? If you can’t, you’re not fully event sourced. This can be great if you want to time travel. Me, for example, I would love to time travel back to March 13th, before the pandemic ended, and maybe play out these things a little differently. That would be good. Maybe, I’m thinking. In an organizational setting, a lot of times people want to do things like, “Hey, let me test this new model for energy pricing, or demand, or on older data and see if we can make it more accurate.” If you need to do things like that, event sourcing might be for you.

Anna McDonald: What do you do now that you say, “Okay, well I want to bring a eventing into my space.” There are three things that I recommend everybody does. One, know the events that matter. Nothing is more important than being prepared. Don’t ever just dive in. There’s something, it’s a process called event storming. It’s where you get together with all your lines of business and you say, “Okay, I know that most of us care about addresses. We need them to do our jobs. We want to know and what states we’re doing well. What else do we care about? And what do we need to know to act on it?” You get everybody together, you decide what events are important. They should be things in plain English, again. And then you can act from there. The second is to know your systems. If you don’t know where these things happen, you’re going to fail. It’s not very valuable to track orders placed 50% of the time. You need to make sure you understand what systems these events occur in.

Anna McDonald: Then here’s my next most important capture, broad categories of events. Don’t be narrow. If somebody says, “Look, we have a new mandate. And that mandate says, we got to know every time an order is placed in Italy.” Grab every order, every time an order is placed. You can filter later downstream if you need to, to just have orders from Italy. If you’re going to go ahead and do that work, make sure you make it count. Always grab a big categories. Once you have this wonderful stuff, and you know, “Oh, I want to event. This is how I’m going to do it. This is what’s important to my organization.” What does that event look like? This is a common question I get asked all the time. What should go in an event? I will tell you, right now. One of them is the name. You have to have a name for your event, that’s just common sense, don’t be silly. It should be something in plain English, like I said, or plain whatever language that you want to communicate in. It doesn’t have to be English. It could be any language, but the name should be order placed, address updated, something that makes sense.

Anna McDonald: The next is event production time. Here’s where it’s going to get just a little bit complex. There’s absolutely no guarantee that the system that throws this event, is the system it happened in. That would be way too restrictive. There are patterns like derivative events where you can derive events from change data capture from a database, so there’s no guarantee that a decoupling hasn’t occurred, that you’re going to need to know what time the event was produced, as opposed to what time the event actually happened. There could be a disconnect there, and both are really important things to track.

Anna McDonald: The next is source systems. I really dig legacy applications, more to the point, I really dig killing them and retiring them, and having people get to work on new fancy employable things. I like to call the source system an old evil application. I also like dinosaurs. Then, event creation system. Again, the system that created the event might not necessarily be the same system it was thrown it. Then your detail block. This is going to be what makes that event storming all worth it. You’re going to have the information that you need to make these events valuable, to multiple lines of business. They’re all going to love it. “This is just fantastic. I’m so happy. That’s it. Time. I think I made it. Now, I’m done. Thanks, everybody.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. That was awesome. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much, Anna. That was really insightful. I want to introduce our next speaker, Leslie Kurt. Leslie joined Confluent as a field engineer and will share how through self exploratory and networking, pivoted her career path to product management. Welcome, Leslie. This is definitely a talk a lot of us, we definitely want to hear how you can move from one role to the next. I know product management is something that a lot of people are interested in. It will be fascinating to learn how Leslie’s navigated and adjusted that way. A lot of good comments for Anna. People commenting on how exciting and interesting your doc was, Anna. Welcome, Leslie.

Leslie Kurt: Welcome. Thank you for having me, as well. One second. I’m trying to get the screen to share. Does that look all right?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, looks good.

Leslie Kurt: Awesome. Well, hello everyone. I am Leslie Kurt and I am a product manager here at Confluent. A little bit about my background. I have worked at two different companies, and I’ve had two different roles at each company. My bio really tees up my presentation today, as I will be talking about how to navigate an internal career transition. Specifically, I’m going to talk about my most recent internal career transition, where I moved from a sales engineer to a product manager role here at Confluent.

Leslie Kurt: First off, I want to provide a little context and background as to what motivated my internal transition. Both times that I made a career transition it was based on what day to day activities made me the happiest at the end of the day. Throughout my career, I have periodically and consistently checked in and asked myself the following questions. What makes me happy? What do I want to learn? What am I good at? What challenges me?

Leslie Kurt: Every couple of months, I would sit down and write down all the projects, interactions, tasks, that answer these questions for me. As I started to compile this list over time, I realized that this list of things really answered the question of what career path should I take for me?

Leslie Kurt: If I think back to where I was about a year ago today, I recall some of the things that helped lead me to want to make this transition from sales to product. I had learned that I really liked talking to customers, and working with new technologies. I knew that one of my strengths was my empathy, and advocating for customers. I knew that I liked solving problems and figuring out how to make a solution work for a customer, but I was also really interested in improving the product and how to influence the direction of the product to improve the experience for the customer.

Leslie Kurt: I also knew that I missed building things from back when I was a software engineer, and I wanted to figure out a way to incorporate that back into my day to day. As I looked at these individual pieces, I realized that these types of activities described the day to day role of a product manager. I realized that it might be time for a career transition.

Leslie Kurt: Before I made any rash moves to change my career path, I wanted to make sure that this was the right move for me. I decided to dip my toes in the product manager pond. I did this by finding more ways to interact with the product managers in my company.

Leslie Kurt: When a new product was released, I would reach out to the PM who had launched that product, and ask them questions on what it took to build that product, what types of decisions and trade offs they made, and what their role was in the release. I even collected some customer feedback from some of our different products and presented it to a few product managers to try to put myself in their shoes and see if this was the right role for me.

Leslie Kurt: After observing, and even trying out some of these day to day activities of a product manager, I reflected on the experiences I had had. I sat down again and asked myself the same four questions from before. What makes me happy? What do I want to learn? What am I good at? What challenges me? It was also important, at this point, for me to reflect on if I wanted to make the transition within Confluent, or if I wanted to join another company. For me, I really loved the company culture here at Confluent and the direction I could see the product going. 

Leslie Kurt: I also had a good understanding of the culture of the product team here. I could see myself fitting in well with that team. After reflecting, it became pretty clear to me that this role, product management, was what completed my puzzle, and that I knew that I wanted to stay at Confluent. So I decided to make moves towards an internal transition.

Leslie Kurt: The first thing that I did was talk to my manager. This wasn’t and isn’t an easy conversation, but I knew that transparency was key when navigating an internal transition. A few tips in bringing up this conversation are, one, expressing interest early. As I was dipping my toes in the product manager pond, I let my manager know that I liked working closely with product management. I liked completing this feedback loop between our customers and the product team.

Leslie Kurt: Second, is that internal transitions are beneficial to the company. My experience on the sales team would help provide a unique and valuable perspective to the product team. Third, it was important for me to reassure my manager that having a seamless transition was a priority to me and that I was willing to put in the work to ensure that the team was left in good hands.

Leslie Kurt: Now that I had talked to my manager, it was time to reach out to my network within Confluent and express interest for the new role. But after expressing interest, I realized that it was also important to be patient. With internal transitions, timing was everything.

Leslie Kurt: My goal was to put myself out there so that if and when an opportunity arose, I would be the first person they would consider for a job. After a period of time, I was lucky enough that a position opened up. I went through the application and the interview process, just like any other candidate. I will caveat that interviewing for a position with coworkers you already work closely with is a bit strange, but all in all, it went well. I was offered the job.

Leslie Kurt: Now, it was time to figure out how to make the transition seamless. I had promised my manager that was a priority for me, and it was. One thing that helped me a ton in this process was having a hard stop on my role as a sales engineer and a clear start date for my role as a product manager. I wanted to provide my best self to both teams. I realized that I couldn’t have one foot in both roles and still provide my best work. I negotiated a start date that would provide me enough time to wrap up loose ends and train my replacement on the sales side so that when I started my first day on the product team, I could really hit the ground running and devote all of my attention to the new role in my new team.

Leslie Kurt: One problem I had not foreseen was the difficulties I would have adjusting to the new role. Over the last two years, I had known myself as, and other people had known me as a sales engineer. Then, one day, thanks to my hard transition date, I showed up and was now a product manager. I found myself continuing to play the sales role, just now, on the product team. I thought like a sales engineer. I asked sales questions, and I was constantly putting myself back in my old role. While this was a potentially valuable perspective on my new team, it was not allowing me to embrace the new role. I realized that I really had to reframe the way that I thought about problems, so I watched other PMs on my team and how they thought about problems, phrased questions, et cetera, in order to reprogram my brain for the new role.

Leslie Kurt: Lastly, internal transitions are not easy. I could not have done it alone. I was extremely fortunate to have many coworkers and friends, willing and available to provide me advice, guidance, and reassurance during this process. So thank you to Brandalyn Powell, who had navigated an internal career transition at Confluent before me and provided endless advice on how to navigate the transition. Thanks to Dani Traphagen, who was a mentor to me from day one at Confluent, and has continued to be a mentor to me after the transition. Thanks to Larry McQueary, who was my sales engineering manager, for being supportive in helping me pursue the career that I wanted, and to Mike Agnich, who really helped me navigate the product management process and transition. With that, thank you, everyone, for listening. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you all today.

Angie Chang: That was really great, Leslie. That was, I think, really illustrative of how someone can advocate for the role that they want and then get the right help that they need to get there. We had some questions about, for example, how would you advise a Girl Geek on finding the support within the company, or, if not within her company, if her manager says no, how can this person still be able to gain the skills that they need to become a product manager or a different job?

Leslie Kurt: Yeah. I think when I was looking for people to provide advice and mentorship during the internal transition, I looked for, one, mentors that I’d already had in the company. I think building those up from the day that you start is important so that you have them available to you when you need some guidance. The other thing I did was, I looked for other individuals within Confluent who had actually gone through the process before so that I could really understand the inner workings within Confluent and what that process looked like.

Angie Chang: Cool. Awesome. Thank you so much. We’re going to move on to our next speaker, Victoria. For anyone, who’s curious, please use our Q&A feature. It is a little button down below that says Q&A. You can ask a question to our speakers. You can upvote them so that we get the best questions out of the crowd, and we can ask the speaker for you. Let’s see, where is Victoria?

Victoria Xia: Awesome.

Angie Chang: Great.

Victoria Xia: Let me pull up my slides here.

Angie Chang: I’ll introduce you. Victoria hopes to encourage open conversation by sharing her experiences and counter-tactics she’s found helpful in combating negative patterns of thinking, a common phenomena of imposter syndrome. Welcome, Victoria.

Victoria Xia: Thanks, Angie. Can you see my slides?

Angie Chang: Yes.

Victoria Xia: Awesome. As you now know, my name is Victoria. I am a software engineer at Confluent working on the event streaming database, ksqlDB.

Victoria Xia: My freshman year of high school, I somehow made it onto the varsity tennis team where I was the worst player by a noticeable margin. I was frustrated with my performance and didn’t enjoy the sport as a result. I also felt out of place on the team, since my teammates had all been playing for many years, whereas I’d only learned recently. I felt like I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t. After a particularly rough practice session, where it seemed as if less than half of my shots went in, I shared my frustrations with my coach. His response was, “Hey, remember when you started? Almost none of your shots went in.” I said, “Gee, thanks. That makes me feel a lot better.” But sarcasm aside, he was right.

Victoria Xia: I’d been so caught up in my current performance. I’d forgotten how far I’d come. I’d forgotten to enjoy myself along the way. What I learned from this first exposure to imposter syndrome is that if you’re a perfectionist like me, you’ll never be satisfied with where you are, but that doesn’t mean you need to beat yourself up over it. Don’t forget to step back, look holistically, and acknowledge your strengths and the progress you’ve made in addition to seeing your weaknesses.

Victoria Xia: Fast forward to 2018, a couple of weeks before my master’s thesis deadline. I was frantically assembling plots and turning outwards when I learned that the startup I’d signed a full-time offer to join after graduating, had been acquired by a company called Confluent. That was the first I’d heard of Apache Kafka or event streaming. I was unsurprisingly behind the curve when I started at Confluent a few weeks later. It didn’t help that this was before Confluent’s first new grad recruiting season, which meant I was the only new grad engineer at the company.

Victoria Xia: It was intimidating to be surrounded by people who knew more and had more experience than me, but it was also an amazing opportunity to learn. I was lucky to have a manager who emphasized the importance of focusing on learning, rather than feeling pressure to get things done. He explained it’d be better for both me and the team in the long run if I took things slow and ramped up on solid foundations, rather than rushing to get things done with partial understanding. He couldn’t have been more right. I eventually ramped up.

Victoria Xia: Things got better, before taking a turn for the worst. Because Confluent was doubling in size each year, that meant, when I was less than a year out of school, I’d already been at the company longer than half the other employees and was seen as a veteran, though I definitely didn’t feel like one. I felt like tasks that took me weeks could have been done by any of my teammates in a matter of days and found myself working long hours in an attempt to make up for the difference. My manager said I was doing fine. I wanted to believe him but found it hard to accept. It turns out these thought patterns are common enough to have a name, the imposter cycle.

Victoria Xia: The cycle starts with a task or anything on which our performance may be measured. This triggers worry and typically leads to either procrastination or over preparation. Once the task has been completed, we reject any praise or positive feedback, dismissing it as luck or something else outside our control, which allows us to repeat the cycle with the next task. To break the cycle, we first need to realize it’s happening in order to stop encouraging thoughts like, “What if I disappoint?” and, “I just got lucky this time,” and instead accept our accomplishments and say, “I can do this,” knowing that it’s okay and totally normal to sometimes slip up.

Victoria Xia: Additionally, the most effective countermeasure, in my experience, is sharing how I’m feeling with others and realizing I’m not alone. One day, during lunch at the office, pre-COVID, of course, I ran into a friend on a different team who was a few years older than me. As we caught up, I was amazed to learn she was feeling all the same things I was. Perceived pressure to deliver, even though her manager said otherwise, feeling behind her more experienced peers, and working longer hours as a result. I couldn’t believe someone I so admired, and looked up to, shared my insecurities. I felt suddenly more okay with myself and was able to break the imposter cycle in doing so.

Victoria Xia: A big part of imposter syndrome is feeling alone, but we can counter that by finding friends, family, and colleagues to serve as personal cheerleaders who we can share our feelings with. Unfortunately, imposter feelings can be hard to talk about, since at its heart is the fear that others will realize we’re frauds. Sharing our insecurities feels like it might contribute to that, but personal cheerleaders help overcome this by making us feel safe and not alone.

Victoria Xia: So to recap, overcoming imposter syndrome starts with identifying what’s happening. A few weeks ago, I received an email asking whether I’d like to give a lightning talk, with the Confluent Girl Geek X event. I was excited, but also a bit apprehensive since I couldn’t think of a topic I felt qualified to talk about, particularly to an audience with more industry experience, tech experience, and life experience than me. I fought these doubts by thinking about my strengths and choosing a topic I feel strongly about and reframed my fear of failure as an opportunity to expand my comfort zone and grow. Rather than worrying about audience members being disappointed, I focused on the fact that if my talk helps even a handful of people overcome imposter syndrome, then that’s wonderful.

Victoria Xia: Of course, I shared how I felt with my friends and with the event organizers too. Their validation gave me the confidence to be here today, which I’m extremely grateful for, since one of the most harmful consequences of imposter syndrome is to cause us to give up opportunities we might otherwise take. That said, while these strategies for beating the imposter are powerful, they also have their limits. If you find yourself in a toxic environment, where those around you put you down or belittle you, it’s better to address or leave the situation than focus on internal reframing. Additionally, it may be prudent to seek professional help, especially if your physical or mental health are suffering.

Victoria Xia: To sum up, focus on your own progress and growth rather than comparing yourself to others, watch out for the perfectionism trap, and remember that imposter syndrome is common when starting something new, or if you perceive yourself as different from those around you in any way. Acknowledge your strengths in addition to your weaknesses, reframe intimidation and fear as learning opportunities and chances to grow, know that it’s okay to mess up sometimes, find personal cheerleaders to talk to. Remember you’re not alone. Go grab that opportunity you’ve been wanting to take. Thanks.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Victoria. That was an excellent talk on imposter syndrome and breaking out of that cycle. We do have a question for you from Puja. She asks, “Do you think imposter syndrome is mostly seen in women?” She relates to this feeling. Most boys around her know less but are very confident.

Victoria Xia: Funny that this is asked, actually. In digging into this talk, I did look at the academic research. It’s pretty split. Earlier studies suggest that imposter feelings are more common in women. More recent studies are more ambiguous about it. In terms of my personal experiences, I think, for me, it’s any time I’m in a situation where I feel like the odd one out. That could be being in tech, in an industry that is male-dominated, it makes total sense for women to feel more this way, or in situations where it’s hard to point to leaders or success stories that look like me. Again, it’s depending on the industry. It makes a lot of sense.

Angie Chang: For sure, I think you had the example about the tennis. When you played tennis, was it girls’ tennis?

Victoria Xia: It was girls’ tennis, yeah. In that case, the reason I felt different was just because I was new to the sport. It was definitely an internal feeling rather than my teammates making me feel different or anything like that. That was enough to trigger it.

Angie Chang: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. It seems to really have resonated with a lot the girl geeks in the audience. I think we have time for one more question. Someone asked, “Would you suggest sharing your feelings with coworkers, managers, or people on your team? Why or why not?”

Victoria Xia: I think my metric is just whoever I’m comfortable with. I have my go-to friends and family members, of course. If I have friends at the office or people who I can trust to understand where I’m coming from, rather than to misinterpret, or even worse, accidentally spread information that I wouldn’t want to be spread, then I find that those are great people to talk too. I guess my advice there would be to trust your instincts. I think we tend to have pretty good reads on who’s trustworthy and who we want to open up to. If you think someone’s trustworthy, then I’d say give it a shot, even though it can be scary to talk about.

Angie Chang: Thank you. Let’s see. I think that’s all the questions we have time for. Thank you, Victoria, for joining us and giving us a great talk. Now, we will be moving on to our next speaker.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Angie. Evelyn Bayes is our next speaker. In terms of a quick intro, Evelyn will share her many experiences of coming out, the benefits of living an open life, and some helpful strategies to achieve it. Welcome, Evelyn.

Evelyn Bayes: Hey, thank you. My talk is “Coming Out at the Workplace”. A little bit about me, I’ve been at Confluent for roughly two years now, in the last year as a manager. Prior to that, I was with a mobile service provider named Instaclustr, and then Accenture before that. No formal education as a software engineer, but instead I taught myself after taking a related class in the last year of uni.

Evelyn Bayes: If you’re not LGBT, you might be wondering, “Cool topic, but this doesn’t apply to me.” But actually, most people go through a coming out experience at some point in their life. Some people go through many, and plenty of these happen at the workplace. For one person, their coming out experience might be letting their boss know that they suffer from mental health issues. For another, it might be telling a colleague they’re dealing with domestic violence. These coming out experiences have different subjects, but the reason for people staying silent and coming out are often very similar.

Evelyn Bayes: In this talk, I’d like to share some of the lessons learned on coming out from the queer community, why you should consider coming out, and how these lessons learned can be applied to your situation. Before we get into things, I thought I’d share a few more details that my About Me left out. First, I’m bisexual. Second, I’m transgender. Third, I suffer from major depressive disorder. These are all things I’ve had to come out about at some point, sometimes more than once. Granted coming out as transgender felt like a bit of a bigger deal at the time, but I think coming out gets easier the more times you do it. Either way, I’ve learned from my mistakes. I’d like to share that experience with you.

Evelyn Bayes: Now you know that coming out is something that applies to you, you might be thinking, “Okay, why should I come out though?” Well, first, you’ll feel better. I’m not saying it’s easy, but I can say, at the bare minimum, you’ll feel free. Free of the burden of keeping a part of you and your experience secret. Second, and more importantly, you’ll have access to support. Many workplaces have a number of policies and resources in place for people going through a range of life experiences. These include provisions for carers leave, access to counselors, heck, my partner gets gender diversity leave that covers things like dealing with paperwork associated with transitioning, surgery, and a range of other things.

Evelyn Bayes: Third, you’ll have access to community within the workplace. I personally know at least two other trans women at Confluent. No one else is going to get my weird pickle jokes. I swear. It’s a thing. Ask a trans girl. Finally, there’s pride. Pride in being out. Pride in being visible. Nothing beats knowing you’re the reason someone felt safe to speak up. Safe to be themselves. Safe to seek help. This happens more than you’d think. I’ve been on both ends of this. Earlier this year, I had a girl reach out to me a few months after I gave a speech at Accenture. My own experience of coming out as trans, it had given them their own courage to begin their own journey coming out in the workforce. You’ve been listening to me ramble for a bit. Now, we’re at the crux of it, so let’s keep it short.

Evelyn Bayes: Step one, find resources. You’re going to want something short, a good one-pager on the subject of your coming out experience. You’re going to want to be able to link people to it on demand. What’s pansexual? Is that someone who loves pans? Link. What are your pronouns, or what are pronouns? Link. What is it like being someone who suffers from whatever? Link. Nothing is more cruel than the burden placed on people going through these coming out experiences, than the expectation that they educate every man and his dog on the topic. Don’t do it. Make them teach themselves.

Evelyn Bayes: Step two, find an ally. This might be a favorite work colleague, a manager, or someone who just feels safe. I, personally, stress seriously considering anyone with the phrase “diversity and inclusion” in their title. Those people kick ass. My all-time biggest coming out success was with my friend and colleague, Rachel. She was with me every step of the way. She fought so many of my battles. Today, she advises on global policies for gender diversity at Accenture. Rachel’s a rock star.

Evelyn Bayes: Step three, create a plan. A plan can be as simple as a few dot points to discuss with your manager, or as complex as an organization-wide email followed by an instructor-led educational session for your team with a Q&A, while you take a much-needed vacation, but a plan is vital. Also, that is legit what they offered me at Accenture and so much regret for not taking it.

Evelyn Bayes: Step four, do it. But in case you still need a little inspiration or you need to see it in a practice, on top of being bisexual, transgender, and suffering from major depressive disorder, I’m also non-monogamous, sometimes referred to as polyamorous. For me, that means I’m in a loving relationship with my partner, and also with my other partner, both of whom have other loving relationships of their own. If you want to know more about non-monogamy, I suggest checking out www.morethantwo.com. In particular, I’d suggest checking out their frequently asked questions page. For anyone working at Confluent, please feel free to talk to Sam Hecht. He’s been given the rundown. Have a lovely day. Everyone and good luck with your own coming out experiences.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Evelyn. When you get the chance, you must read the comments, some really, really amazing comments. I want to just read out one that says… Kathy says she’s watching with their eight-year-old daughter and 11-year-old non-binary kid. They’re finding this really helpful too. The 11-year-old plays hockey with mostly boys, so related to a lot of what you spoke about. Thank you. This has been helpful.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: And for people who want to be allies as well. So we have one question from Elizabeth. Evelyn who were some of your champions in coming out at work? How did your manager support you? I think this will be helpful for us to know how to support our colleagues and coworkers?

Evelyn Bayes: Yeah. So first of all, my friend, Rachel that I mentioned, so she worked with me on my first job at Accenture and she was actually the first person I came out to out of anyone, not just in the workforce, as trans. And so she, like I said, she fought so many battles for me. She represented me in so many different ways, helped me some steps through it. But in other places, I think Confluent’s probably a good example. With Confluent, I guess I never felt the need to come out as trans. it’s just I’ve always been very open about being trans and the big things that they do is they just, they support me when people get pronouns wrong or things like that. And it’s really just normalized, but a good example would be coming out as non-monogamous to my boss, which was quite a scary experience.

Evelyn Bayes: And he was the first person I came out to at Confluent, but was just generally supportive. And when I told him about this, he was thrilled about it. And he’s also just stepped up as the executive or one of the executive sponsors of the LGBT inclusion program as part of a Confluence diversity and inclusion program. I’m not sure if I’m getting the wording on that right. But I think a lot of people are just, they’re ready to step up and be supportive. People will amaze you. Probably my favorite story is and I’ll try and keep it really quick.

Evelyn Bayes: When coming out at Accenture, I remember having this colleague who was devoutly Muslim and would pray morning and evening and afte. I came out — at the time, it was so uncomfortable because I was a bodybuilder and had just gotten rid of my beard. And it was a pretty traumatizing experience, but he came up to me and took me aside and said that if I ever needed anything, he was always available and there to be supportive and people really care.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Oh, that’s lovely. Someone else commented that they’re non-monogamous. So definitely when you get the chance please do take a look at the chat. So many good comments for you. Quickly, one last question. What is something you think people shouldn’t ask or shouldn’t say? What’s the one thing that people ask you and you feel like, “Oh my gosh, don’t.”

Evelyn Bayes: There’s always one with everything. Like I said, I got that question. When I came out as pans, like pansexual to colleagues. I remember them joking about pansexual being people who are attracted to pans. I’ve had a lot of people… The big one for me, which always blows my mind, is when people ask me about what I’m going, what surgeries I’m going to go get with my body parts. And I’m like, it is no more appropriate for you to ask me about my genitals as it would be for me to ask you about your genitals. So you start. But I think just asking for good educational research and doing the research yourself is good. There’s so much burden placed on people when they’re coming out. And it’s so unfair to get these questions all the time.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Of course. Yeah, definitely. So I had a feeling that’s what you would say when I asked this question. So thank you so much, Evelyn, for your honesty, for the education you just provided. All right. So thank you. That was a great talk.

Evelyn Bayes: Absolute pleasure.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So up next.. What you would have seen as in person getting off the stage and getting on the stage is what you’re seeing right now. Our next speaker is Candace. Blackfluent is the name of the Black and African American community Slack channel at Confluent. Candace and other black employees are taking it to employee resource group status, which is awesome. Welcome, Candace.

Candace Garton-Mullen: Thank you. Can everyone hear me? Wonderful. So as you can see here, hopefully on my screen. I am the Executive Business Partner, which most of you know as executive assistant and I work with Roger Scott at Confluent. Which you can see here on this next slide. I’ve been a business partner to Roger Scott, starting at New Relic. And now at Confluent for the last few years, I’m not…

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Candace, sorry to interrupt. We can’t yet see your slides. You need to share your screen.

Candace Garton-Mullen: Oh, so sorry. Let me go backwards. I’ll share my screen. And there we go. Now, can you see my slides?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. I can see your slides now.

Candace Garton-Mullen: Wonderful. Okay. Moving forward then. This is the slide that I’d gotten to was talking about my partnership with Roger Scott. I will, again, be back to this slide later on. So I’m going to move past that.

Candace Garton-Mullen: First, I think it’s important to explain what Blackfluent is. In the literal sense. The word is a combination of ‘black’ and ‘confluent’ as a result of the company name. Plus the focus group name. To me personally, it means how to speak to your black colleagues, peers, and community members. Taking you back to the beginning of my journey. This is my very first day of kindergarten in 1984. That’s my mom and my almost four year old little brother helping me onto the bus. My father was taking a photo.

Candace Garton-Mullen: After stepping on the bus. I looked for a place to sit down and for the first time in my life, I heard the utterance of this word… A little boy called Danny was the little boy who spewed the word at me and caused me to wander up and down the aisles of the bus. Very much like the scene from the beginning of Forrest Gump, I eventually ended up sitting in the front seat, which was reserved for students with disabilities, which I didn’t know at the time. I sat next to a young man called Eric that had mild form of cerebral palsy. Eric was my first friend and he taught me a lot about humility in the years to come.

Candace Garton-Mullen: After school that day I went home, told my parents what happened, which prompted what we call ‘the talk’. ‘The talk’ is the formation of what becomes a natural understanding of the way that the world works when you’re a child. A world that our ancestors were thrust into and that we inherited.

Candace Garton-Mullen: This creates a dynamic in which we culturally were taught, what was expected and proper of us to blend in a white owned world. In other words, we are all ‘whitefluent’, regardless of if we choose to behave in a manner that shows that or one that potentially helps us in the world, we are taught and aware of how we need to behave should we decide to.

Candace Garton-Mullen: Moving along to my journey to high school. This is Hudson high school in Hudson, Ohio. Hudson is a small middle class, upper middle upper class suburb in Ohio, which is extremely similar to the dynamic of Palo Alto. If you’re from California. You can see by the demographics taken from the year 2000 in the upper right hand corner, that I was the literal minority in my high school. Especially at that time in 1997, when I went. Specifically, you can see me swimming in the sea of my senior classmates.

Candace Garton-Mullen: And if you can’t find me yet, I’m right there. More importantly on the day that this picture was taken, it’s the same day that everybody signs yearbooks, passes around school pictures and hopefully gets one from their crush. I received one from someone who is not my crush, but I think I might’ve been his. Kyle passed me this picture at the end of homeroom. On the last day of school and disappeared before I had a chance to process the PS. “I’ve always wanted to tell you that you’re super pretty for a black girl.” I know what Kyle was trying to say. Unfortunately, the veiled insult in the comics took precedence even in my 18 year old mind. Kyle was definitely not Blackfluent. At the time. I didn’t realize how desensitized I was to things like this, because it’s just the way that things have always been.

Candace Garton-Mullen: After high school, college, and a decade in the legal field in Ohio. I moved to San Francisco. When I arrived. I leaned on the same tools that worked for me in Ohio. I learned that I was able to move forward really quickly and blend, as many of us do, if I wear my hair straight, instead of curly. These quotes were taken from an article written in 2013. So you can imagine how much more applicable they were in the eighties and the nineties. The fear of wearing my hair in its natural state of curls in corporate America was really real. And as I mentioned, it followed me to the bay area wherein I wear my hair straight for every interview. And for the majority of my 10 years at Salesforce, Lyft, and Ripple. It wasn’t until I arrived at New Relic and began working alongside of Roger Scott, that I was encouraged to bring my authentic self to work. And then again, encouraged to bring that same authenticity with me to Confluent.

Candace Garton-Mullen: I’m very thankful to Roger and to New Relic in general, either way. When Roger asked me to join him at Confluent, I was extremely nervous that I would be sliding backwards into the blending. But a few weeks after joining the company, I was approached by the head of diversity and inclusion team and asked about the possibility of forming an employee resource group. Now known as Blackfluent. Within those efforts. Our newly forming resource group came up with the following mission statement. The mission statement is to grow and empower the black communities within and outside of Confluent while fostering meaningful action from allies.

Candace Garton-Mullen: We want to promote understanding through community engagement. Promote awareness through professional development. Demote discomfort through encouraging a sense of belonging. Demote misunderstanding through allyship. Offering a safe space to engage. And some of the ways we plan to do this are through the Executive Sponsorship using our executive sponsors and their connections to get the things that we need to make this group work for us and for the employees. The equal opportunities in organizations with career counselors and such. Observing other mentorship programs from other companies to get ideas about how we can help the people in our company and grow inside and then outside, when they’re not even at work and community building and leveraging resources from previous jobs. It’s really important to the group, it’s leaders, and me specifically to create a space where any, and everyone can be Blackfluent, should they wish. And I look forward to working with my colleagues at Confluent to provide a space where they can do that, learn and grow and thank you all for your time.

Angie Chang: Hey, that was really awesome. Thank you, Candace.

Candace Garton-Mullen: Thank you.

Angie Chang: We have a question for you from Valerie. She asks ‘Do you like the idea of the word ‘Blackfluent’ becoming mainstream vocabulary because it’s such a positive word and fluent has a connotation of being well-read in a subject and fluent indicates someone that has taken the time to study the subject as opposed to generally getting it?’

Candace Garton-Mullen: Yes, absolutely. That specifically I came up with the word Blackfluent. So it means even more if it were to go mainstream because it’s like hashtag Blackfluent, my word, but also obviously the bigger implications of that being that it would be so great if we can make that a mainstream word that people use to represent that type of inclusion and the way that they can speak to their peers with comfort. That would mean a lot.

Angie Chang: Awesome.

Candace Garton-Mullen: Absolutely.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Candace.

Candace Garton-Mullen: Thank you.

Angie Chang: Great. And now we’ll be moving to our last speaker of the evening, Tejal. She will be speaking about being pregnant and networking. It can be hard, but being new at both is altogether a different ball game. So Tejal will be sharing her CPR technique to ease you through the bump and help you deliver like a boss.

Tejal Adsul: Oh, thanks for the awesome intro. Hi everyone I’m Tejal Adsul and today I’m going to share my journey of working while pregnant. So a little about myself. I did my undergrad from Pune University and Master’s from Arizona State with specialization in software security. And after graduation, I joined Intel and was pretty much working on securing data trust for solid state drives. And after working for a couple of years for a big giant, I was highly motivated to join a startup. And so I went ahead and I joined Springpath, but my startup dream was pretty short lived because we were soon acquired by Cisco and I was back with the big giants. And so now I joined Confluent, another startup, and I’m mostly working on platform wide security features for the conference platform.

Tejal Adsul: So as most of y’all must have heard the famous saying that be careful what you wish for you will get it, but be even more careful what you work for, for you will get it even more quickly. And I like to call it my year 2018 as my genie year, because it was determined to grant me all my wishes. Well, not all, but most of them. So when I was looking to join a startup in the year 2017, I joined for a software engineering position at Confluent. But unfortunately, by the time I applied, that position was already filled and I went ahead and joined Springpath instead. Luckily, in 2018, they had this position for platform security engineer. And as they were just forming a brand new security team, and I felt like this is a perfect opportunity for me because it’s in the domain of my expertise and the company I had been following for quite some time.

Tejal Adsul: So I applied, went through all the interview process, and joined Confluent in October. Now Mr. Genie then decided to grant me my second wish about the same time. And I came to know I was pregnant just after a month of joining Confluent. Initially I was super ecstatic, but soon my excitement was replaced with a lot of anxiety because I somehow believed in the stigma that pregnancy derails your career. And now I had to choose between the two, but as I was going through the entire process, I realized it’s not really choosing of one over the other, but finding the right balance between the two. And so I go in this technique, which I like to call a CPR, which helped me transition into a working mom. So the first daunting task, which most of us face, is how, and when, should I break this news to my manager?

Tejal Adsul: And honestly, my first gut feeling was, Hey, I don’t really need to tell them at all. Right? And if I start to show, I can just blame all the good free food they gave me at Confluent and no one will ever know, but then you have to pee like a freaking million times in a day and no exaggeration there.

Tejal Adsul: There is absolutely no way you can hide it. So I was so nervous wrecked that I decided to have this conversation with my manager pretty early on. I was almost just eight weeks pregnant and I just scheduled a quick one on one with him. And I just broke the news that, Hey, I know I just joined, but I am pregnant. And I was so surprised that he took the news so well.

Tejal Adsul: Rather he shared his own experience, as he was new to the parenthood as well. And that instantly put me at so much of ease. So this is one of my recommendations to all the moms to be. When you are comfortable, have this conversation with your manager and preferably early on and divide this conversation into two separate meetings. First, schedule just a quick meeting to announce the good news. So it gives them time to think through any concerns that they have, but most importantly, schedule a followup meeting in another two, three weeks so that you can gloss over your work plan, job requirements or your maternity leave plans, but be sure to be highly prepared for this particular meeting so that you can answer of any concerns that they might have.

Tejal Adsul: Being pregnant is like having a flu or being hung over all day every day. And this is especially true in the first trimester. So you cannot really work with a hundred percent of your capacity. So you have this limited energy and limited time before you go for your maternity leave. But most importantly, you have limited caffeine. So it’s highly crucial to plan how and where you want to put this energy into. And that brings us to the P in the CPR technique. And this is a very important lesson I learned during my pregnancy. And it took me some time to get into this mindset that you cannot do everything and you cannot do everything perfectly. And that is perfectly okay.

Tejal Adsul: So if you’re going to choose to do X, you are definitely going to miss out on doing Y. So for instance, I choose to do all these fill-ins or hard slogs. I am going to miss out on those quick wins and major projects. So what I did and what y’all should do is spend some time using this graph and try to analyze where and how you’re going to put this limited energy and time to achieve those quick wins and impactful project. And once y’all have wisely chosen your X, y’all can then use it in the conversation meeting, which we just discussed.

Tejal Adsul: Lastly, stress, nausea, those mood swings, all these are part and parcel of pregnancy. All you can do is embrace them and try to relax by consciously inculcating relaxation techniques into your day to day routine. So I used to literally schedule breaks after every two hours. And when I say schedule, I literally had them on my calendar and every time I got those pop up reminders, I would just stop working on whatever I was doing. And I would just listen to music or walk around the office or meet a friend on a different floor. And these 10 to 15 minutes of break would give me my energy back and it helps to improve my efficiency highly when I was actually working. And my biggest reward of working while pregnant is that I have this daughter who has intimate knowledge of Apache Kafka because we pretty much started our journey together. Thank you.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Tejal. That was a really excellent talk about delivering like a boss. We are going to now go into our Fireside Chat with Neha.

Neha Narkhede: Hi there. Can everyone hear me?

Angie Chang: Yes. Can you turn on your video?

Neha Narkhede: I’m trying that. Can everyone see me?

Angie Chang: There you go. Perfect. So I’m going to do a quick intro. So Neha is a Co-Founder at Confluent, the company behind the popular Apache Kafka streaming platform. She is one of the initial authors of Apache Kafka and a committer and PNC member on the project. So, Neha, why don’t you quickly give us a… am I missing anything in your bio?

Neha Narkhede: I think you did a wonderful job of covering it. I’m so excited to be here. First of all, thank you for inviting me into what is my favorite event of the year. Thank you.

Angie Chang: Thank you. We had such a good time.

Angie Chang: So our first question for you is what is the most overlooked obstacle for women when it comes to asking for a promotion? So what are the differences in promotions at startups versus medium and larger companies?

Neha Narkhede: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, something that I’ve thought about at every stage of my career, it doesn’t seem to ever get easier. I’m not sure how overlooked this is anymore, but I think that a significant obstacle for women and minorities alike is the fear of being judged negatively for coming across as being too ambitious. You know, when you get ready to really advocate for yourself. And I think that this fear is actually rooted in some reality as well. In my observation, this obvious bias that normalizes ambition, advocating for yourself, for men, typically white men, and while expecting minorities and women to wait for the term or the right time.

Neha Narkhede: The other obstacle is that men tend to be assessed more on their future potential while women are assessed more in the past experience as has been shared by so many women leaders. And so it really isn’t easy to ask for promotions or advocate for yourself when you know that there are so many factors working against you. And so I just wanted to sort of share my own experience and say that it is okay to feel a little bit out of place. It was okay to feel all this fear because you’re not imagining it. Some of it actually does exist in varying proportions, in different cultures. I think the trick is figuring out how to ask for it, regardless, right? And so what I wanted to share is what has worked for me, other than being okay as being viewed as ambitious has actually been to navigate the communication around it carefully, right?

Neha Narkhede: Ultimately you have to have a productive conversation and actually a series of conversations to make the change happen. So I typically just write down what I want to say ahead of time, and have the best possible clarity. That gives me a chance to really rehearse what kind of objections might come through, what I really want to say, keeping the emotion aside of feeling the bias. Because there is very little opportunity, or very little appetite to hear that out. I also make it okay for myself, I think this is probably the most important thing that I had to train myself to do, is to actually be okay to hear “No” a couple of times before it finally gets to a yes.

Neha Narkhede: So just know that a “No” should follow with clear, actionable feedback that allows you to make progress. If you see a situation where consistently it’s, “No, but we don’t feel that you’re ready.” That actually doesn’t mean much and it’s probably time to move on, however hard it might seem.

Neha Narkhede: The other thing to say is most people, including myself, we didn’t really know how to negotiate. What’s the science and the art behind negotiation? So something practical that I wanted to share here, a book that really helped me learn about the secret of negotiation. It’s called, Never Split the Difference, Negotiating As If Your Life Depends On It. It’s literally written by an FBI negotiator. I find that it has a lot of practical advice on how to navigate this situation and many others. I hope that everyone else finds it helpful as well.

Neha Narkhede: The other question you ask, I think, is a little different. Where the differences in promotions and startups, versus midsize companies, versus large companies. I think it’s very important to realize the back of the field that you’re walking into. Startups are really chaotic. Startups don’t really have a process around much of anything, really. Career growth is just one part of the puzzle. It’s not that people, whether they’re managers, or executives, or founders, they’re not interested in it. It’s just it’s, it’s a matter of survival versus not. You’re really focused on something else. So I think knowing that the reason for not being able to have a structured conversation around this is not so much your own performance, it’s just that it’s a startup and it’s going to be a little bit harder to bring it up.

Neha Narkhede: The secret in startups to grow as what we shared is, to just take ownership of what needs to be fixed. That’s the secret to growth. As the startup grows and it goes through its own sort of teenage years, as I think some of the hyper-growth companies are, including Confluent. There is actually a process, there’s actually plenty of opportunity to have those conversations. It’s not perfect like the large companies, but I think there’s plenty of opportunity. I think the secret there, or the obstacle just is that it’s not evenly across the organization, however much you might like it. So you might find yourself in pockets of the organization where it’s just not ready for the new process that has been instituted, because the company is growing so quickly that no matter how well you tried, every policy is not evenly applied.

Neha Narkhede: There’s another chance to give the benefit of doubt to your leaders, your managers, your teammates, and yourself to actually go at it a couple of times and have a positive conversation. Like I said if at any point in time there’s a repeated lack of clarity, I think maybe it’s a time to reconsider whether it’s the right time in your career to be in that kind of work environment. Larger company is much more stable, a lot of process. Obviously there are trade offs, so more process and more stability also means probably fewer opportunities for step function growth in career.

Neha Narkhede: It’s really more of a balance. It’s so different, I’ve been at really, really tiny startups, I’ve been at hyper-growth companies, at LinkedIn when I wasn’t really a c -founder or anything like that, and large companies. I still think that as long as the company grows, you have plenty of opportunity for growth if you figure out how to navigate the situation and then a lot of persistence to fight it through.

Angie Chang: Absolutely. I agree that it’s a matter of asking and asking again and getting no. Then asking, “What do I have to do to get to that next level?” Then being persistent and then coming back with, “Well, I’ve done these things. Let’s talk about this again.” It’s one of the Girl Geek Dinners, last week that I hosted with a woman who everyone respected, was a director of engineering. She gave this great example of, every job promotion I’ve been given it, wasn’t given. I had to ask for it and show up with my list of the things I’ve done, and asked for it, and asked for it. So you have to be your biggest advocate, so definitely-

Neha Narkhede: Plus one. Always ask for it.

Angie Chang: Absolutely. So we get a lot of questions from the Girl Geek Community about technical interviewing. So I wanted to ask if you have a story that you could share that would resonate with our community, that finds technical interviewing extremely challenging or daunting to think about.

Neha Narkhede: Yeah, I want to start by sharing that earlier in my career when I had to get into this technical interviewing process, it was extremely daunting. It felt like the hardest thing to do, despite knowing how to code and knowing how to do the job. What I did is what I usually do when I’m presented with daunting experiences that I want to navigate anyway is, I over-prepared. I signed up for lead code and back then, that was the thing. Just went ahead and practiced and went ahead and over-prepared.

Neha Narkhede: Unfortunately, that’s what I had to do. So, what I want to share here is that, what I also did is give myself power in the situation. I changed my perspective from feeling like a victim of an obviously unideal situation, to taking control of it. By just realizing that how you’re made to feel in a technical interview process is really a reflection of the team, and the company culture you’re going to sign up for. Ultimately hiring is a two-way decision. I remember picking LinkedIn over another social networking site, and another file sharing company, simply based on the quality of my interview experience, and it worked out.

Neha Narkhede: Realizing that it’s your choice too, it actually just oddly gave me a lot of comfort. I do think that having been on both sides of the table, there are many things that need to change about technical interviewing. So that’s another thing to realize is it’s really not perfect, and it’s not you. It’s a collective effort that we all have to work towards. There many things that we were able to institute at Confluent that I think really worked. I think the first is just realizing and making a decision that it shouldn’t be an adversarial experience. It should feel like a collective brainstorming exercise that you want to do with the future colleague. So interviewers need to adopt a friendlier stance, you need to communicate with empathy, you need to challenge the candidate and vice versa, respectfully.

Neha Narkhede: The other thing we did was to institute a take-home exercise, which is literally the first step in the interview process. Because that gives you the best possible window into thinking, to understanding how a candidate works, as we all do. There’s no one watching over our shoulders when we’re writing code. So it’s kind of silly for that to be our whole entire experience. The other thing that this take home does is, it allows you to prepare for the unique onsite interview that that candidate needs. Because we all need to prepare. It’s not just the candidate that needs to prepare. We need to prepare as interviewers to come in and actually understand their perspective and creatability.

Neha Narkhede: The third is to leave enough time and opportunity for the candidate to ask you questions. I can’t stress that enough is, you actually learn a lot of valuable information about a future colleague by just studying the quality of questions they ask. It’s really not just bombarding the candidate with questions, and trickier questions, and laying down the landmines to kind of win that situation. We found a lot of success that Confluent started instituting these changes for technical interviews. I hope that technical interviews in general, in the whole industry change for the better. It’s really a situation that needs to change collectively. It’s not just what you can do.

Angie Chang: Absolutely. I have one more question and then we’re going to turn it over to the Q&A. For people who are tuned in from home, you can put in your questions in the Q&A feature and then people can upvote it if they like it, and will ask Neha a question from there. My final question is, and Neha, you’re such a good communicator, what are some advice you can share about interpersonal communication, or salary negotiation? What’s the piece of advice you want to leave us with?

Neha Narkhede: First of all, thank you. It did not come naturally to me. I wasn’t into all the inter-school debates and whatnot that train you to just be good speakers. So I want to say that it’s okay to start off as a shy introvert engineer like I was, and find yourself up on the keynote stage.

Neha Narkhede: Take every opportunity, however super uncomfortable it feels to be on that stage and speaking. So a couple of secrets is it’s so different, communication in one-on-ones, and communication in team meetings, and communication on stage is they’re entirely different, the way I found it, because I literally had to learn that on the job.

Neha Narkhede: Communication on the stage, a little secret I did want to share as we do all these sort of… There were many speakers here, and if this was a live event they would all be on stage, is… I’ve had the opportunity to speak to really celebrated speakers, and literally all across the board, the secret is great speakers, practice a talk about more than 10 times. You don’t have to do that, but if you find a speaker that you really like, and you think that they go up on stage and write the talk like three days before, they might’ve done that, but they practiced more than 10 times. That’s sort of the happy number.

Neha Narkhede: A lot of us have speaker notes, and writing the talk prior to giving the talk is the second secret. So you literally imagine what you’re going to say. It does not make you too rehearsed, it just gives you clarity of thought. Believe it or not somehow magically you go up on stage and you say all the right stuff, and you don’t forget, and you’re not nervous because you can see your speaker notes. Because all of us tend to forget something really crucial because you focus on someone who’s looking at you and then you lose your focus. So that those are some things to share about onstage.

Neha Narkhede: About negotiation, other than what I shared, which is I tend to resort to writing to get clarity of thought. I carry those notes with you, and will try to get my notes, and studying how to communicate.

Neha Narkhede: Another book, and I feel bad about just recommending books, but this is definitely widely accepted, this particular book called Crucial Conversations. That is just amazing in terms of having both hard conversations, as well as high stakes conversations, at work. It’s specifically written for at work situations. I just think that there’s a lot of value I found. I don’t think I’m great at applying all the different techniques used in the book, but I think it’s super valuable. A lot of executive and personal coaches do recommend that book. So you might as well get your hands on it without having to hire some fancy coach.

Angie Chang: Great. That’s an excellent recommendation to have notes, to use them, and to read that book. So we have a question, I think we have time for one question before we finish and go to networking. Someone asked that they have a strange case at work. Their company says they don’t have titles and there’s a flat structure. So how do they ask for promotion without sounding like they’re not conforming?

Neha Narkhede: Yeah. This is something that’s somewhat of an emerging culture, especially in engineering. There are pros and cons of this culture. On one hand it allows people to make their case and win arguments without using their title because “Hey, everyone is called software engineer.” So I wouldn’t know it if you’re three levels higher. It allows me and gives me a level ground. But at the same time, it’s hard to see yourself really grow, right? Really what does growth even mean? So sometimes, as companies grow and mature, what they actually end up with is they have internal levels so you know the expectation of every level, and a level really means growth and opportunity and responsibility. That really is the way to look at growth.

Neha Narkhede: It does not satisfy the ego, but you are so capable that when you go and look for your new job, you are ready for a much bigger job. That’s always the safest way to navigate your career is to just be so ready. So I think if there aren’t levels established in a company, despite what the titles say, I think it’s very important to advocate for that. I found a lot of value because when you’re put in that situation, we are thinking of what levels you have to think about, what are the expectations? Why would I say, “Hey, I don’t think you’re quite ready for that staff engineer level five promotion.” It doesn’t allow for those unsaid things to happen. So I like that is like a healthy balance between no titles and career growth.

Neha Narkhede: Having said all that no matter what the culture is in your company, I think it’s very important to ask for specifics. Really good leaders would carve out a roadmap for you to get to the next level. If you don’t have that, it’s going to be much harder. Like I said before, it’s something for you to think about on how long you want to continue in that environment. If this was really something you find value in. There’s no judgment, some people ask for promotions and that’s okay. You’re ambitious and you want to push yourself and you’re going to learn fast.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Neha. That was all really helpful advice and great book recommendations. I’m sure everyone’s writing it down and putting it in Amazon so they can get it shipped so they can read it, so-

Neha Narkhede: Oh, that’s great.

Angie Chang: We are going to be switching over to Elizabeth. Elizabeth is Confluent’s Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. She would like to share a few words on Confluent’s commitment to increasing diversity of the workforce. Okay. Oh, hold on a second. I need to unmute. There you go.

Elizabeth Borges: There we go. My first thing to share, piece of advice, if you ever get asked to speak at a Girl Geek event, don’t go last because there is no way that I can match any of the wisdom or the stories of the folks that’ve spoken tonight. So not going to try. Instead, I want to do two things quickly. Yes, we’ll definitely touch on a little bit of what we’re doing at Confluent from a DEI perspective. So first of all, just want to say thank you. Thank you to all of you for being here with us.

Elizabeth Borges: Thank you to our incredible speakers. I got a chance beforehand to hear some of the practices of the talks, but there’s something different about seeing it at the actual event. I definitely had to get some tissues for some of those. Just really appreciate the vulnerability and all of the wisdom that you shared. So happy you’re part of the Confluent Community.

Elizabeth Borges: I also want to thank all of the folks who are on the line today. You are actually helping us kick off our Confluent Kafka Summit, which starts tomorrow. I don’t know if it’s an official or unofficial Confluent Kafka Summit kickoff event. This is the second year in a row that we’ve done a Girl Geek Dinner the night before Kafka Summit. So we’re starting to get into a little tradition here that I hope that we maintain for a bit. I want to thank you all for helping be a part of kicking this off. As we think about our job at Confluent, our mission is to put an event streaming platform at the heart of every organization around the world.

Elizabeth Borges: As we think about being able to do that as a company successfully, we know that that’s going to take a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We need to, as a company, embrace and reflect the diversity of the global community, if we want to successfully bring that event streaming platform into organizations all around the world. As Angie mentioned, there’s a lot of great work that we’ve been doing over the past year at Confluent to help us get better at being able to realize that mission. You heard a little bit tonight from folks who mentioned employee resource groups, so internal communities of folks that serve people of different backgrounds within the organization. That’s Blackfluent, for example, like what Candace talked about. We’re also doing a lot in terms of training and starting to really talk intentionally about what it means to build an inclusive culture.

Elizabeth Borges: But I also want to point out that we want to connect with communities and folks outside of the company because we know that we can learn from you all as well. So that’s part of why partnerships, like the one that we have with Girl Geek are so important to us and part of why I’m so grateful having all of you be here tonight to help us kick off Kafka Summit. Then also celebrate diversity and inclusion and some of the amazing women from our community. So that’s first thing, very sincere thank you.

Elizabeth Borges: Second is, as Angie mentioned at the start of the event tonight, it is a unique time. I think we can all agree that 2020 is one for the history books. Obviously, we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. That’s why we’re doing this virtually. Those of you who are in California, I woke up this morning, there was smoke. It’s definitely a scary situation for many of us, given the wildfires here. There are natural disasters. I think I saw something about a hurricane coming to another part of the U.S. Then of course we’re experiencing all of this natural disasters, things that are happening out in the external world, on the heels of a very difficult summer. Having a much needed, but difficult, conversation about systemic racism and persistent racial injustice that exists in the U.S. So it’s a lot, there is a lot going on. I think at a time like this, it’s never more important to build a community, and to find people who you can be open and honest and vulnerable with.

Elizabeth Borges: That’s one of the reasons that we love partnering with Girl Geek. I think this is one of the only tech events where you can have somebody speaking honestly, and openly about coming out at work. Or having to run to the bathroom when you’re pregnant, or talking about what it’s like to grow up in Ohio as one of the few black kids at your school, and to be able to do that and be so supported. So as we are in the middle of a very difficult year, I just want to encourage all of you to continue to invest in this community.

Elizabeth Borges: We at Confluent are so excited to support it. Know that you’re also now part of our extended community at Confluent, and we’d love to stay in touch. So encourage you, if you can, to join the icebreaker afterwards. Definitely reach out to any of us who’ve spoken here tonight on LinkedIn. If there’s anything that we can do to further help you, or support you during this time. Thanks so much.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Elizabeth. That was great. So thank you to Confluent for sponsoring this dinner and making this happen.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: I encourage you all to move to icebreaker. The link is in your confirmation email. I want to give one last thank you to everybody who spoke at this event, and also to all the amazing people behind the event from the Confluent side. If you have any questions about how to get to icebreaker, please comment on the chat. I am hoping to see you all there.

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


60 Female CTOs to Watch in 2020

Update: This content is out of date. Check out this list of 60 Female CTOs to Watch in 2023!

These powerful women leading technology and innovation at their companies are ones to watch. Many earned advanced degrees in engineering and robotics, serve on boards and give back.

We are unlocking the clubhouse and building a bigger table for CTOs of companies big and small — more opportunities for women and underrepresented groups to lead.

1 – ADP CTO Urvashi Tyagi

ADP CTO Urvashi Tyagi joined the benefits and payroll company in New York in 2019. Before joining ADP, Urvashi worked at American Express, most recently as Vice President of Global Head of Commercial Data Engineering. Before American Express, she was a Director of Engineering at Amazon. She began her career as a Software Engineer at NuGenesis. Urvashi mentors at Newark Venture Partners and Illicit Mind. Follow her on Twitter at @urvashidtyagi.

2 – Adstream CTO Katie Nykanen

Adstream CTO Katie Nykanen has been at the digital advertising company in London since 2012. Prior to Adstream, Katie worked at Nokia for six years, most recently as Marketing Solutions Development Manager. Prior to Nokia, she spent a decade working at B&Q as a Project Leader. Check out this interview she gave recently about working in tech. Follow her on Twitter at @katienykanen.

3 – Advanced Energy CTO Isabel Yang

Advanced Energy CTO Isabel Yang has been at the innovative power company in Denver since 2018. Prior to Advanced Energy, Isabel worked at IBM for over 19 years, most recently as Vice President of Research Strategy. She began her career as a Lead CMOS Device Engineer at Motorola. She earned advanced degrees from MIT, and is open to serving on boards.

4 – Biden for President CTO Jacky Chang

Biden for President CTO Jacky Chang was a senior engineer on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and worked for the Democratic National Committee’s voter protection team during the 2018 midterms. She spent most of her career as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, working for companies like Stripe and Eventbrite. Prior to Eventbrite, she was CTO and co-founder at Plympton and began her career as a Research Engineer at StumbleUpon. Follow her on Twitter at @kyoki.

5 – Bloc CTO and Co-Founder Amina Yamusah

Bloc CTO Amina Yamusah co-founded the career service management platform for job training organizations. Prior to Bloc, Amina worked at MoveOn as a Data Engineer. Before MoveOn, she was a Social Entrepreneurship Fellow at Echoing Green in New York. She began her career in diversity affairs at Princeton University, where she received her bachelor’s degree in politics, and led a career development organization, Our Bloc, dedicated to lowering the black collegiate unemployment rate from 13% to 5%. Follow her on Twitter at @AminaYamusah.

6 – Breaker CTO and Co-Founder Leah Culver

Breaker CTO Officer Leah Culver co-founded the social network for podcasts in 2016. Prior to Breaker, she worked at Dropbox, Medium and Sincerely. Before that, Leah co-founded Convore and Pownce (acquired by Six Apart). She is an angel investor in GitHub (acquired by Microsoft), Sentry, Numeracy (acquried by Snowflake), Opsolutely (acquired by Shift), and many more. She is an author of OAuth 1.0, passionate about many technical topics, and a frequent conference speaker. Fun fact: she is renovating the Pink Painted Lady, one of the famous Painted Ladies in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @leahculver.

7 – Cabot CTO Patricia Hubbard

Cabot CTO Patricia Hubbard has been at the chemicals and performance materials company in Boston since 2018. Prior to Cabot, Patricia worked at Avery Dennison as Vice President of R&D and Materials. Before that, she worked at PolyOne for nine years, most recently as Vice President of Technology. Before that, Patricia worked at GE for a decade, most recently as CVD Technology Manager.    

8 – CBS Interactive CTO Elizabeth Carrasco

CBS Interactive CTO Elizabeth Carrasco joined the online content network in 2011. Prior to CBS Interactive, Elizabeth was CTO at Clicker Media (acquired by CBS Interactive). Before Clicker Media, she was Vice President of Engineering at Spot Runner, Authenticlick, and United Online. She started her career as an Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Follow her on Twitter at @deneiges.

9 – Change.org CTO Elaine Zhou

Change.org CTO Elaine Zhou joined the platform for change in 2020. Prior to Change.org, she was at Vidado as CTO, and has held leadership positions for over a decade at companies including HomeStore, PlanetOut, IAC and more. She’s been a longtime mentor at Upwardly Global. Follow her on Twitter at @softwired.

10 – Curve Health CTO Cheryl Porro

Curve Health CTO Cheryl Porro joined the senior health platform company in 2020. She spent 13 years at Salesforce.com and Salesforce.org building platforms and industry-leading products that helped grow multiple business lines into 100Ms+ in annual revenue. She has led technology teams for Amazon, DigitalThink, and most recently Thrive Global. Follow her on Twitter at @cporro_sf.

11 – Democratic National Committee CTO Nell Thomas

Democratic National Committee CTO Officer Nellwyn Thomas has been leading technology and analytics for the Democrats since 2019. Prior to the DNC, she worked at Facebook in data science and served as Deputy Chief Analytics Officer for the Hillary for America campaign in 2016. Before that, she worked at Etsy for over four years, most recently as Senior Director of Analytics & Business Intelligence. Follow her on Twitter at @nellwyn.

12 – Digital Guardian CTO Debra Danielson

Digital Guardian CTO Debra Danielson has been at the data loss prevention software company in Waltham since 2019. Prior to joining Digital Guardian, Debra was at CA Technologies for 30 years, serving in a variety of VP and SVP roles. She began her career as a Software Developer at Applied Data Research. Debra serves on the board of Rock Solid Technologies and Springboard Enterprise’s Technology Council. Follow her on Twitter at @debradanielson.

13 – Dina CTO Erin Karam

Dina CTO Erin Karam has been at the AI-powered care coordination company in Chicago since 2015. Prior to Dina, she was at Solstice Mobile as Director of Solution Delivery. Before that, Erin was at Clean Urban Energy as Vice President of Engineering. She began her career at IBM as an IT Specialist, and worked her way up to IT Architect in nine years. Follow her on Twitter at @erinkaram.

14 – Ding CTO Barbara McCarthy

Ding CTO Barbara McCarthy has been working at the international mobile top-up platform in Dublin since 2019. Prior to Ding, she worked at HubSpot as Director of Engineering for four years. Prior to HubSpot, Barbara worked at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for over seven years, most recently at VP of Software Development. She serves on the board of Social Innovation Fund Ireland and mentors at 30% Club Ireland. Follow her on Twitter at @babsogrady.

15 – EXOS CTO Yvette Pasqua

EXOS CTO Yvette Pasqua joined the human performance company in 2020. Previously, she held product and engineering leadership roles at Meetup, Haven, and the WPP Group. She’s an advisor at Chloe Capital and cares deeply about doing the work to support people from underrepresented groups in the technology industry. Follow her on Twitter at @lolarobot.

16 – ezCater CTO Erin DeCesare

ezCater CTO Erin DeCesare has been at the online catering marketplace in Boston since 2019. Prior to ezCater, she was Vice President of Data and Analytics at Bottomline Technologies and Vistaprint. Before Vistaprint, Erin worked at Fidelity Investments as Director of Program Management and was a Project Manager at Sovereign Bank and Woodman Design.

17 – FCC CTO Monisha Ghosh

Federal Communications Commission CTO Monisha Ghosh has been at the United States government agency in Washington D.C. since 2020. Prior to the FCC, she worked at the National Science Foundation as Program Director and was a Research Professor at the University of Chicago, conducting research in wireless technologies. Prior to the University of Chicago, she was with Interdigital, Philips Research, and Bell Laboratories. She was recognized for her contributions to the IEEE 802.22.

18 – FeelIT CTO and Co-Founder Meital Segev-Bar

FeelIT CTO Meital Segev-Bar has been working on predictive maintenance and sensing solutions since 2017 in Haifa. Prior to co-founding FeelIT, she earned her PhD focused on Nanotechnology from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

19 – Firefly Health CTO Mimi Liu

Firefly Health CTO Mimi Liu has been working on technology-powered concierge medicine service for average Americans since 2020. Prior to Firefly Health, she worked at Devoted Health. Before that, Mimi worked at athenahealth for over 12 years, most recently as Executive Director of Engineering. She began her career as a Senior Developer at athenahealth.

20 – Flare CPTO Liz Crawford

Flare CPTO Liz Crawford has been working at the HR software company in Sydney since 2018. Prior to Flare, she consulted for Skillshare, Outdoor Voices, Flare and more. Before that, Liz was CTO at Birchbox in NYC for over five years. She is a serial entrepreneur, launching Aprizi and Crono, after earning multiple engineering degrees and publishing over 20 academic journal and conference publications. Follow her on Twitter at @liscrawford.

21 – GE Renewable Energy CTO Danielle Merfield

GE Renewable Energy CTO Danielle Merfeld has been working at GE since 2007, leading technical efforts to develop differentiated products and services across a broad renewable energy portfolio. She began her career as a Solar Platform Engineer at GE, after earning multiple degrees in electrical and electronics engineering. Follow her on Twitter at @dwmerfeld.

22 – Glassdoor CTO Bhawna Singh

Glassdoor CTO Bhawna Singh has been working at the recruiting and jobs company since 2016. Prior to Glassdoor, Bhawna worked at Ask for over seven years, most recently as Senior Director of Search Intelligence. She began her career as a Software Engineer at Sybase and AT&T. Follow her on Twitter at @bhawna_tweets.

23 – Global Payments CTO Shannon Johnston

Global Payments CTO Shannon Johnston has been working at the pure play payments technology company in Atlanta since 2016. Prior to Global Payments, she worked at ShopVisible as COO and was CTO at Points of Light Institute. Before that, she was at CompuCredit, most recently as VP of Global Infrastructure Services.

24 – Glossier CTO Pawan Uppuluri

Glossier CTO Pawan Uppuluri has been working at the beauty company in Seattle since 2019. Prior to Glossier, she worked at Amazon for over 14 years, most recently as Director of Alexa Orchestration Engine. Before Amazon, Pawan worked at i2 Technologies, most recently as Director. 

25 – Halma CTO Catherine Michel

Halma CTO Catherine Michel has been working at the global group of life-saving technology companies since 2019. Prior to Halma, she worked at Sigma Systems for six years, most recently as CTO. Prior to Sigma Systems, Catherine worked at Tribold (acquired by Sigma Systems) as CTO and co-founder. She began her career as a Senior Manager at Accenture.

26 – Healx CTO Meri Williams

Healx CTO Meri Williams has been working at the AI-powered, patient-inspired technology company in Cambridge in England since 2020. Prior to Healx, she worked at Monzo Bank and Moo.com. Before that, she worked at Marks and Spencer as Head of Engineering and at Proctor & Gamble, most recently as Head of Operations. Follow her on Twitter at @Geek_Manager.

27 – Honeycomb CTO and Co-Founder Charity Majors

Honeycomb CTO Charity Majors has been working at the full stack observability company in San Francisco since 2016. Prior to founding Honeycomb, she worked at Facebook as a Production Engineering Manager. Prior to Facebook, Charity worked at Parse as Infrastructure Tech Lead. Before that, Charity was a Systems Engineer at Cloudmark, Shopkick and Linden Lab. Follow her on Twitter at @mipsytipsy.

28 – Intuit CTO Marianna Tessel

Intuit CTO Marianna Tessel has been working at the global financial platform company in Mountain View since 2017. Prior to Intuit, she worked at Docker as SVP of Engineering and VP of Engineering at VMware, Intaact, Ariba and General Magic. Follow her on Twitter at @mariannatessel.

29 – Iron Mountain CTO Kimberly Anstett

Iron Mountain CTO Kimber Anstett has been working at the storage and information management company in Boston since 2019. Prior to Iron Mountain, she worked at Nielsen for over 19 years, most recently as Chief Information Officer. Follow her on Twitter at @kimanstett.

30 – Itaú Unibanco CTO Vanessa Fernandes

Itaú Unibanco CTO Vanessa Fernandes has been working at the bank since 2017. Prior to Itaú Unibanco, she worked at Itaú BBA as CIO. Before that, Vanessa worked in compliance at Itaú Unibanco. Before Itaú Unibanco, she worked as VP at JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank.

31 – Johnson & Johnson CTO Rowena Yeo

Johnson & Johnson CTO Rowena Yeo has been working at the healthcare company since 2016, when she joined as VP and CIO for Asia Pacific at Janssen Pharmaceuticals. Prior to Johnson & Johnson, she worked at Cargill for 21 years, most recently as Global Group CIO. Rowena began her career as a Systems Engineer at IBM.

32 – Kapor Center CTCO Lili Gangas

Kapor Center CTCO Lili Gangas has been working at the social impact non-profit in Oakland since 2016. Before Kapor Center, she was a Tech for Good Fellow at New America. Before that, Lilii worked at Accenture and Booz Allen Hamilton. She began her career as an engineer. Lili is on the advisory board for Techqueria and a board member for Latinas in Tech. Follow her on Twitter at @LilsG31.

33 – Kennametal CTO Carlonda Reilly

Kennametal CTO Carlonda Reilly has been working at the materials company in Pittsburgh since 2018. Prior to Kennametal, she worked at DuPont for 22 years, most recently as Global Technology Director. She began her career as an Engineering Technology Manager at DuPont. Carlonda serves on the board of directors at W. L. Gore, Saint Vincent College, and the United Way of Westmoreland County.

34 – Khan Academy CTO Marta Kosarchyn

Khan Academy CTO Marta Kosarchyn has been working at the educational company in Palo Alto since 2017. Prior to Khan Academy, she worked at SCI Solutions as SVP of Product Development and Operations. Prior to SCI Solutions, Marta worked at Intuit as Director of Product Development. Before that, she was in management at Hewlett-Packard. Follow her on Twitter at @mkosarchyn.

35 – LimeLoop CTO and Co-Founder Chantal Emmanuel

LimeLoop CTO Chantal Emmanuel has been working at the shipping company in Emeryville since 2018. Before launching LimeLoop, she worked at SYPartners and Red Clay as a Software Engineer. Before Red Clay, she worked at New York Cares as Community Programs Officer. She began her career working at AmeriCorps. Follow her on Twitter at @chantalemmanuel.

36 – Lululemon CTO Julie Averill

Lululemon CTO Julie Averill has been working at the athletic apparel company in Seattle since 2017. Prior to Lululemon, she worked at REI, most recently as CIO Prior to REI, Julie worked at Nordstrom for over a decade as VP of Selling and Marketing Systems. She has taught classes on strategy and engineering at Seattle University, and began her career as a Project Manager at Weyerhaeuser. Follow her on Twitter at @julie_i_b.

37 – Lyra Health CTO Jenny Gonsalves

Lyra Health CTO Jenny Gonsalves has been working at the teletherapy company in Burlingame since 2016. Prior to Lyra Health, she worked at SugarCRM, most recently as VP of Engineering. Before SugarCRM, Jenny worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Epiphany. She started her career as a Programmer Analyst at RBC Dominion Securities. Follow her on Twitter at @jenny_gonsalves.

38 – Carbon Health CTO Claire Hough

Carbon Health CTO Claire Hough previously worked as CTO at ticketing company Lyte. Prior to Lyte, she worked at Apollo GraphQL as VP of Engineering. Prior to Apollo, Claire worked at Udemy, most recently as SVP of Engineering. Before Udemy, she led engineering at Tapjoy, Citrus Lane, NextTag, Blue Martini Software, Napster, and Netscape. She is a Limited Partner at Operative Collective.

39 – McKesson CTO Nancy Flores

McKesson CTO Nancy Flores is EVP and CIO, leading the company’s technology initiatives including software, infrastructure, application development tools and processes, operations, and cybersecurity. She also guides the overall direction for the company’s healthcare technology products and data and analytics. Prior to McKesson, she served as CIO at Johnson Controls (JCI) where she was responsible for information technology, cybersecurity and analytics. Previously, she spent 22 years at Abbott in several leadership roles including chief information officer. She serves on the board of the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin.

40 – Navenio CTO Niki Trigoni

Navenio CTO Niki Trigoni has been working at the infrastructure-free location company in Oxford since 2019. She has been a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford for the past 13 years. Before that, she taught Computer Science at University of London and was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Cornell University.

41 – NovoEd CTO and Co-Founder Farnaz Ronaghi

NovoEd CTO Farnaz Ronaghi has been working at the online-learning company in San Francisco since 2012. She designed and built the first version of the NovoEd platform at Stanford’s Social Algorithms Lab. The project was part of her PhD thesis on collaborative learning at scale, and her research focused on incentives and motivators in online learning environments. Follow her on Twitter at @farnazr.

42 – Nylas CTO and Co-Founder Christine Spang

Nylas CTO Christine Spang has been working at the unified communications company in San Francisco since 2013. Prior to launching Nylas, she worked at Oracle for two years, most recently as Principal Developer. Christine joined Oracle by way of acquisition of Ksplice, where she worked as Software Engineer after graduating from MIT with a degree in Computer Science. Follow her on Twitter at @spang.

43 – Omada Health CTO Maria Latushkin

Omada Health CTO Maria Latushkin has been working at the digital care company in San Francisco since 2018. Prior to Omada Health, she was Chief Technology Officer at Narvar, One Kings Lane, and Peet’s Coffee. Before Peet’s, Maria was at Walmart, most recently as Director of Engineering. She began her career as a Software Engineer at Homewarehouse.

44 – One Medical Group CTO Kimber Lockhart

One Medical Group CTO Kimber Lockhart has been working at the primary care company since 2014. Prior to One Medical Group, she worked at Box, most recently as Senior Director of Web Application Engineering. Prior to Box, Kimber was CEO and founder of Increo Solutions (acquired by Box).  Follow her on Twitter at @kimber_lockhart.

45 – Outer Labs CTO Jen Carlile

Outer Labs CTO Jen Carlile has been working at the modern architecture, engineering, and construction software company in San Francisco since 2018. Prior to founding Outer Labs, Jen worked at Flux Data for five years as VP of Engineering and co-founder. Before Flux Data, she worked at Google[X] as a Software Engineer for almost two years. She began her career as an Audio and Acoustics Engineer at AuSIM. Jen mentors at Hackbright and Stanford. Follow her on Twitter at @jencarlile.

46 – Pilot CTO and Founder Jessica McKellar

Pilot CTO Jessica McKellar has been working at the finance company in San Francisco since 2017. Prior to founding Pilot, she worked at Dropbox for three years as Director of Engineering. Before Dropbox, Jessica was co-founder and VP of Engineering at Zulip (acquired by Dropbox). She began her career as a Software Engineer at Ksplice (acquired by Oracle). The open source developer is PyCon North America’s Diversity Outreach Chair. Follow her on Twitter at @jessicamckellar.

47 – Precisely CTO Tendü Yoğurtçu

Precisely CTO Tendü Yogurtçu has been working at the data integrity company in New York since 1997. She began her career as a Senior Software Engineer at Precisely. Tendü has also served as a part-time Adjunct Professor for graduate level courses (Programming with C++, C++ for Financial Engineering, Programming with JAVA, and Computer Architecture). Follow her on Twitter at @tenduyogurtcu.

48 – Puppet CTO Abby Kearns

Puppet CTO Abby Kearns has been working at the continuous delivery company in San Francisco since 2020. Prior to Puppet, she worked at Cloud Foundry Foundation for four years, most recently as CEO and Executive Director. Prior to Cloud Foundry, she worked at Pivotal Software and OPSWAT. Before that, Abby worked at Verizon and Totality. Follow her on Twitter at @ab415.

49 – Redfin CTO Bridget Frey

Redfin CTO Bridget Frey has been working at the real estate company in Seattle since 2011. Prior to Redfin, she worked at Lithium Technologies, most recently as Director of Engineering for Analytics and Business Applications. Before that, she worked at IntrinsiQ as VP of Development and IMlogic as Senior Program Manager. She began her career as a Software Engineering Manager at Plumtree, after interning at Microsoft and Motorola. Bridget serves on the board for Premera Blue Cross. Follow her on Twitter at @svbridget.

50 – Refinitiv CTO Alex Cesar

Refinitiv CTO Alex Cesar has been working at the financial infrastructure company in London since 2017. Before Refinitiv, she was at Thomson Reuters as Global Head of Risk Technology, at Deutsch Bank as Head of Governanc, and at J.P. Morgan as Head of Compliance. Before that, she was at Standard Chartered Bank as Head of Compliance and Assurance Technology. Alex began her career as a Technical Analyst at HSBC.

51 – Silicon Valley Bank CTO Ivneet Kaur

Silicon Valley Bank CTO Ivneet Kaur has been working at the bank in Santa Clara since 2020. Prior to Silicon Valley Bank, she worked at Equifax for over a decade, most recently as CTO. Before that, Ivneet worked at Claritas for six years, most recently as Product Development Manager. She began her career as a Software Engineer at Microsoft.

52 – Skillz CTO Miriam Aguirre

Skillz CTO Miriam Aguirre has been at the eSports company in San Francisco since 2013. Prior to Skillz, she worked at Financial Engines for over eight years, most recently as Software Architect. Follow her on Twitter at @techaguirre.

Sky Medical Technology CTO Rachel Fallon has at been the UK-based medical devices company since 2010. Their products include Geko devices, OnPulse technology, and Firefly recovery.

54 – Staples CTO Pragati Mathur

Staples CTO Pragati Mathur has been at the worklife fulfillment company in Framingham in 2017. Prior to Staples, she worked at Biogen as CTO. Before Biogen, she worked at Boeing as Enterprise Chief Architect. Before that, she worked at General Motors for a decade, most recently as Chief Architect. She started her career as a Senior Consultant at PWC. Follow her on Twitter at @pragatimathur2.

55 – Starbucks CTO Gerri Martin-Flicking

Starbucks CTO Gerri Martin-Flickinger has been at the coffee company in Seattle since 2015. Prior to Starbucks, she worked at Adobe for over eight years, most recently as CIO. Before that, she was CIO at VeriSign and Network Associates / McAfee. Gerri began her career at Chevron. Follow her on Twitter at @gmflickinger.

56 – SurveyMonkey CTO Robin Ducot

SurveyMonkey CTO Robin Ducot has been at the survey company in San Mateo since 2017. Prior to SurveyMonkey, she worked at DocuSign as SVP of Engineering. Before DocuSign, she was VP of Engineering at Eventbrite, Linden Lab, Adobe and Avolent. She began her career as a Software Engineer at BGS Systems. Folow her on Twitter at @rducot.

57 – ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons

ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons has been at the global software consultancy company in Seattle since 1999. Follow her on Twitter at @rebeccaparsons.

58 – Token Transit CTO and Founder Ekaterina Kuznetsova

Token Transit CTO Ekaterina Kuznetsova has been at the shared mobility marketplace company in San Francisco since 2016. Prior to launching Token Transit, she was at Meteor Development Group as a Core Developer for two years. Before that, Ekaterina worked at Google and Akamai Technologies as a Software Engineer. Follow her on Twitter at @technekate.

59 – Transposit CTO and Founder Tina Huang

Transposit CTO Tina Huang has been at the incident resolution company in San Francisco in 2016. Prior to launching Transposit, she was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures and a Founding Engineer at Sigma Computing. Before that, Tina worked at Twitter for four years as Staff Software Engineer. Prior to Twitter, she worked at Google and Apple as a Software Engineer. Follow her on Twitter at @kmonkeyjam.

60 – Verizon CTO Rathi Murthy

Verizon Media CTO Rathi Murthy has been at the media company in Sunnyvale since 2020. Prior to Verizon, she was CTO at Gap — and served as CIO at American Express. Rathi has been in engineering leadership at eBay, Yahoo!, Metreo, and WebMD. She began her career as a Software Engineer at Sun MicroSystems. Rathi serves on the board of directors for PagerDuty. Follow her on Twitter at @rathi_murthy.

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Artificial Intelligence for Beginners

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become increasingly important to our modern world. Applications of AI range from everyday products like smart thermostats and facial recognition used to unlock phones, to collision avoidance systems used in cars that warn you about an impending accident. In an increasingly complex domain, we may misunderstand what AI really is.

At its core, AI detects patterns in data and uses it to make a decision; that decision might be a recommendation, a prediction, or even creating new text content.  More formally, AI is the ability to reason, deduce, automate, generalize and identify patterns from experiences to accomplish simple to complex decision making and knowledge creation tasks. 

While research and development so far in the field of AI can be understood as merely “scratching the surface,” some of AI’s well known subtopics such as machine learning (ML), data science, cognitive systems and knowledge discovery from databases are developing quickly and gaining significant importance. So how do ML algorithms that learn and improve from experience make life better? 

Let’s consider some examples to better understand the four groups or categories: supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning algorithms. We will compare the differences between these algorithm groups based on their application when communicating in a foreign language. 

Source: https://www.ebsco.com/blog/article/foreign-language-learning-reinvented

Supervised ML algorithms enable learning patterns from similarly structured data or events, also known as ‘training data’. This is analogous to learning a new language from a teacher who takes us through various learning difficulty levels from alphabets to words to sentences. Most automation examples we see around us, such as object detection for computer vision applications, demand forecasting, and time series forecasting, belong to the supervised ML category. 

Unsupervised learning algorithms refer to pattern identification by the relative similarity in data and events in the absence of any structured training data. As an example, in the absence of any foreign language training, communicating through gestures and expressions would imply unsupervised learning, since the gestures and corresponding expressions remain relatively similar irrespective of geographic and lingual barriers. Examples of unsupervised learning would be data clustering, searching similar items while shopping, and being recommended items to buy based on similar customers. 

Semi-supervised ML algorithms enable learning “a lot” from a small structured set of training data or events. Consider this similar to communicating in a foreign country using a language translation book, where you learn the meaning of some words from the book and combine that with hand gestures and expressions to convey the information. Examples of semi-supervised learning include learning customer response for a new product based on past purchase history, cataloging supermarket products as upcoming specials, or categorizing cars as family cars or cross-country cars. 

The fourth category of algorithms, reinforcement learning, differs significantly from the other three algorithm categories since they mimic the human way of learning most closely. For reinforcement learning algorithms, a goal or outcome is first decided, followed by step-by-step actions that are taken to achieve the goal based on external feedback in each step. For the foreign language communication example, say you learn a sentence from Google translate in a foreign language and say it to someone who speaks that language. What happens if the pronunciation or dialect is off? The listener may correct you, or ask for clarification by asking “Did you mean….?” Based on this feedback you may correct your pronunciation or phrasing,  and the next time you’ll make fewer mistakes. You continue this process until you master the language. Examples of reinforcement learning lie in training robotic motion, or in playing AlphaGo, chess or other computer games with an automated system. Although the application settings may vary, being equipped with the fundamental knowhow of data processing, modeling and pattern learning we can open doors towards automation and AI-based product development.

We often hear that data is currency. While data is abundant, you need to know what to do with it in order to extract value. Data that can be processed, analyzed and learned from is currency.

The key is in building and honing a set of tools that can help shape the data into a comprehensible format for us to then make good strategic decisions for ourselves and for our loved ones. Through training and education programs that teach hands-on applications of the  AI/ML skills toolset, we can further advance how the algorithms can be applied in the real world. 

At FourthBrain, the curriculum focuses on project-based and collaborative learning through online instructor-led sessions.

Save $500 on your FourthBrain Course when you mention “Girl Geek X”

Just apply here for October 2020 cohort. Applications due September 28th.

FourthBrain trains aspiring Machine Learning engineers in the technical and practical skills necessary to contribute immediately to an AI team. Our remote, online program is designed to be flexible and accessible for anyone with software experience. We infuse values of collaboration, communication, empathy, and equity throughout the program. We are part of the AI Fund, founded by Andrew Ng.

The team is looking forward to working with the cohort to apply AI in bringing about a safe and sustainable future together!

FourthBrain Machine Learning Program Info Session:

FourthBrain Course Updates:

By Sohini Roychowdhury, Curriculum Director at FourthBrain

Before joining the founding team at FourthBrain, Sohini worked at Volvo Cars as Senior Research Lead and Machine Learning/AI expert. She led the research and development of novel algorithms for AD/ADAS systems and optimal utilization of the vehicle sensor suite. Prior to Volvo, Sohini was an Assistant Professor at University of Washington. She received her PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from University of Minnesota with a specialty in computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, machine learning, and AI system design. Sohini has 45+ peer-reviewed, published articles including IEEE Journal cover articles and several Best Educator and Mentorship awards.

60 Engineering Leaders To Watch in 2020

We have celebrated Chief Technology Officers, Infosec & Cybersecurity executives, Product Design leaders, Architects – and now we are celebrating engineering leadership in 2020!

Here are 60 technical women to watch – the next FORTUNE 100 CTOs!

1 – Amy Hurlbut – Salesforce Senior Vice President of Software Engineering

Amy Hurlbut is Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Salesforce, where she’s worked for over seven years. Prior to Salesforce, Amy worked at Echelon for 23 years, where she was most recently Vice President of Software Engineering. She began her career as a Hardware Engineer. Follow her at @amyhurlbut.

2 Amy Truong – Patreon Vice President of Engineering

Amy Truong is Vice President of Engineering at Patreon. Prior to Patreon, she worked at Planet, where she was most recently Senior Director of Product Engineering. Prior to Planet, she was at Twitter, Rackspace and IBM in engineering management. Follow her at @amyt.

3 – Analyn Sales Nouri – Ticketmaster Vice President of Engineering

Analyn Sales Nouri is Vice President of Engineering at Ticketmaster, where she has worked for 19 years. Prior to Ticketmaster, she was a serial entrepreneur, co-founding Echo-Sigma Emergency Systems and Fluent Home. She began her career as a Software Developer at iXL. Follow her at @analynnouri.

4 – Annabel Liu – Curated Vice President of Engineering and Co-Founder

Annabel Liu is Vice President of Engineering at Curated. Prior to co-founding Curated, Annabel worked at LinkedIn for over seven years, where she was most recently Vice President of Engineering. Before LinkedIn, Annabel spent nine years at Ariba.

5 – Annie Kao – Simpson Strong-Tie Vice President of Engineering

Annie Kao is Vice President of Engineering at Simpson Strong-Tie, where she has worked for over 13 years and she started her career as Branch Engineer. She serves on the board of directors at Structural Engineers Association of Southern California. Follow her at @annietrankao.

6 – Arquay Harris – Slack Senior Director of Engineering

Arquay Harris is Senior Director of Engineering at Slack. Prior to joining Slack, she was a Web Development Manager at Google, where she led a large team of information architects, developers and designers. Before Google, she worked at CBS Interactive as Director of Engineering.

7 – Ashley Ha Dudgeon – Salesforce Vice President of Software Engineering

Ashley Ha Dudgeon is Vice President of Software Engineering at Salesforce, She began her career as a software developer after graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in computer science. She finds inspiration and empathy in her background as a refugee and is a proud mom to two young boys.  

8 – Bela Labovitch – athenahealth Vice President of Engineering

Bela Labovitch is Vice President of Engineering at athenahealth. Prior to athenahealth, she worked at inVentiv Health, LogixHealth, MedMinder Systems, and Newsilike Media Group in engineering leadership. Follow her at @bmedminder.

9 – Cailin Nelson – MongoDB Executive Vice President of Cloud Engineering

Cailin Nelson is Executive Vice President of Cloud Engineering at MongoDB. Prior to MongoDB, she was at Turntable.FM as Vice President of Engineering. Cailin has held engineering roles at Kiva, Zicasso, SquareTrade and Applied Financial Technology.

10 – Caitlin Smallwood – Netflix Vice President of Data Science and Engineering

Caitlin Smallwood is Vice President of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix. working on predictive decision models, algorithm / machine learning research, and experimentation science. Prior to joining Netflix in 2010, Caitlin worked at Intuit, Yahoo!, and several consulting firms.

11 – Cathleen Wang – Udemy Senior Director of Engineering

Cathleen Wang is Senior Director of Engineering at Udemy, Prior to Udemy, she was at Simply Hired for four years as Director of Engineering. Prior to Simply Hired, she worked in engineering at Nest Labs, One Kings Lane, Netscape and more. Follow her at @cathleenwang.

12 – Cathy Edwards – Google Vice President of Engineering

Cathy Edwards is Vice President of Engineering at Google. Before she joined Google, Cathy was a serial entrepreneur. She was CTO and co-founder at Chomp (acquired by Apple) and CEO and co-founder of Undecidable Labs (acquired by Google). Follow her at @cathye.

13 – Claire Delaunay – Nvidia Vice President of Engineering

Claire Delaunay is Vice President of Engineering at Nvidia. Prior to Nvidia, she was Vice President of Engineering and co-founder at Otto (acquired by Uber). Prior to Otto, Claire worked at Google and founded Botiful. Follow her at @lullabeee.

14 – Dawn Baker – Fitbit Vice President of Engineering

Dawn Baker is Vice President of Engineering at Fitbit (acquired by Google). Prior to Fitbit, Dawn worked at LinkedIn, where she was most recently Senior Manager of Site Reliability. She has held various leadership roles at Advantaged Technology Group, Arc90 and OpSource.

15 – Elaine Teoh – Flexport Vice President of Engineering

Elaine Teoh is Vice President of Engineering at Flexport. Prior to Flexport, she was Vice President of Engineering at Periscope Data and Lookout. Prior to Lookout, she was at OpenTable for five years, most recently as Senior Director of Engineering.

16 – Elizabeth Bierman – Comcast Vice President of Engineering

Elizabeth Bierman is Vice President of Engineering at Comcast. Prior to Comcast, she worked at Honeywell for over seven years, most recently as Senior Technical Manager. Follow her at @ekbierman.

17 – Erica Joy Baker – GitHub Director of Engineering

Erica Joy Baker is Director of Engineering at GitHub. Prior to GitHub / Microsoft, she worked at Patreon where she was a Senior Engineering Manager. Prior to Patreon, she was at Slack as a Senior Build and Release Engineer. Prior to Slack, Erica spent almost a decade at Google, most recently as Site Reliability Engineer. She is a founding advisor at Project Include. Follow her at @EricaJoy.

18 – Erica Lockheimer – LinkedIn Vice President of Engineering

Erica Lockheimer is Vice President of Engineering at LinkedIn, where she leads the teams responsible for LinkedIn Learning. Prior to LinkedIn, Erica worked at Good Technology for nine years. She was the first in her family to attend university and almost dropped out. She went on to graduate from SJSU with a degree in Computing Engineering. Follow her at @EricaLockheimer.

19 – Heidi Williams – Grammarly Head of Engineering

Heidi Williams is Head of Engineering at Grammarly. Prior to Grammarly, Heidi was CTO and co-founder at tEQuitable. Prior to that, she was Box’s Vice President of Engineering for four years, and spent over a decade at Adobe in engineering management. Follow her at @heidivt73.

20 – Isaura Gaeta – Intel Vice President of Security Research

Isaura Gaeta is Vice President of Security Research at Intel. She has been at Intel for over 25 years. She serves on the board of directors at The Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley, and chairs the Nominating and Governance committee. Follow her at @isauragaeta.

21 – Jan Chong – Tally Vice President of Engineering

Jan Chong is Vice President of Engineering at Tally. Prior to Tally, Jan was Twitter’s Senior Director of Engineering. Prior to Twitter, she was at OnLive, where she spent four years in engineering management. Follow her at @lessachu.

22 – Jessica Popp – Twilio Vice President of Engineering

Jessica Popp is Vice President of Engineering at Twilio. Prior to Twilio, Jessica worked as Senior Director of Engineering at SendGrid and DDN Storage. Before that, Jessica spent five years at Intel, most recently as Senior Director of Engineering. She began her career as a Software Engineer for Circuit City.

23 – Jill Wetzler – Pilot Head of Engineering

Jill Wetzler is Head of Engineering at Pilot. Prior to joining Pilot, Jill was Lyft’s Director of Engineering Leadership Development. Prior to Lyft, she worked at Twitter and Salesforce in engineering management. She speaks at conferences on building inclusive teams. Follow her at @JillWetzler.

24 – Joy Su – Twitter Vice President of Engineering

Joy Su is Vice President of Engineering at Twitter, where she’s worked at for over seven years. Prior to Twitter, Joy was at Topix for eight years, most recently as Senior Director of Engineering. She began her career as a Software Engineer at Patkai Networks. Follow her at @joyousx.

25 – Kate Bergeron – Apple Vice President of Hardware Engineering

Kate Bergeron is Vice President, Hardware Engineering at Apple. Kate has almost 20 years of industry experience in high volume consumer electronics and manufacturing domestically and abroad. She has extensive experience in the commercial world and bringing products to market.

26 – Kathy de Paolo – Disney Vice President of Engineering

Kathy de Paolo is Vice President of Engineering at The Walt Disney Company. Prior to Disney, she worked at Qualcomm for 22 years, most recently as Director of Engineering. She began her career as a Firmware Engineer.

27 – Lakecia Gunter – Microsoft Vice President

Lakecia Gunter is Vice President and General Manager at Microsoft, leading IOT Global and Strategic Engagement. Prior to Microsoft, she was at Intel for over 12 years, most recently as Vice President of Programmable Solutions and General Manager of FPGA Ecosystem Development and Operations. Follow here at @lakeciagunter.

28 – Laura Thomson – Fastly Vice President of Engineering

Laura Thomson is Vice President of Fastly. Prior to Fastly, she worked at Mozilla for over 12 years, most recently as Senior Director of Engineering. She served on the board at Internet Security Research Group for four years, and published books on PHP and MySQL web development. Follow her at @lxt.

29 – Lei Yang – Quora Vice President and Head of Engineering

Lei Yang is Vice President and Head of Engineering at Quora. Prior to Quora, Lei worked at Google for over seven years, most recently as Staff Software Engineer. She started her career as a Research Intern at NEC Laboratories America.

30 – Leslie Carr – Quip Senior Director of Engineering

Leslie Carr is Senior Director of Engineering at Quip (acquired by Salesforce). Prior to Quip, she worked at Clover Health, most recently as Engineering Manager. Leslie began her career as a Network Engineer at Twitter, Craigslist and Google. Follow her at @lesliegeek.

31 – Li Lin – Marvell Vice President of Engineering

Li Lin is Vice President of Engineering at Marvell. She joined Marvell in 2005 and now leads a team of 900+ globally to develop wireless transceiver systems for mobile, connectivity and IoT applications.

32 – Lisa O’Malley – PayPal Vice President of Product and Engineering

Lisa O’Malley is Vice President of Product and Engineering for Large Enterprise Solutions at PayPal, where she’s been for over 12 years. Prior to PayPal, she worked at Creative Labs for seven years, most recently as Director of Product Marketing.

33 – Maria Zhang – LinkedIn Vice President of Engineering

Maria Zhang is Vice President of Engineering at LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, Maria was Chief Technology Officer at Tinder. Prior to Tinder, she worked at Yahoo! where she was Vice President of Engineering. She was founding CEO at Alike (acquired by Yahoo!) and has worked at Microsoft, Zillow, NetIQ and Sirana. Follow her at @mariarenhui.

34 – Marian Croak – Google Vice President of Engineering

Marian Croak is Vice President of Engineering at Google. Prior to Google, she was Senior Vice President of Research and Development at ATT Labs. It was at Bell AT&T Labs where she collaborated with colleagues to invent Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP). She holds over 200 patents in VoIP technology.

35 – Michelle Grover – Twilio Chief Information Officer

Michelle Grover is Chief Information Officer at Twilio. Before Twilio, she was Vice President of Software Development at SAP Concur, where she led a global team of mobile and platform engineers who focus on TripIt. Follow her at @jcmish.

36 – Milena Talavera – Slack Senior Director of Engineering

Milena Talavera is Senior Director of Engineering at Slack. Prior to Slack, she worked at Talkdesk as Director of Engineering. Prior to Talkdesk, Milena was at Twelvefold Media for six years, most recently as Vice President of Engineering. She began her career as a Software Engineer for the US Government.

37 – Monica Bajaj – Workday Senior Director of Engineering

Monica Bajaj is Senior Director of Engineering at Workday. Prior to Workday, she worked as Director of Engineering at Ultimate Software and Perforce Software. She is on the board of Women in Localization, as a Chief Compliance Officer for GDPR and security initiatives. Follow her at @mbajaj9.

38 – Neha Narkhede – Confluent Technical Co-Founder and Board Director

Neha Narkhede is a technical co-founder and serves as board director at Confluent. Previously, she led the streams infrastructure area at LinkedIn, where she worked for four years. She began her career as a Member of Technical Staff at Oracle. She is a co-creator of Apache Kafka. Follow her at @nehanarkhede.

39 – Ning Li – Facebook Vice President of Engineering and Product

Ning Li is Vice President of Engineering and Product at Facebook, where she has worked for over 11 years. She began her career working at IBM for eight years as a Software Engineer.

40 – Prachi Gupta – Discord Vice President of Engineering

Prachi Gupta is Vice President of Engineering at Discord. Prior to Discord, Prachi was worked at LinkedIn for over a decade, most recently as Director of Engineering. She began her career a Software Engineer at Impetus.

41 – Preeti Somal – Hashicorp Vice President of Engineering

Preeti Somal is Vice President of Engineering at Hashicorp. She has shared lessons learned in HashiCorp’s hypergrowth of remote-first engineering culture. Prior to Hashicorp, she was Vice President at tech giants like Yahoo!, VMware and Oracle. Follow her at @psomal.

42 – Rachana Kumar – Etsy Vice President of Engineering

Rachana Kumar is Vice President of Engineering at Etsy, where she’s worked for six years. Prior to Etsy, Rachana co-founded Shaadi Karma and interned at United Nations Population Fund. Prior to that, she was Lead Software Architect at Brighter India Foundation and Web Development Manager at BET Networks. Follow her at @kumar_rachana.

43 – Rachel Potvin – GitHub Vice President of Engineering

Rachel Potvin is Vice President of Engineering at GitHub. Prior to GitHub, Rachel worked at Google for over 11 years, where she was most recently an engineering leader for Google Cloud. She began her career as a Software Developer for Openface Internet. Follow her at @potvinrachel.

44 – Raji Arasu – Intuit Senior Vice President of Platform

Raji Arasu is Senior Vice President of Platform and Services at Intuit, where she leads development of platforms and core services. Prior to Intuit, she served as Chief Technology Officer for eBay subsidiary StubHub, after holding a variety of leadership roles at eBay. She serves on the board of directors at NIC. Follow her at @rarasu.

45 – Rashmi Channarayapattna – Salesforce Vice President of Engineering

Rashmi Channarayapattna is Vice President of Engineering at Salesforce. She joined Salesforce in 2005 as a Quality Engineer after working in a startup and worked her way up.

46 – Reena Tiwari – American Express Vice President of Engineering

Reena Tiwari is Vice President of Engineering at American Express. Prior to American Express, she worked at Symantec for four years, most recently as Senior Director of Digital Transformation, E-Commerce and SAAS. She began her career as Technical Lead onsultant at Argonaut Group. Follow her at @retiwari.

47 – Sarah Aerni – Salesforce Senior Director of Machine Learning and Engineering

Sarah Aerni is Senior Director of Machine Learning and Engineering at Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Sarah spent four years at Pivotal, most recently as Data Science Manager. She is a Program Committee Member at Apache Foundation and MADlib committer. Follow her at @iTweetSarah.

48 – Sharmeelee Bala – Gap Inc. Vice President of Engineering

Sharmeelee Bala is Vice President of Engineering at Gap Inc. Prior to Gap Inc., she was at Walmart Labs for a decade, working her way up from Programmer to Senior Manager. Sharmeelee began her career as a Systems Analyst at TCSS and BCSS.

49 – Sharmila Ravi – Capital One Managing Vice President of Software Engineering

Sharmila Ravi is Managing Vice President of Software Engineering at Capital One. Prior to Capital One, she worked at Comcast Cable for 14 years, most recently as Vice President of Product Development. She began her career as a Senior Software Engineer at Toobias Associates / Compustatics.

50 – Silvia Ahmed – Veritas Vice President of Engineering

Silvia Ahmed is Vice President of Engineering at Veritas. Prior to Veritas, she worked at Dell EMC as Senior Director of Product Engineering. Fun fact: Silvia earned undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Cybernetic Systems from San Jose State University.

51 – Shay Bahramirad – ComEd Vice President of Engineering and Smart Grid

Shay Bahramirad is Vice President of Engineering and Smart Grid at ComEd, where she has worked for over six years. Prior to ComEd, Shay was Vice President at IEEE Power Energy Society. Prior to IEEE, she was Adjunct Professor at Illinois Institute of Technology for seven years. Follow her at @sh_bahramirad.

52 – Sue McKinney – Anaplan Senior Vice President of Cloud Engineering

Sue McKinney is Senior Vice President of Cloud Engineering at Anaplan. Prior to Anaplan, she was Vice President of Engineering at Cloudera, Veritas, Symantec and Pitney Bowes. Prior to that, Sue was at IBM. Follow her at @sue_mckinney.

53 – Surabhi Gupta – Robinhood Vice President of Product Engineering

Surabhi Gupta is Vice President of Product Engineering at Robinhood. Prior to Robinhood, she was at Airbnb for six years, most recently as Director of Engineering. Prior to Airbnb, Surabhi was at Google, where she was a Staff Software Engineer. Follow her at @surbs.

54 – Tamar Bercovici – Box Vice President of Engineering

Tamar Bercovici is Vice President of Engineering at Box, where she began working as a Senior Software Engineer a decade ago. Prior to Box, Tamar worked at XMPie (acquired by Xerox) for five years, most recently as a Software Application Engineer. Follow her at @tamarbercovici.

55 – Theresa Vu – Xandr Vice President of Engineering

Theresa Vu is Vice President of Engineering at Xandr. She worked at AppNexus for over a decade, joining as a Senior C Developer. She gave a talk on rap and realtime systems where she talks about her passion for music, and shared about her inspiring mother in an interview. Follow her at @gotvu.

56 – Vanitha Kumar – Qualcomm Vice President of Software Engineering

Vanitha Kumar is Vice President of Software Engineering at Qualcomm, where she has worked for over 24 years. She began her career as a Senior Engineer at Cisco. Vanitha serves as a board director at Elementary Institute of Science and Qualcomm Foundation.

57 – Victoria Kirst – Glitch Vice President of Engineering

Victoria Kirst is Vice President of Engineering at Glitch (Fog Creek Software). Prior to Glitch, Victoria worked at Google for over seven years as a Senior Software Engineer. She loves to teach and has lectured at Stanford. Follow her at @bictolia.

58 – Wendy Shepperd – New Relic Group Vice President of Engineering

Wendy Shepperd is Group Vice President of Engineering at New Relic. Prior to New Relic, she was Vice President of Engineering at Liquid Web, AllClear ID, and WP Engine. She began her career as a Content Developer at Texas Education Agency. Follow her at @WendyShepperd.

59 – Yanbing Li – Google Vice President of Engineering

Yanbing Li is Vice President of Engineering at Google. Prior to Google, she was at VMware for over a decade, most recently as Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage and Availability. Prior to VMware, Yanbing spent six years at Synopsis in engineering management. Follow her at @ybhighheels.

60 – Yoky Matsuoka – Google Vice President of Engineering

Yoky Matsuoka is Vice President of Engineering at Google. Prior to Google, she was CTO of Nest (acquired by Google). Previously, she was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Washington, where her research combined neuroscience and robotics. Follow her at @yokymatsuoka.

You can follow these engineering leaders on a Twitter List, Pinterest Board, and the Girl Geek X community on LinkedIn.

We love seeing where women’s careers take them over the years! Technical women leaders of large organizations have demonstrated different pathways to moving up. Sometimes they move up over a decade. Sometimes they are recruited and hired at the top. Some of our favorite technical women are entrepreneurial and spend time outside of the corporate race to the top and instead build their own company or join an early-stage startup.

There are many more women coming up in the corporate and startup ranks.

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Three Questions With Confluent’s Neha Narkhede: Getting Ahead in Tech

Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Neha Narkhede is a technical co-founder and board member at Confluent, the company behind the popular Apache Kafka streaming platform.

Prior to starting Confluent, Neha led streams infrastructure at LinkedIn, where she was responsible for LinkedIn’s streaming infrastructure built on top of Apache Kafka and Apache Samza. She is one of the co-creators of Apache Kafka.

She shared her insights from how women can rise in the workplace, to technical interviewing, during a fireside chat at a Girl Geek Dinner.

What is the most overlooked obstacle for women asking for a promotion?

That’s a great question – something that I’ve thought about it at every stage of my career. It doesn’t seem to ever get any easier. A significant obstacle for women and minorities is the fear of being judged negatively as being too ambitious, when you get ready to really advocate for yourself.

This fear is rooted in some reality – in my observation – obvious bias that normalizes ambition and advocating for yourself for white men, while expecting minorities and women to wait for their turn, or the right time. Another obstacle is, men tend to be assessed by their future potential, and women assessed by past experience, as has been shared by so many women leaders.

It’s okay to feel a little out of place and to feel this fear – you are not imagining it, some of it actually does exist in varying proportions in different cultures.

The trick is figuring out how to ask for it regardless. What has worked for me is to navigate the communication around the ask carefully. Ultimately you have to have a productive conversation – and a series of conversations – to make the change happen.

I typically write down what I want to say ahead of time and have the best possible clarity. That gives me a chance to rehearse and anticipate any objections that might come thru, and keep emotions aside.

Importantly, I make it okay for myself to hear “no” a couple times before it finally gets to a “yes”. Know that a “no” should follow with clear, actionable feedback that allows you to make progress. If you see a situation where consistently it’s “no, but we don’t feel like you are ready”, that doesn’t mean much and it’s probably time to move on, however hard it seems.

A book “Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depends On It” written by an FBI negotiator has a lot of practical advice on navigating this situation and many others.

Startups are really chaotic and career growth is one part of that puzzle. It’s a matter of survival or not. Knowing the reason for not being able to have a structured performance.

The secret to growing in a startup is to take ownership of something that needs to be fixed. As the startup grows and go thru its teenage years, there are opportunities to have a positive conversation. Larger companies have more process and more stability. Trade-offs means probably fewer opportunities for step-function growth in your career. As long as the company grows, you have plenty of opportunities for growth if you figure out how to navigate the situation with a lot of persistence.

How did you overcome technical interviewing?

Earlier in my career, when I had to get into the technical interviewing process, it was extremely daunting despite knowing how to code and knowing how to do a good job. I did what I usually do in daunting experiences (that I want to navigate anyway) — I over-prepared to give myself power.

I changed my perspective, from feeling like a victim of an obviously un-ideal situation, to taking control of it by realizing – how you are made to feel in the technical interviewing process is a reflection of the team and company you are signing up to work for.

I picked LinkedIn over other companies based on the quality of my interviewing experience, and it worked out. Realize that it’s your choice too!

Having been on both sides of the table, it shouldn’t be an adversarial experience. It should feel like a collective brainstorming exercise that you want to do with a future colleague. Having a take-home interview helps you prepare for the onsite interview. You learn a lot about a future colleague by studying the quality of the questions asked.

What is some advice to share about interpersonal communications?

It’s okay to start off as a shy, introvert engineer like I was and find yourself up on the keynote stage. Take every opportunity, however super uncomfortable it feels, to be onstage speaking. A secret is – great speakers practice a talk more than 10 times. A lot of us have speaker notes.

I learned on the job that communication is entirely different: communication in one-on-one meetings, communication in team meetings, communication onstage

There’s a lot of value in the book “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High” at work. Get your hands on it to learn without having to hire a coach.

* This conversation has been condensed for clarity.

Watch the whole fireside chat from virtual Confluent Girl Geek Dinner 2020:

Give the Gift of Internet to Underserved Students for this Pandemic School Year of Distance Learning 🎁💻🌐

Over one-third of students in Oakland Unified didn’t have internet at home before the pandemic, according to EdSource. With distance learning beginning this fall, underserved students will fall behind without Internet connectivity to learn and do homework!

If you have benefited from having a computer and Internet at home growing up, please consider helping underserved students participate in distance learning during this pandemic.

Here are local San Francisco Bay Area initiatives bridging the digital gap for under-served students, and how you can help:

Donate $300 to provide a low-income student a computer, Internet & support with Oakland Tech Exchange. Get your employer to double your contribution to Tech for All — the program runs under Oakland Public Education Fund, a non-profit 501(c)(3). #TECHFORALL #OAKLANDUNDIVIDED

Donate $500 to provide a low-income student a computer, Internet & support with StreetCode Live in east Palo Alto. Get your employer to double your contribution to StreetCode Academy, a non-profit 501(c)(3). #STREETCODELIVE

Apply to volunteer virtually with an Oakland school this fall or volunteer at StreetCode Academy (headquartered in east Palo Alto).

Tell us about a great program connecting donors with students who need the resources.

Email us at hello@girlgeek.io or tweet at @girlgeekx and we’ll add it to our list here.

Thank you!

Girl Geek X Planet Lightning Talks! (Video + Transcript)

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

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  • Transcript of Planet Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

    Angie Chang: It’s six o’clock and that means it’s time for another Girl Geek Dinner, and this time, however, we are coming to you virtually for the first time!

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Just going virtual opens up our access to you and to you to each other, few people in various time zones, some people who say they’re in London at 2 A.M.

    Angie Chang: I’m just super excited to be able to partner with Planet and bring this evening of talks to hundreds of girl geeks.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: So today I’m going to talk about diversity and belonging and the climate that we’re at right now and how it’s not business as usual, and rethinking what diversity is going to looks like in 2020.

    Lisa Huang-North: And when you do make that leap into your new role, how long do you want to be there? Is there a stepping stone to another bigger career pivot? For example, if you’re moving to a new industry or is it a way for you to grow and really deepen your expertise, for example, within the industry or within the field?

    Sara Safavi: Along the way I’ve had to pick up some new habits, some new practices and ways of working in order to make my staye in remotesville as a remote employee sustainable.

    Barbara Vazquez: What I’m going to talk about today about agile development and estimation, because I’m a software engineer and we do agile development at Planet. These are some tips that might be useful on a day to day.

    Kelsey Doerksen: Today, I’m going to be talking a little bit about how to handle big data in space and the different machine learning projects I’ve been a part of over the past few years.

    Deanna Farago: My name is Deanna Farago and my team and I operate a fleet of satellites that are currently imaging the entire planet every day.

    Elena Rodriguez: I chose a topic because this is something that I’m always thinking about it, and now I have the opportunity to talk about it and I’m going to take advantage of this – this is how I ended up here, so I’m going to show you my story.

    Sarah Preston: Stories are passed to community and understanding. So think about all the stories that you loved growing up. There were some kind of connection that you made, either to a character, to the author or to the setting that drew you in and made it really memorable.

    Brittany Zajic: I’m on the business development team here at Planet. Business development means something different at every company. Here we focus strategic partnerships and the commercialization of new markets.

    Nikki Hampton: At Planet we have always been committed to diversity, but we are doubling down on our commitment and particularly so looking with respect to attracting and retaining communities of color. For all of you online, we are looking forward to and eager to work with you to tap into a broader network of talented folks that you might want to consider referring to us or applying and sharing with a who you know. But we’re super excited to have been part of this and are grateful that you all attended!

    Angie Chang: It’s six o’clock. And that means it’s time for another Girl Geek Dinner… This time, however, we are coming to you virtually for the first time from our homes in Berkeley, California here. Sukrutha, where are you?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: I’m in San Francisco, California.

    Angie Chang: And behind the wings we have Amy, who is coming from … Amy, where are you coming from?

    Amy Weicker: Pennsylvania.

    Angie Chang: Pennsylvania. Awesome. We have a bunch of people coming in. Can you use the chat below and tell us where you’re coming in from? While everyone does that, Oh my God.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Wow. Orange County, San Jose. [inaudible] India, my hometown. What were you saying, Angie?

    Angie Chang: I’m like, normally we get to see you in a beautiful office space. It’s always great to just go to these different companies and go there and meet the people, eat their food, drink some wine — and then hear from their women at the company speaking about what they’re doing at the company. From roles in engineering and product to sales … we’re going to hear from a few sales people tonight .. It’s really great and exciting to hear from many of the women working at the company on what they love to do.

    Angie Chang: We learn a bit about the company. I’m just super excited to be able to partner with Planet and bring this evening of talks to hundreds of girl geeks. These videos will be available on YouTube for free later so if you can’t come because you actually had to cook dinner and eat it with your family, you can still watch it later.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: I want to just call out a few people in various time zones. Some people who say they’re in London at 2:00 AM, that’s awesome. India, 6:30 AM. That’s amazing, where in a funny way just going virtual opens up our access to you, and to you to each other 100% across time zones and across a variety of fronts. So that’s awesome.

    Angie Chang: Cool. I guess it’s time for introductions. My name’s Angie Chang. I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. I’ve been organizing these Bay Area Girl Geek dinners, as we called them for the first 10 years. Then now we’ve been doing Girl Geek X events. We’ve done over 200 events at companies big and small, at companies you’ve heard of and companies you haven’t. I think it’s really fun to keep doing it all these years because of that. You get to learn about so many companies that you never thought of. You go in there and you hear about all the ways that the company has people working in these different departments that you never knew existed. Suddenly you’re like, “Oh my God, I guess this sounds really cool.” By the end, when they’re like, “And we are hiring,” you’re like, “Yes, I know what you do. I know what team I can join. I heard from people at that company, I know their names. I can now find them on LinkedIn and poke them and send them my resume.” Please do that. They are hiring. Sukrutha?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. Hi, I’m Sukrutha. I’m the CTO of Girl Geek X. Angie and I met several years ago when I had just moved to the Bay Area looking for other like-minded women like yourself to connect with. I found out that there was an upcoming event with Girl Geek Dinner and I saw Angie’s name there. I was like, that’s awesome. I should try to go. For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to go that evening, and I instead managed to get the company I was working at to sponsor. Angie and I played phone tag for a little bit, but we ended up meeting and I was like, this is so exciting because that particular event had over 200 women AND men show up — 200 people show up, basically. It was such a great energy in the room. I just couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to come back.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s where our journey together started. That was dinner number 11. We’ve since had over 200 dinners. I’ve actually lost count. At that point it was one every few months. We ended up having the frequency just go up. We then launched into podcasts. We launched into virtual conferences. So you can see all of that content on our website (girlgeek.io). Just to catch up if you’re new to this, usually what we do in this situation is we survey the room and we ask how many of you are attending this event for the first time. I don’t know how we would do that now, but I’d be really curious to learn from virtually raising your hands. How many of you are attending for the first time? Wow. I can see the numbers, counting now over 40 people are raising their hands as the first time.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Wow. That number’s climbing, Angie. That’s amazing. I’m so happy to see so many first time attendees. Generally, like for us, it has been amazing because we would get so much out of these dinners, the podcast that we do, as well as the conferences, because the energy from just meeting other people specifically like you, you may not have that access in your company. We were getting so much out of it. We would hear from the sponsoring company, how they were getting access to really motivated, smart individuals like yourself, where they ordinarily wouldn’t have the access to. Likewise, the attendees would come to these events and they’d be like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize that were these many people who are just like me.” And then they started to make friendships. Often Angie and I would talk about how important it is to network before you actually need it.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: I myself was super shy and awkward. And honestly, I still am. Who knows with the pandemic and sitting at home how awkward I’m going to be in real life when all of this lifts, but I do force myself. I learned from Angie, actually, how best to get involved in a conversation and approach people that I know I can benefit from that connection and they can benefit from it, as well. We started to build our circle. From that, I learned concepts like build your own personal board of directors, people who advise you in your career and your work life balance and topics like that. Then people who give you honest feedback on how you can improve yourself. So many things like mentorship and sponsorship and how to go about seeking that for yourself and how not to directly just go up to someone and be like, “Just be my mentor,” but then not give them enough context. So how to go about it the right way. There’s usually tips and tricks like that, that we will benefit most from asking other people who’ve had shared experiences like ourselves. What do you think, Angie? What do you think people get out of this?

    Angie Chang: I really appreciate going to Girl Geek Dinners and then Girl Geek events, because we reach a wide range of women who are working in tech and engineering and product. Also a lot of startup entrepreneurs and operations and marketing people. And they all intersect. I think in our careers, which are going to stand for decades, we are definitely going to be changing our jobs, and our roles will be different. I remember when I first met Sukrutha, she was a software engineer in test, and now she’s a senior engineering manager and it’s been years and it’s been great watching her change her career and grow and continue to look for … I think people look for people like them.

    Angie Chang: If I were an engineer, which I was 15 years ago, I would go to a Girl Geek Dinner and I’d be like, “I want to meet other engineers,” but then you wouldn’t have that happy chance of meeting other people, women who are working in other roles, but then you’d be like, “Oh my God, this is actually really cool.” These weak ties and these relationships are actually really beneficial in the long run. I don’t think I would have asked for it when I was younger, to meet all these different types of people, but now I really see it’s fortuitous and it pays to be a little broader. I like the Girl Geek X umbrella, instead of saying I’m only in product, which I was for a few years, or I’m only an entrepreneur, which I was for a few years.

    Angie Chang: Now, it’s just a great place to meet a lot of people. They keep coming back. We actually keep seeing a lot of faces. There’s always a lot of new people and a lot of people that come back time and again, based on who is hosting. We’ll be having different companies host virtual events moving forward monthly. You can look forward to different companies. But tonight we’re really excited to bring you the Girl Geeks of Planet Labs. I am going to be introducing our first speaker from Planet Labs, Adria.

    Angie Chang: Here’s a quick bit about her. She joined Planet’s federal division in Washington, DC as a people partner, where she was able to continue her passion for innovation and data with strategic human capital. She earned her master’s degree at Georgetown university with a research focus on diversity, equity and inclusion in tech. She is co-lead to Planet’s belonging taskforce. Welcome, Adria.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here. This is such a great event, and it’s my first time. Obviously my first time as a panelist, but my first time attending the event. I’m just so excited to have so many people here listening to our talks and just connecting with women in different industries. I’m excited to just attend future events later on. Thanks so much for the introduction.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s jump into a little bit about Planet. I’m going to share my-

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Adria, would you like to turn on your video so people can see you?

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Oh, I’m so sorry.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: No worries.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I think we can all relate. I think this has happened to probably all of us. We’re all in a remote workforce right now. Maybe everyone can raise their hand if they’ve forgotten their video once or twice. Thank you. That made me feel a little bit better. Let me share my screen really quickly with everyone. We will jump into a little bit about Planet and then … oops, sorry … I will jump into my presentation.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: About Planet, aerospace know how meet Silicon Valley ingenuity. From our spacecraft to our APIs, we engineer our hardware and software to service the largest fleet of earth imaging satellites in orbit and scale our seven plus petabyte imagery archive, growing daily. Planet designs, builds, and launches satellites faster than any company or government in history by using lean, low cost electronics and design iteration. Our Doves, which make up the world’s largest constellation of earth imaging satellites, line scan the planet to image the entire earth daily, which is really cool. We launch new satellites into orbit every three or four months. Most earth imaging companies don’t build their own satellites, but we’re not like most earth imaging companies. Planet designs and builds its satellites in house, allowing us to iterate often and pack the latest technology into our small satellites.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Complete vertical integration enables us to respond quickly to customer needs and perpetually evolve our technology. Operating one satellite is a challenge, but operating 200 is completely unprecedented. If you haven’t checked out our Ted Talk on YouTube, I highly, highly suggest you do. Planet’s submission is really cool. I’ll dive into a little bit about why I love working at Planet in a little bit, but it really is unprecedented. Our mission control team uses patented automation software to manage our fleet of satellites, allowing just a handful of people to schedule imaging windows, push software into orbit and download images to 45 ground stations throughout the world. Planet processes and delivers imagery quickly and efficiently. We use the Google Cloud platform and enable custom processing so that customers can tap directly into our data the same way we do. Our data pipeline ensures easy web and API access to Planet’s imagery and archive. We make every scene available as a tile service, composite scenes into mosaics, and build time slice mosaics so you can see change over time. That’s a little bit about us.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I am the first speaker, so I’m just going to dive into my talk. I hope that was a high level overview of Planet. Every person that works at Planet is super passionate about our mission, what we do. I really can say that every time I’m out on the street and I do tell people that I work for Planet, our mission is just so cool, that we build our own satellites and we have daily earth imaging. It really is unprecedented. It’s a really cool place to work.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: On to my talk. I’m the people partner for Planet Federal. I work out of Washington, DC. Planet Federal, it’s the government arm of Planet. We partner with the government. I function as the people partner, which is basically HR. The people partner does function kind of as an HR business partner. Today I’m going to talk about diversity and belonging and the climate that we’re at right now, and how it’s not business as usual. We’re rethinking what diversity and belonging looks like in 2020.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: A little bit about me. I like to use the group identity wheel anytime I do any type of speaking related to diversity and belonging, because I think this is a really good representation, at least for me, the way I like to represent myself and my different group identities. I am a cis gendered woman. My pronouns are she/her. I’m a US national, identify as agnostic. I am a Black, queer lesbian living with disability. I’m a millennial, upper middle class, and I do hold an advanced degree. This framework is really good for me. I think it’s really good for others, just to kind of show places where I’m marginalized and places where different group identities that I am also dominant.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s jump in. So why I joined Planet. It was an industry jump for me. I had about seven years in human resources. I started as a generalist. I grew into leadership and then I later expanded into consultancy. I’m really passionate about strategic HR and diversity, equity, and inclusion. I began looking for something in the tech industry. I wanted to feel really connected to the mission of the next place that I landed. I was instantly intrigued by Planet and their core values. Why I love working at Planet, and this is what keeps me passionate, keeps me engaged, it’s why I show up to work every day. I love my team. They’re brilliant. I can actually say this globally, across Planet. We just have a really talented group of individuals that work for our company. If we’re at coffee chats or happy hours or whatever you can just listen to people for hours.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Everyone is just brilliant at what they do, and everyone is so passionate about how they contribute to Planet’s mission. The work that I do is really great for me. It is what I’m passionate about. I get to do that every day. Planet is dedicated to agility and learning, which is something that’s really important to me, especially being in the people department. I love working on the people team because I really enjoy fostering connection and collaboration between teams.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s dive into the topic today of what I wanted to talk about for this lightning talk, which is diversity and belonging. This year has been a tough year, and I think we’re all in agreement. We face a global pandemic. We’re facing systematic racism and police brutality, political unrest, and let us not forget the murder hornet scare in May. Just in case you did forget, I put a little slide here. It did terrify me, I think, as well as some others. Wanted to add a little bit of levity there. This was an addition to our plates, I think, that we did not need in May. But so let’s dive into the topic for today. We are a nation that’s currently experiencing trauma. Filmed police brutality and racist interactions have flooded our broadcasts as well as social media. It’s something that we’re seeing every day. Many, from all backgrounds and racial identities, have filled the streets in protest to support Black Lives Matter. In response to this, a number of companies have put out statements in solidarity, and it’s forcing many companies, including Planet, to grapple with internal diversity statistics and consequently rethink diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s talk a little bit about statistics. Statistics show that Black employees are left behind. In 2014, Google released their diversity statistics, which many tech companies followed suit after that. But before that it wasn’t something that companies widely released. Statistics over the past six years have shown that despite diversity efforts by most organizations, Black representation remains extremely low with a net change that is almost nonexistent. Statistics do show a slight increase for women in tech, which shows that some diversity efforts are working, but some marginalized groups are still being left behind, which is super important to look at. Let’s look a little bit at the delta for Black employees and tech. So this is a really good representation to just show you over the past five to six years there really hasn’t been a change, despite companies having large funding towards diversity, having diversity programs in place.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: The numbers still remain extremely low. There has been, as I said, an increase for women in tech. It’s been a small increase. There’s still so much room to go, but there has been some strides made there. So just wanted to show a little bit of visual representation of that data. Let’s talk about why diversity efforts are failing. This is what I mean when I’m talking about diversity, quote, unquote business as usual. This is what companies have been doing for decades. Despite a few new bells and whistles that came about in the ’90s, companies have been essentially doubling down on the same approaches that they’ve been doing since the ’60s, which is diversity training to reduce bias. I think many of us have held trainings like that if you’re in people operations, like I am, or maybe you’ve attended a training like that. Hiring tests and performance ratings that limit bias, and putting grievance systems in place for employees to challenge managers.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: These tools are really designed to preempt lawsuits. I think that framework is even in the wording. When we do attend these trainings, it’s very fear-based, I would say. They don’t dive further than that. They don’t dive further to promote equity and inclusion. Now we’re seeing a shift. Employees are demanding change. Companies can no longer operate business as usual in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Employees don’t want a PR statement from the organization, but rather they want to see a clear action plan related to inclusion and anti racist efforts. This really falls in the wheelhouse of the people team.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: It is an organizational wide effort, but it’s something that I’m proud to be involved in. I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. Moving toward belonging and the new landscape for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. I really, really love this framework and I wanted to make sure I included in this talk. Diversity has no meaning without inclusion and belonging. Diversity is like being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance and belonging is dancing like no one is watching. Belonging is really being able to show up at work as your true self, and being able to be your authentic self in the workplace. We spend so much time at work that really having this piece where you’re being invited to the party without having these other pieces, it doesn’t mean anything. This is exactly why these diversity efforts are failing.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I’m not going to dive super into the inclusion framework here, but I did want to include a visual of the sweet spot for inclusion, which is a high level of belongingness and a high value in uniqueness. What that results in is an individual being treated as an insider, and also allowed and encouraged to retain uniqueness within their work group. Let’s talk a little bit about definitions, because a lot of times, I think you can get these trendy words that are happening within diversity or even happening within HR, within people. Belonging can be pegged as a trendy word and it’s really not. I wanted to be explicit about the definitions. Belongingness has to do with whether or not a person is and feels treated as an organizational insider. Uniqueness is measured by the degree to which an individual feels he or she can bring his or her full self to the work without needing to assimilate to cultural norm.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: The degree to which an employee can fully engage, feel safe, and feel connected in the workplace greatly depends on these two categories. And like I said, these can often be left out of diversity programs. So let’s dive a little further into diversity without belonging. Like I said, diversity without belonging inclusion allows marginalized groups into the organization, but then it forces them to fit in to the existing dominant culture. Many Black employees, for example, experience a pass on promotion, noting that they should get to know other managers more, or network more, or connect more. There’s really not explicit definitions in terms of what that really means. For many marginalized groups, Black employees specifically, they report not feeling safe to connect at work and be their authentic self due to cultural difference and fear of bias or repercussions. There’s a real barrier there. Statistics show that attrition rates among Black employees and those of other marginalized groups are much higher. A 2017 report surveyed over 2000 tech employees who left their jobs. It found that many people of color felt that they had unfairly been passed over for promotion, faced stereotyping or bias related to quote unquote fitting in or connecting with others.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s talk about getting it right. I mean, that’s what I really want to talk about in this talk. When belonging and inclusion are embedded in company culture, it no longer forces employees to fit into the dominant culture, but rather it builds a culture around everyone’s unique identities. Rethinking strategy. Belonging becomes the heartbeat behind an organization’s culture and core values. I’m proud to say that that’s something Planet is working towards and I think that they value. I am the co-lead on the belonging task force. I can really say that that is embedded in Planet’s core values. Without inclusion and belonging, employees do not feel as though they can show up as their authentic self at work, like I said before. This inhibits recruitment, retention, and promotion of marginalized groups, and it also inhibits diverse voices from speaking up and being heard. Let’s talk about creating sustainable change. An internal and external audit is something that must be done.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Companies, including Planet, must take a long, hard look in the mirror and they must sit with what they see. What are the diversity statistics amongst marginalized groups, specifically Black employees in this climate? What are the attrition rates amongst these groups? How do these systems that organizations have in place contribute to oppression of these groups? Creating a safe space for employees and fostering belonging is also really important. I’m sure a lot of you have heard about employee resource groups, or maybe you’re a member of one.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: They’re a great place to create a safe space for employees to connect. They’ve actually been in effect since 1964, and they were established as a response to anti-black prejudice following the 1964 riots in New York. They’ve continued to be a huge part of the tech community, but companies must really be careful to utilize these groups as a safe space, rather than placing extra burden on them by forcing them to do organizational diversity work and education on top of their jobs. Especially with us being women in tech, sometimes the burden can fall on the marginalized group to do the education, to do the work on top of their jobs. That’s not really the purpose of an employee resource group. It’s to create that safe space, to create belonging, and to create connection. Employers should really watch that and be careful of putting that burden on the employees.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Looking at the internal and external pipeline of candidates is also really important. Talent and recruitment reform, I think is the biggest part of this. You want to audit your hiring practices, and broadening the schools that you recruit from is really important and including HBCUs, it’s also really important. Recognizing bias against HBCUs and other university programs as being seen as a lower bar is the first step in that. I think that’s something that a lot of tech companies are looking at right now. Also auditing referral programs. So I think referral programs sometimes can fall by the wayside, especially in tech. If a workforce is already homogenous, referrals can further contribute to this as referrals from employees tend to be within their own identity groups.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I challenge everyone on this video to think about when you’re referring people into your organizations, are you amplifying diverse voices? Who are you referring, or is it homogenous? This is something that even as employees, we can be thinking about when we’re bringing people into our organization.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Addition of external efforts, and this is something I’m really proud to partner or be involved with Planet. Recognizing the disparity of marginalized groups in tech and committing to investment in community partnerships and education is also huge in creating sustainable change. An example of this is investing money to give black and LatinX students exposure to geospatial and STEM studies and potentially creating an internship pipeline based on such programs.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: The last portion I want to talk about is mentorship programs. I think Angie highlighted, it was either Angie or Amy, highlighted mentorship in the beginning of this. People in senior roles tend to want to mentor and groom people who look like them or remind them of themselves. This is implicit bias. It’s unconscious bias. It’s not on purpose. But this means that people in marginalized groups often do not have someone to advocate for them. Organizations and managers within these organizations, if you’re a people leader on your team, you should be intentional about diversity in mentorship programs rather than leaving it up to senior management.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: The last portion is stamina. This isn’t a checklist. This isn’t a quick fix. This isn’t a measurable ROI. ROI is like always what executives want to hear is if you’re on the operations team or maybe you’re a people leader on your team I’m sure you talk a lot about ROI, building business cases for everything that you want to pass through. But that’s not the case here. This is systemic change that we’re trying to create at the organizational level, which is sustained over years of hard work to see measurable results. Companies must commit to sustainable change over time at every level of the company to value and prioritize diverse and inclusive workforces.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I’ll end this just by saying, I am so excited to be a part of these efforts at Planet. I look forward so much forward to seeing sustainable change within our company, and I hope that your companies are also working to create sustainable change. I hope that your voices are being heard. This is a really important time for all of our companies, especially within the tech community. I’ll be excited to see what type of change happens within the tech community in years to come. So thank you so much.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Thank you so much, Adria. That was wonderful. It was really inspiring for sure for me. We’re going to switch over to our next amazing panelist, Lisa Huang-North. I’m going to do a quick introduction and then we can jump into Lisa. Wow, great background, Lisa! Lisa is a product and program lead at Planet. The team is responsible for delivering product solutions that help customers scale their business. Before joining Planet, Lisa worked for over a decade in strategic consulting, finance, digital marketing, and full stack software engineering. In her free time, you can find Lisa building Lego Technic sets, coaxing her sourdough starter, and dreaming of the day when we can all travel to see friends and family again. Oh my gosh, don’t we all? Welcome, Lisa.

    Lisa Huang-North: Thank you very much, and thank you for the intro. Let me share my screen. Hopefully, everyone had a great time listening to Adria’s talk. I’m really excited to be following such a fantastic speaker. Can you all see my screen?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Lisa Huang-North: Hopefully, yes. Okay, wonderful. Yeah. Really today I’m hoping to speak with you around pivoting, and I think especially with 2020, it’s really thrown the spinner. I think a lot of people’s plan, whether that be life plans or career plans and career pivots, there’s never really a good time for it, but it’s even more stressful when there’re uncertainties around that. I’m hoping today I can share three lessons from our satellite operation team and really get you to think around how you can plan for your career pivot.

    Lisa Huang-North: To start, let’s see. Here we go. All right. Firstly, about me, I’m currently a product and program lead here at Planet, and I’m also a part of our wonderWomen ERG group that Adria mentioned earlier, [inaudible] taskforce. I call myself a Pivoteur with five career pivots. Prior to COVID shutdown, I loved to travel. Hopefully that’s something that resonate with everyone. And here, I just included a short quote because that was part of what inspired my brief or the talk, was Robert Frost’s poem around traveling or taking the road less traveled.

    Lisa Huang-North: The first lesson, what are your areas of interest? A lot of the time for our satellite operation team, the first thing they need to know about tasking on satellite is, where do you want to look, and what do you care about? I will use two use case to try to explain. The first one, perhaps you’re in agriculture. Perhaps you are a farmer, in which case, the area that interests you could be roads. You’re trying to find the roads that will help you travel to your farms versus if you’re a civil government, for example, someone in San Francisco who is doing city planning, the things you care about will probably be buildings or infrastructure, and not so much about the road itself to a farm land area.

    Lisa Huang-North: Using these sample lessons similarly for you, when you’re planning your career pivots or career changes, that will be my question to you, what are your areas of interest? That can be an industry, a vertical, perhaps you really tech or you want to try out finance or non-profit. Maybe it’s a skillset that you want to gain along the way, or perhaps it’s really about a national or geographic location, you want to move to the city or you want to be closer to family. So those are interesting points to consider around your area of interest.

    Lisa Huang-North: In my case, it was a combination of all of those when I did my first two career pivots, I will say. I started off in Chicago, my career as a mutual fund data analyst. So, that was at Morningstar. And one of the things that I personally felt was really important was a chance to work abroad because I think it’s important to learn about different culture and get a chance to work and live in those places [inaudible 00:39:30] traveler.

    Lisa Huang-North: And that’s what brought me to my first opportunity where the company went through a merger and acquisition and I volunteered, interviewed, and ended up moving to Cape Town, South Africa, where I headed up the data operations for our Sub-Saharan African office. And that’s the picture on the left. And after doing that for a couple years, I realized, hey, data analyst is great. I get to learn a lot about data operations and logistics and business analytics, but I really want to do something more creative now. And I love something that’s more customer facing and somewhere where I can work on my marketing or communication skills. So that was my second pivot where I moved and became a food writer. I know, I know a little off course, but it was something fun. I was in my early twenties and for me, it was about the skillset that I wanted to gain and in the immediate format.

    Lisa Huang-North: All right, lesson number two, what are your time of interest? A lot of the time for our satellite operation team, they need to know what the targeted time period for our customers, our users will want to see imagery of. Again, going back to the earlier examples, if you’re in agriculture, for example, a farmer. Your time of interest is probably quite seasonal. For example, with this picture, you actually see a lot of the circular fields. That’s what you’ll spot throughout the U.S. And in their case, their time of interest would probably be spring because they’re planning for the growing season and they really need to know what the health of their fields are. However, going back to civil government, if you’re looking at zoning or city planning, or even thinking about where do I want to develop the city, building more infrastructure, building new highways, some of those time of interest could be longer term instead of a season. You’re looking at your own year or even multi-year horizons.

    Lisa Huang-North: So think about that when you’re going through a career change or planning for it, what is your time of interest? Are you looking at something that will happen within the next 12 months, two years? And when you do make that leap into your new role, how long do you want to be there? Is there a stepping stone to another bigger career pivot, for example, if you’re moving to a new industry or is it a way for you to grow and really deepen your expertise, for example, within the industry or within the field. And feel free to put your thoughts in the Q and A as well, it’s always fun to make it interactive as you are pondering through these lessons.

    Lisa Huang-North: So in my case, I would say while I was becoming a food writer, I fell into digital marketing because a lot of writing and communication are augmented by social media. And from there I discovered one of my passions, which is in public speaking. So for me, my time of interest at the time was really to hone my public speaking skills and communication skills. And one of my capstone projects or goal I set for myself was to speak at the TEDx event. And at the time Cape Town held or organized various TEDx events. There’s ones organized by the university and there’s ones organized by the city itself. And I was able to, again, submit the talk proposal and be selected and really presented. And that was where I had the unique opportunity to meet Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as well. Still one of the highlights in that time of my life.

    Lisa Huang-North: And carrying that forward, now my next time of interest was looking at two to three year horizon where I said, “I have my data analytic skills down. I have my creative marketing skills down. What do I want to learn next?” And I really wanted to be able to build a product so that I’m not just talking about it or selling it or analyzing it if I can build the end to end user experience. And that’s where it brought me to my next pivot into a full stack software engineer role. And I went through a coding boot camp where I really learned the full stack where on the backend learning Ruby and on the front end learning JavaScript, using frameworks such as Ember.js and React.js. And that’s the photo you see on the top right. Again, I like to have milestones or capstone project for myself, and for that one, I really wanted to present some fine learnings in the form of a conference talk. And I was able to present at GDG in Madrid, that’s Google Developer Groups, during my travels when I was in Madrid. Think about the time of interest as you pursue your next career change.

    Lisa Huang-North: All right, lesson number three, and I think this one is actually one of the most important one. And it’s a reasonable or logical extension coming from area of interest, time of interest, and now what are your success criteria? Using the earlier examples, if we are looking at those as an agricultural farmer. This image on the screen, it’s probably not very successful because I don’t see a lot of farming or agricultural land near San Francisco downtown. Whereas if the photo was of [inaudible] with garlic farming or even of Napa Valley with the wine industry there, that probably makes a lot more sense and that image will be successful, right?

    Lisa Huang-North: But again, going back to city, if you are San Francisco government and you’re doing city zoning and infrastructure development, this image is probably perfect for your use case. You’re able to see downtown, you’re able to see Embarcadero. And in fact, you can even see Presidio on the top and the bridge, The Golden Gate Bridge. And even with Karl the Fog, the clouds, we’re always looking up for cloud covers at Planet, even though the cloud obfuscate the left side of the city, you really get to see 90% of the city.

    Lisa Huang-North: So this image for civil government will be successful. So link in to that, what are the factors for your success criteria? Is it about the job, the scope of the role, maybe it’s about salary because you’re at the time of your life where you need to provide for your family and financial stability is key. Or perhaps if you’re younger and earlier in your career journey and for you, personal growth and learning is the key factor for your success criteria. So think about that as you’re planning your career change and planning for the next pivot.

    Lisa Huang-North: In my case, I would say that through those different career changes, initially the success criterias were pretty immediate. Which are, what skills can I learn? And am I having fun with it? Am I having fun while I’m changing these different jobs or learning new things? And I would say on the top left, this was at a friend’s wedding in Durban, South Africa. And for me at the time, the social aspect was a huge thing, too. I really wanted to meet people. I wanted to experience different cultures and those, my lifestyle choices, were integral pieces to my success criteria beyond professional growth.

    Lisa Huang-North: And slowly as I moved back to the U.S., I would say that my success criteria has changed over time. And now, instead of just focusing on perhaps immediate and personal gains, I’m really looking at how I can integrate or how I can be closer to families and what that means for my lifestyle and what I want in the longterm, starting a family, for example, mentoring other women in tech. And that’s how I’ve been involved in Women in Product and Tech Ladies. And in some ways, still trying to get connected with my roots from when I ran the startup by attending startup conferences and just keeping fingers on the pulse about what’s happening in the startup space. So that was really key shift from personal growth lifestyle to professional, family, as well as any mentorship impact.

    Lisa Huang-North: And that ultimately was what brought me to Planet. I think, as Adria mentioned, a lot of us here at Planet, we are fully aligned with Planet’s mission. And one of the success criteria for me when I went through the latest round of job search was around impact. I really wanted to join a company where I myself can be contributing to something that is impactful at the global scale. And really, Planet way surpassed that and some more because I would say beyond global, this is really a planetary and specie level. And I think hopefully with the use case I have shared, you can see how it impacts industries at the time. And I’m sure some of the speakers later will share even more interesting story such as forestry or crisis management. And you’ll get to hear a lot more. So take this time in the question Q and A area, if you can think about what your success criteria are, start sharing that with us.

    Lisa Huang-North: So finally, savor the journey. I think bringing back the three lessons about area of interest, time of interest, and your success criteria, another thing to remember is that while we are in the midst of career change or any pivot, the uncertainties are probably quite stressful. And you may feel like you don’t really know where you’re going, or if you are going to be able to attain the goals that you have set out for yourself. But as a famous saying go, hindsight is always 20/20. And while you’re in it, you may feel like you’re going through a rough divergence, snaking around from place to place. And it doesn’t feel like a linear path, but looking back, or if you zoom out and take a bird’s eye view, you’ll probably realize that you’ve made something beautiful and you have created this fantastic journey for yourself, where all those different skills and experience you pick up along the way were pieces of the puzzle. And ultimately when you piece all of them together, they look really stunning.

    Lisa Huang-North: So I hope that will help to lessen some of the stress, anxiety you’re feeling as you put it through these uncertain times. And to close, obviously, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out and let’s chat. You can connect with me on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I will be here for the networking event later on as well. So definitely reach out and we are hiring. So always happy to chat about Planet. Thank you.

    Angie Chang: Thank you, Lisa. We are running a little behind, so we’re going to skip the Q&A but feel free to ask the questions and we will ask Lisa and we will share them later in a blog post with everyone. But right now our next speaker is Sara. And we’ll bring her right up. Hey, Sara.

    Sara Safavi: Hey, how’s it going?

    Angie Chang: Good. How are you?

    Sara Safavi: All right.

    Angie Chang: So… you can get your slides…

    Sara Safavi: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Angie Chang: Perfect. So Sara, by means of intro and [inaudible]. She leads the developer relations team at Planet Labs. Welcome, Sara.

    Sara Safavi: Thank you. All right. So yes, I will get started. Like Angie said, I lead the DevRel team here at Planet Labs. And what I want to talk to you all about today is my experience working remote. I’ve been working remotely, both here at Planet and prior to Planet for about five or six years. So about three years here at Planet and then a couple different companies before. Along the way, I’ve had to pick up some new habits, some new practices and ways of working in order to make my stay in Remotesville as a remote employee sustainable.

    Sara Safavi: Tonight, I just wanted to share some of those tips with you and go through them really quick. I want to give you a starting point, not so much teach you everything, but a starting point you can reference if you’re also somewhere at the beginning of this journey. I know a lot of us are, especially in the last couple of months, so it’s a topic that we’ve all been talking about. And this, if you ask somebody for their one tip for working remotely, this one is probably what you’ll hear most of, establish a routine, make sure you have a routine.

    Sara Safavi: I’m putting this first because it is so common that you’ll hear it. I have a couple of things I’ll mention after this less common, but I do think that this is important. But something important to notice here is that we’re new because I’m talking about establishing a new routine. You need to develop some new routine that works for you because this isn’t the same as your pre-Remotesville routine. Your life is no longer in the same patterns. You’re not going to get up in the morning and pack a lunch, probably. You’re not going to get into your car, stop at the gas station on the way. You probably not even going to put your shoes on in the morning.

    Sara Safavi: So it’s completely different scenario, which means it’s going to take a different routine. But routines are still important because our brains can be stupid. And we want to trick them. A routine helps you trick your brain into understanding that we’re getting ready for work, we’re going to work, we’re no longer sitting at home in bed, it’s not the weekend, it’s still a weekday. So taking that time to get dressed in the morning, do your hair, put on something that makes you feel powerful and professional. It really helps separate that situation in your head between home and work.

    Sara Safavi: So build a morning routine that takes care of you. Maybe do some yoga, meditate, go for a run, whatever it takes to establish that new routine. But some other things that people don’t necessarily talk about, a friend of mine shared this concept with me a couple of months ago, and I really love it. So I had to stick it in here. Teach yourself and give yourself permission to put your body first. What I really mean by this is a lot of times when we’re working solo at home, it can become really easy to just stop listening to our body’s needs. If we’re not changing what we’re doing or interacting with other people, if we’re just sitting at our desks for eight hours a day with a cat or a dog sitting under the desk, then you can really start ignoring your own body’s needs.

    Sara Safavi: So if you catch yourself feeling out of sorts or not able to get into that workflow like you usually do, or just feeling like something’s wrong, or you keep beating your head against the same bug for 10 minutes, take a minute and check in with yourself. See if there’s some body’s needs that you’ve been ignoring. Did you skip lunch? Have you not stood up from your desk for four hours? Since you don’t have like a water cooler to walk towards, maybe you forgot to get a drink of water, hydration is important. But just take a moment, check in with yourself because a lot of times, the ways that we’re feeling are actually directly related to ignoring what our body’s asking for.

    Sara Safavi: And similarly, talking about stepping away from your desk, when you’re working remotely, you really have to make space for scene changes. If you’re in an office, many times a day, you’re going to get up, you’re going to go to a conference room, you’re going to go visit your coworker’s desk, you’re going to go to somebody else’s desk and ask to see what they’re working on. You’ve got all these opportunities to change your scene, but when you’re working at home, you don’t have those opportunities anymore. So you have to deliberately make space for them. Schedule them into your daily routine. Maybe you’re going to take your dog for a walk for a half hour every afternoon. Put that on your work calendar. Or maybe every Monday morning, you water all your plants, put that on your calendar. Put dancing breaks on your calendar, I have friends that do that and I love it. You’re working remotely though, your schedule can be flexible, maybe you can do a yoga class at 1:00 PM. Maybe you have the freedom to do that, but you have to deliberately seek out those opportunities to change your scene.

    Sara Safavi: Similarly, you have to seek out connection. You really have to rethink what it means to make connection. If you’re working remotely, like I said, you don’t have those coworkers desks to walk to. You don’t have a water cooler. You don’t have a break room to go make a cup of coffee or grab your lunch and heat it up. You don’t have those natural opportunities for connection. So as a Remotesville citizen, you need to be deliberate and intentional about this. Instead of just telling a coworker on Slack, “Hey, we should get coffee sometime,” you should send them a calendar invite for 2:00 PM on Wednesday and say, “Hey, I’m going to be on Zoom, having coffee. Let’s chat.” Make it an intentional and easy way for them to accept and say, “Yeah, let’s connect.”

    Sara Safavi: Find opportunities to network. Find a network of other people working remotely, whether it’s at your current company or friends that you know who are in different companies. And if you don’t have a network already and you can’t find one, maybe that’s a perfect time for you to make your own. Something that’s really great that we overlook in remote work is coworking. It can be really great to just cowork with somebody. And I don’t mean an active Zoom chat, like a coffee break, where you’re talking back and forth, but maybe you just open a video call with a coworker and you guys just sit there in silence doing your own work together. It’s really companionable.

    Sara Safavi: So rethinking what we mean when we’re thinking about human connection and then being deliberate and intentional about it, is what’s going to make that remote work environment more sustainable. Something to watch for is to be aware about the creeping attraction of home comforts. So if you’re working in Remotesville, you’ve got a comfy couch, you’ve got a comfy bed, you’ve got all of the comforts of home, but I strongly recommend that you don’t work from your bed.

    Sara Safavi: So I know Deanna is going to talk to us later about satellite operations from bed, and I totally fully endorse it. I think that’s awesome. But what I mean when I say don’t work from bed is, don’t make this your normal Monday to Friday, nine to five office space. Like I said, brains are stupid. You need to trick your brain into understanding home versus workspace. You have to use sensory cues to signal that difference. You have to let yourself close an office door at the end of the day. So maybe you don’t actually have an office at your house, but maybe you have to mentally be able to close that door.

    Sara Safavi: If you’re working from your bed all day, it’s super comfortable. It’s awesome. Maybe you’re even really productive, but then the problem comes when it’s time to go to bed and you want to sleep, but your brain is like, “Oh, this is where I’ve been working all day.” So you start thinking about work again, and your brain starts turning the last problem you’re working on over in your head. And it’s really difficult to have that isolation. So maybe at home, you don’t have a lot of space, maybe you’re working from your dining table. That was me for the first two years of my remote career. But something you could do is put a lamp on that table and turn that lamp on only when you’re working. And when you’re done working, the lamp’s off. Little stuff like that, those sensory cues can really make a difference in being able to mentally close that office door.

    Sara Safavi: I’ve given you a lot of advice and I do want you to remember, these are interesting times where we’re living through right now. This isn’t the normal time that you would be switching to working remote in tech. So give yourself permission to practice a little self compassion and be kind to yourself, but also be honest because compassion doesn’t mean lying to yourself. So if you forget to step away from your desk for eight hours, or maybe you fail to put anything besides coffee and LaCroix in your body since 8:00 AM today, it’s okay. But it’s important to be honest and name that and understand that it happened and then just try again tomorrow. You understand that it’s important to listen to your body, to stay hydrated, to take those opportunities for scene change, and just try again tomorrow.

    Sara Safavi: So try to create a routine that works for you. A new routine. You’re not going to make your old routine work here. Take breaks. Remember to move around. Listen to your body and brain’s needs. Intentionally seek out human connection and make invitations to people that are easy to act upon that are not passive. And don’t let comfort creep overtake you. Try not to work from bed all day every day. Don’t ignore your body and your brain’s needs. Don’t skip meals. It’s okay to take a break and step away from your desk, but above all, don’t be too hard on yourself.

    Sara Safavi: So I don’t know if we have time for Q?A. I would love to take questions if I can, but otherwise that’s my contact info. I would love to hear from any and all of you.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: That was great. Thank you so much. We’re definitely going to take questions later, like Angie mentioned, but thank you so much. All right, next up… Barb is a software engineering manager and developer on the applications team at Planet. Take it away, Barb. Welcome.

    Barbara Vazquez: Thank you. Hey, everybody. My name is Barbara Vasquez. I go by Barb and I’m a software engineering manager and developer, as well, at Planet. A little bit about myself, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I have been working in the geospatial industry as a software engineer since 2008, when I moved to the DC area. And I have been living right now, I’m in Maryland, but I’ve been in the DC area since then. I joined planet about three years ago in 2017. And I’m part of the web applications team. We build some of the tools that help people have easier access toward data.

    Barbara Vazquez: The main thing that, if you’re familiar with Planet, is an application called Planet Explorer. If not, go check it out, planet.com Explorer. Now what I’m going to talk about today, it’s about Agile Development and estimation. It’s mostly focused because I’m a software engineer and we do Agile Development at Planet. And these are some tips and things that might be useful for people doing Agile. Even if you’re not doing Agile, thinking about estimation and how much something will take you to do is useful on a day to day. But with further ado, if you’ve done Agile Development and you do the daily scrums or the daily meetings, you’ve had these thoughts, what are points?

    Barbara Vazquez: Why are people asking me so many questions so many times, when will it be done? Why do I have to give status every day? And it can get tiresome. And you might just want to flip the table and say, this is not what I signed up for. This is not why I want to do software engineering. But through the years, I’ve learned that it can work in your favor. It can actually help you be more organized and communicate better, to have less stress.

    Barbara Vazquez: So estimating with points, if you’re not familiar with Agile or Points. Points is a system that tells people, mostly managers, how difficult do you think a thing is and how long it will take you. But in my perspective, yes, that’s one benefit, to tell your manager when things will get done, but it will help you be honest with yourself.

    Barbara Vazquez: Can I really do this? Is two weeks enough? Or however long you have to develop something. That doing the mental exercise will get you in a better spot where you might not need to pull all nighters. If you have to work weekends to meet your deliverables, you’re probably signing up for too much. Or you might be underestimating what is being asked from you.

    Barbara Vazquez: In Agile, the way it works, you sign up for work and you have X weeks to do something. I’ll use our example. We do two weeks of development. If after those two weeks, every time you’re rolling over things, rolling over means that you did not complete it. That means something is wrong in the process. It’s not necessarily you. It’s a team thing. It’s being underestimated.

    Barbara Vazquez: Scope creep happens. You’re midway. You’re almost done. And then somebody is like, did you think about this? What about you do that? And you go on a tangent and you forget about your original goalpost, or the biggest one that nobody wants to admit is you probably don’t have enough information, but how do you tell your manager that you don’t have enough information?

    Barbara Vazquez: Shouldn’t you be able to do it on your own? Not really. That’s what the whole point of Agile and team development should be. And points are there to help you communicate that.

    Barbara Vazquez: How to start doing better estimates. One thing I do with my team is ignore numbers. Just give me T-shirt sizes, small, medium, large, or extra large. Extra large, can I do this in two weeks? If it’s an extra large, no. It probably needs to be broken apart. You probably need to talk more about it. A large size, will probably take me the two weeks. I’m threading there on borderline not completing it, but let’s give it a shot and let’s see how it goes. Medium, I can get this done. I don’t know how long it will take me. It’s definitely going to be more than a day but I can get it done. And small is I can do this with my eyes closed. It doesn’t matter.

    Barbara Vazquez: That’s my rule of thumb. When I go to do estimates, it’s give me a sense, how do you feel this is so that we can have that conversation of how long it will take. As soon as you do this mental exercise, you’ll get in a better habit and you’ll start recognizing better. I don’t have enough information or this is super easy. Why am I even thinking about it? Let’s get it done.

    Barbara Vazquez: So once you get the T-shirt sizes down, you can map this to whatever point system your team uses if that’s the preferred methodology. A lot of people use the Fibonacci sequence where it’s one, two, three, five, up to 13, where a 13 is the extra large equivalent.

    Barbara Vazquez: So this once you get used to, and you’re like being able to do t-shirt sizes, you can move up to doing the point systems. In any case, even if you don’t do Agile, thinking about your tasks in t-shirt sizes can help you think about difficulty, can help you keep yourself organized and just do that mental exercise of what do you need to get done that week?

    Barbara Vazquez: The other point, two points, no pun intended, is keeping your other responsibilities. Add some buffer. You might be able to sign up, just keeping with the example, two medium things, because life happens. Add some buffer, COVID has taught us that life is unpredictable and your normal cadence is not the same anymore. Distractions happen, you might have family at home. Take that into consideration as well when you’re doing these estimates.

    Barbara Vazquez: And the other point, the other thing to think about with points is it helps you negotiate. It helps you make sure priorities are clear of what needs to be done first versus what needs to be done later. If your plate is full, whether it’s with actual tasking, if it’s with life, use the points to help you drive conversations. I can only do so many mediums stories. If I sign up for one more, I will definitely roll it over because that’s what I’ve learned.

    Barbara Vazquez: And in the end, having slightly more predictable cadence is valuable for everybody. And again, I say slightly because life happens and we cannot be 100% predictable, but we can get there. And that’s all I have. Thank you everybody. I know we don’t have time for Q and A, but that’s my email, barb@planet.com. If you want to reach out or we can talk later.

    Angie Chang: Awesome. Thank you, Barb. That was really great. I’m going to find Kelsey. Video, it’s perfect. Great. We can see you. So Kelsey is a space systems engineer at Planet. Welcome, Kelsey.

    Kelsey Doerksen: Thank you. Perfect. So good evening, everyone. My name is Kelsey Doerksen and I am a space systems engineer at Planet. I started about four weeks before work from home was an order for the San Francisco office. So I got only a little taste of what it was like to work in the physical San Francisco office, but I’m really happy with my past five months being a part of the team.

    Kelsey Doerksen: And today I’m going to be talking a little bit about how to handle big data in space and the different machine learning projects I’ve been a part of over the past few years. And so I’m just going to jump right into it. So first I wanted to start off with what is machine learning and what do I really mean by big data?

    Kelsey Doerksen: So big data is really just that, it’s a large volume of data or a lot of data. And we use machine learning with this big data to seek statistical patterns, to enable computers and algorithms to make either a classification, such as differing between pictures of dogs and cats, or prediction about the data.

    Kelsey Doerksen: I really like this three step image here that basically breaks down what machine learning is really at a high level, where you start with this big conglomerate of data, you can’t really make sense of it or extract any meaningful information from it. You apply analytics to it. And in this case it would be a machine learning algorithm. And from those analytics, you’re able to make informed decisions about the data in question.

    Kelsey Doerksen: I’m going to be talking about three different projects I’ve worked on at a very high level. Don’t be worried if you don’t know anything about machine learning. And I’m going to start off with my first project I worked on, which has to do with machine learning on Mars.

    Kelsey Doerksen: For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mars exploration Rover mission, this was a NASA mission that launched in 2003, and it sent two twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to the surface of Mars. Unfortunately for the Spirit Rover, its wheel actually got stuck in the Martian soil. You can see in that black and white gif image there that is taken from the Spirit Rover itself. And unfortunately the mission was lost in 2010 for the Spirit Rover because its wheel was stuck in the sand and they weren’t able to get it free.

    Kelsey Doerksen: How could we have used machine learning in order to prevent this from happening for future Mars Rover missions? As we know, Perseverance is launching, hopefully soon, barring any delays. This is a project I worked on at the NASA jet propulsion lab called the Barefoot Rover project. Essentially what the Barefoot Rover project purpose was, was to use what is physically felt by the Mars Rover wheels, to be able to detect different things about the surface it was rolling across of.

    Kelsey Doerksen: My work was specific to making sure the wheels were not slipping or sinking into the different types of sand material we had at the JPL campus. And it was also, I worked on the terrain classification and detecting if there’s any subsurface rocks that could possibly penetrate the wheel and cause damage to the wheels.

    Kelsey Doerksen: How this worked from a machine learning perspective at a very high level, essentially what we had was a yellow pressure pad wrapped around the outside of the Mars Rover wheel. And we took those pressure pad readings and trained that in a classifier to be able to detect these things that are on the bottom of the slide there. So we were able to tell the hydration content of the soil, anomaly detection, safety, and stability of the Rover, slip and sinkage, which is what I worked on, terrain classification, rock detection, and other different tear mechanical properties.

    Kelsey Doerksen: This is a really cool project I worked on and it’s going to be implemented on future Mars Rover missions. The second project I’ll talk about is machine learning for the sun and for our Earth atmosphere. So this very terrifying image you see on the slide here is a picture of a Coronal Mass Ejection event. What a Coronal Mass Ejection event is, is a huge explosion on the surface of the sun.

    Kelsey Doerksen: And essentially what happens is these huge explosions send out high energy particles into space. You can see there, Earth is to scale in terms of the size of a Coronal Mass Ejection and the sun as compared to the size of our Earth. The distance is not to scale, but the size of the two planetary bodies is. So why this is of concern other than the fear that it strikes of course from this image, don’t worry. It’s not going to cause any … The flames will not reach our surface. But what they do do is send these high energy particles to our Earth’s atmosphere that essentially push our satellites around. So from a satellite operator perspective, the satellites can actually be moved off of their orbit path and collide with other objects in space, which is obviously really detrimental to the satellite operators.

    Kelsey Doerksen: How can we use machine learning to tackle this sort of problem? Well, we can’t stop these Coronal Mass Ejection events from happening, pictured there is a gif image from the Soho telescope that is showing what a Coronal Mass Ejection looks like. So we can’t stop these huge events from happening, but we can at least try to learn as much as possible about them and how they are affecting our satellite. And this was my master’s thesis work using the satellite accelerometer data to detect these solar storms. So I mentioned before that these solar storms send out huge amounts of high energy particles and they reach our Earth’s atmosphere. The way you can think about this is if you’re walking outside and it’s very, very windy and you’re getting blown back by the wind, that’s kind of is what’s happening to our satellites when these particles reach our atmosphere.

    Kelsey Doerksen: And that can be captured in the satellite acceleration data. The two graphs I have pictured on the slide here, the top graph, it shows the acceleration of the satellite when there’s solar storm happening. So you can see the signal is quite erratic and it’s actually doubles and above in the linear acceleration of the satellite itself. Whereas during a period, when there is no sort of solar storm, the satellite is very periodic and the signal isn’t fluctuating at any alarming rates.

    Kelsey Doerksen: The last project I worked on and want to introduce is, of course, using Planet data, and this is machine learning for our Earth. So I’m really happy to be a part of the new partnership with the Frontier Development Lab and Planet, which is an eight week research sprint with the NASA and SETI Institute, and Planet is working with the Waters of the United States team, which is using Planet’s daily imagery with machine learning, to assist with drought detection and prediction in small streams in the continental United States.

    Kelsey Doerksen: Pictured here is the Seminole reservoir in Wyoming, United States. And the first signs of droughts can be identified in the small streams that branch off of large bodies of water like these. So by comparing pixel values in these streams using Planet’s daily imagery of sites, similar to this, the team of researchers will be able to detect and predict future droughts across America with the aim to scale this work to other areas across the globe.

    Kelsey Doerksen: I can’t get to my … There we go. I really hope you were interested and able to follow along with those three different projects I worked on. I think machine learning, it’s such a new and growing field and space is the perfect application for machine learning because we have so much data. And if you have any questions, you can feel free to reach out to me, and thanks very much for your time.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: That was excellent. Kelsey, are you seeing the comments? Awesome, Kelsey [crosstalk].

    Kelsey Doerksen: I can’t see them, but thanks a lot.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Someone said I want to be all the speakers. That was just amazing. I learned so much. So moving on to our next speaker, Deanna. Deanna leads the team at Planet responsible for operating and maintaining the over a hundred imaging satellites, or Doves, currently on orbit. Welcome, Deanna.

    Deanna Farago: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. This is my first Girl Geek event. I’m excited also just to hear from other Planeteers because, sadly, it’s a large enough company that you don’t automatically know everyone. I love hearing everyone else’s stories, as well. All right, so I will present. Hopefully everyone can see that okay.

    Deanna Farago: All right, as I mentioned, my name is Deanna Farago and my team and I operate a fleet of satellites that are currently imaging the entire planet every day. And, traditionally, satellite operations can be very time and resource intensive. For example, in order to operate one spacecraft, you could have a room full of engineers around the clock, 24/7 monitoring, telemetry and contacts, and just system performance.

    Deanna Farago: And our satellites operate in a different paradigm and risk posture. This has allowed us to be able to automate a lot of the operations. Even before COVID, we could operate essentially anywhere as long as we had a good internet connection and our laptop. Before I describe what that looks like, it’s important to understand what the mission is and the scale of our operations.

    Deanna Farago: Our company’s mission one is to image the entire planet every day. And you need a lot of satellites in order to do that. And we actually, in addition to operating satellites, we design, build, and test all of our satellites in house. And this is a big advantage for us as operators, because if and when we run into issues on orbit, we can work directly with the engineers that designed the satellite in order to troubleshoot the problems and help come up with on orbit mitigations, as well as design out these bugs/features in the next spacecraft iteration.

    Deanna Farago: And then once in space, we use just a little bit of atmosphere that we have to use something called differential drag to space out the satellites over time. And as one satellite images over a strip of land, the one right after it should image this strip of land, just adjacent to it. And this essentially creates alliance scanner. What you’re seeing here is a 24 hour snapshot of what the imaging strips could look like that the satellites are capturing. And we have a distributed team operating our satellites. We have four people in San Francisco, one person in Toronto, and a team of four in Berlin. And we send tasks to the ground stations, which then send the schedules up to the satellites. And just a fun fact for this group that at Planet, we have three satellite operations teams and they’re all managed by women.

    Deanna Farago: The concept of operations is actually quite simple for these Doves. We don’t image over the ocean. We only image over the land, but basically anytime they’re overland, they just point down, take pictures. If they’re over ground stations, we downlink those pictures in logs and we communicate with them. And then in the background we’ll just run maintenance activities, essentially thinking of them as like tuneups and checking in on like subsystems and keeping an eye on any degradation that might be happening or running experiments. And, in theory, if the satellites are performing well, they should just be as easy as this man’s rotisserie grill, where we just set it and forget it. We can even run it custom experiments, and we set up the tasks and not have to worry about it.

    Deanna Farago: However, things don’t always go smooth. There’s a lot of fires that can happen. And that’s kind of how we know we’ll never really be able to automate ourselves out of a job. These are just some examples of issues that we’ve seen on our satellites. So a satellite suddenly starts spinning up, and we have to figure out why is it spinning up? And we need to de tumble it. We noticed that the satellites have low battery, that’s voltage, and we need to take action before they start browning out and rebooting rapidly. We see that telemetry sensors are reading zero value. Is this a real thing? Or is the sensor it just being faulty? And we have to reset it. Or sometimes satellites just are unresponsive out of the blue and we have to spend time to figure out, did something change, did something break on the satellite?

    Deanna Farago: Or can we just set up some automation to keep an eye on it? And all of these actions started out as manual. We would detect these problems and then operators would spend time triaging it and then eventually taking action. And now our teams have automated responses to all of these so that they trigger off of just telemetry on the satellite. As soon our automation sees like the driver readings are reading up. Then we know the … Sorry, the robot just basically sends a task to respond to this, so an operator doesn’t actually have to. And this decreases latency in the system and gets the satellite back into production as quickly as possible. And there’s always going to be unknown unknowns, and we’re constantly trying to find these new problems and automating responses to it.

    Deanna Farago: What does a day in the life of an operator? Well, we work nine to five and we have a checklist that we rotate among the team members. This enables our team to be able to have weekend or holiday coverage. Even though we’re working normal office hours, we want to make sure that there’s always going to be satellite operators, eyes on the system every day. And for this number of satellites, we have to aggregate our data. Aggregating our data is key. What that means is we build lots of dashboards based off of our telemetry, and off of our logs from the satellite. And it allows us to be able to easily see if there’s any satellites that are responding and acting out of family. And that will then trigger an operator to say this one’s not behaving the same as its fellow satellites. I’m going to dig in further and try to triage it.

    Deanna Farago: We have weekday team standups and we’re supported by amazing other teams in mission control. And those teams also have their own on-call. And so if something does break in the middle of the night, that affects the whole fleet. Those teams help support us. I wanted to show this because it’s one of my favorite things that we’ve taken a picture of at Planet. And it’s actually a series of pictures that we stitched together into a video. And just before a rocket launch, we’re able to opportunistically schedule a Dove to take a series of images of a rocket delivering more Doves to space. Just a real quick cool shot. And that’s shot by one of our satellites. So very cool. And then sadly, we won’t be doing any missed high fives and hugs and mission control in person anytime soon, like our former coworker here Rob Zimmerman. But we can still enjoy having first contacts and commissioning with one another virtually. And this is our, I guess, equivalent version of that from a few years ago when we were able to successfully make contact with 88 satellites right after launch. And with that, that’s all I really wanted to share. I couldn’t go into too much detail, but I’m happy to answer questions. If you’d like to email me. I am at deanna@planet.com. Thank you for having me.

    Angie Chang: Thank you, Deanna. That’s really awesome. And you … Let’s see. And now we are going to bring up Elena, who has over two decades of experience in sales and she’ll be telling us her journey.

    Elena Rodriguez: Excellent. Good evening, everyone. I’m so happy for this invitation. I just joined Planet three months ago and I really wanted to talk about … sorry, this is my first time, I wanted to talk about the adventure of making a decision, how important it is for our career. But first, let me introduce what I do here at Planet.

    Elena Rodriguez: As I said, I joined the company three months ago, I’m this salesperson for Mexico, Central America, Ecuador, and the Caribbean. I have been in the business for more than 20 years, and I am so, so honored to be part of the Planet team. I’m so happy and so proud of working for the company that is offering solutions that are critical to mitigate some of the main challenges that we are facing right now, like climate change, food crisis, fighting poverty, so many applications, and I feel so proud to talk about our business when I go out there and meet my clients and listeners. So I chose a topic because this is something that I’ve been always thinking about it. And now I have the opportunity to talk about it. And I’m going to take advantage of this — is how I ended up here. I want to show you my story.

    Elena Rodriguez: Ever since I started back in the 80s, I have all the dreams like I wanted to be a fashion designer, because that’s something that I really enjoy since I was a little girl. And I took … but it was difficult for me because fashion was a very expensive career in Venezuela, and I had a scholarship, and I moved to Seattle from Venezuela to study sales and advertising. I have no choice. So let me tell you that, that was the first time I didn’t make any decisions.

    Elena Rodriguez: I had to choose what I thought was available for me that time. So I remember my sales teacher, Mr. Fine, it’s impossible to forget him. That he was always saying that a good sales person is capable of selling anything anything. Selling water to a fish. I wasn’t growing that idea of on my mind, but I was thinking, I don’t know if I’m really right for this career, sales is like — I don’t know — However, I was already thinking like when I was a little girl, I was drawing paper dolls and I was selling those to my friends at school. I was making bracelets with the colorful telephone wires, and I was selling those. I was a sales person already!

    Elena Rodriguez: I went back to Venezuela and I graduated, but I was still thinking, I don’t know what I want to do, this is my passion. I want to be a fashion designer. And it took me four years to graduate. It was the beginning of this career in Venezuela. And it was a lot of work. It was very expensive. There were times that I couldn’t sleep, doing all the drawings, the designs, and making all these dresses, this yellow one, and the one along here, I made them. And I was so inspired, because that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

    Elena Rodriguez: But then something funny happened during this practice — is that every time my friends called me and asked me for a dress, because they chose the fabrics, I have my [inaudible] they chose what they liked. And I made the dresses. Then when they came home to pick them up, I didn’t want to sell them! I was like no, I keep them. So I decided that’s not for me.

    Elena Rodriguez: It took me a while and I was thinking, you know [inaudible] what am I going to do? We are almost through this and I need to make a decision. I needeed to plan because I had a strong pressure from society, my country, and I made a decision — I thought it was time for me to have a family. And that was a decision that really, I thought about it a lot, because I know what it meant for me at the time — that I had to give up some things that were important for some time.

    Elena Rodriguez: But those changes, I always ask myself — once I start with passion to adapt to a new reality, because I had that question on my mind. And the answer is definitely no, I was just growing up. And it was time for me to make that decision and get prepared and be responsible for the decision that I have made.

    Elena Rodriguez: In 1995, it was a huge revolution in Venezuela because that’s when Internet arrived to our country. It was the time also when my boy was born, he’s 25 right now. And I remember I was taking care of my son and I was hearing all this noise outside — my husband and his friends talking about Internet — let’s go, let’s navigate, let’s check — They were looking for some topics and they were celebrating and I was feeding my baby and I was thinking, Oh my gosh, I think I’m losing something, something’s happening here, and I don’t know, I don’t want to sound selfish, but I had that on my mind. You know, so what am I going to do with technology, but I don’t know if I can even think about that! Would I ever touch a computer again? I had all these questions at that time. [inaudible] years things turn to be kind of difficult in my country. And I had to work. I had to live outside definitely my [inaudible]. And I had to go outside and find a different job, something because I needed to bring money to… because I had a family and things were difficult, and I was ready to get back on track, but I wasn’t ready for the technology. I had missed one year of all these changes! So selling was becoming more challenging, new terminologies, services, a new way of communicating… communication skills.

    Elena Rodriguez: The first job I got out there was for selling ads for the magazine called Computerworld with names like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, and those that were never familiar to me — it started to be new and that was nice — I was into a completely different world. This job was the one that allowed me to meet the people that helped me, that guided me, that inspired me to be in this field. And to be honest, selling was never had never been so much gratifying for me.

    Elena Rodriguez: Five years later, I had to make a very difficult decision that by the way, this week when I was practicing this presentation I found out how, I mean, how your country, your family, your culture really touched you. And I was like, I didn’t realize before, it’s like I was keeping that into myself, but it was a big decision. It wasn’t something that I was prepared for, but that was the time where the political situation in my country was unsustainable and started to be not sustainable even worse. I had a job offer in Mexico and I didn’t think twice. I moved here. And as you can see, the picture was… I think that was my first week here in Mexico. And you can see all the disaster. And remember I was asking if I would ever touch a computer again.

    Elena Rodriguez: Well, here is a computer, but I was only able to touch it because it was impossible to carry, so heavy. Everything has been changed as we know, that’s funny. So that’s when I started. It was like, for me, that was my own revolution, geospatial, learning new terminologies. It was such an exciting world. I was working with geographers, engineers, and so many people that I met in the industry. I really was in love with this new market. I was, like, wow. And I’m very proud because I participated in the first high-resolution satellite sale to the Mexican government. And I had all these questions from people. I mean, what is that you do? Are you a spy? What is it and that was very funny. But every time I had more challenges, it was time for me to learn more.

    Elena Rodriguez: And that’s really… That was very interesting. I don’t regret. I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years now. I still live in Mexico. I’ve met such interesting people, nice people, being in this environment. And I feel the pride to sell something, that I know that it’s going to go there to help people, to make people make good decisions. And this is something I feel so proud about it. And I’m here. This is what I do now. The geospatial world got me. I’ve been doing this work for, as I said, for more than 20 years, I’ve been in the drones industry, as well. I learned how to fly the drone. I was so proud about it. This picture here — in the mining, it was something very scary because I was in Peru and I had to sleep there. So, many nice adventures. I am so happy that I got… That I decided to stay here. I don’t [inaudible] change from fashion designing to the geospatial world. I can always be creative and I use the fashion designing for myself. So I like clothes. I like that. I mean, that’s inevitable. I can’t leave that behind, but this is, the right decisions brought me here. No regrets how I did it. I don’t know.

    Elena Rodriguez: As you see, sometimes we need to do what we need to do. I’ve been humble. I know that I’m not an expert. I’ve been learning and I always learn. It’s very challenging, this work. I rely on those experts that are willing to teach me and I take that very seriously. I understood that there are ways, many interesting ways to explore different options. I learned that we have to capitalize the knowledge because after you invest so much time in learning about something, changing probably is not such a good idea.

    Elena Rodriguez: Well, I don’t want to discourage the people that are doing this, but for me, I said, no, this is what I’ve learned, took me a long time. I want to be here. I wanted to be… to decide to be part of the change was very… That’s something that really pushed me as well. So that keeps me investigating and asking. So I’m curious about the technology and especially about the things that I do. Every time I made the decision, of course, I had to ask myself how it was going to benefit or affect my loved ones and understanding that it’s not always about me, that I have to care for my family. The company that I work for, there’s a world outside.

    Elena Rodriguez: I have faith in people. Trust me, I believe in people. I think we can always… We are a big team and I have a real engagement for environment. And I don’t know, I take care of my garden, my little dog, and I actually care about that. And, well, that’s it. Thank you. I think we don’t have time for questions. Thank you for listening.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Elena. That was amazing. We learned so much from you. So our next speaker is Sarah Preston. Sarah is a marketing manager at Planet Labs, exploring how to use space-based imagery to improve life on Earth. Just pulling Sarah up. Hi, Sarah, how’s it going, right in front of the Golden Gate Bridge?

    Sarah Preston: Thanks. Out here in San Francisco. You can hear me alright, right?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Mm-hmm (affirmative), Yeah. So, welcome.

    Sarah Preston: Okay. So I’m going to share my screen and… Okay, can you all see that?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yep.

    Sarah Preston: Okay, great. Thanks. Yeah, my name is Sarah Preston. I’m a product marketing manager at Planet. Now, a product marketing manager… Product marketing can mean a lot of different things in a lot of different organizations. But what I do is I work across our product and our marketing team and our sales teams to really find the right fit for our imagery and to understand what our prospects and what our audiences need out of imagery, even if they don’t know it yet. As you can imagine, narratives are extremely important part of what I do. So, I’m super excited to be here with you all to geek out about data-driven storytelling.

    Sarah Preston: Okay. First, why do we tell stories in the first place? Stories are paths to community and understanding. Think about all the stories that you loved growing up. There was some kind of connection that you made, either to a character, to the author, or to the setting that drew you in and made it really memorable. You joined that community that was telling that story. And within that story, whether it’s fact or fiction, there was information, and you got to learn from others in that community and to build an understanding about the world around you.

    Sarah Preston: What is a good story? So, “a good story is driven by emotion and balanced by fact.” That’s one of my favorite quotes, actually, that I heard. I can’t claim ownership of it, but, really, when we listen to a great story and we create a connection to a story, we’re really feeling some emotion and emotions can be extremely powerful motivators. I think, in or outside of the workplace even, an emotion can be excitement. It can be fear. It can be confusion. It can be ambition, but also a very human desire to understand the world around us. Emotions, they get us engaged in a story and interested. But facts and data, they keep us grounded.

    Sarah Preston: As an example of how you might be able to see this, Planet took this image of Pripyat, Ukraine back in April. Now this was when Pripyat was experiencing massive wildfires and this was right outside of the Chernobyl exclusion zone that you can see in the center there. It was an extremely dangerous time, already a dangerous area. Radiation levels had spiked 16 times more than usual and Ukranian officials were telling the world, basically, that these fires had been controlled, extinguished. Clearly not the case. Now hearing this, when we talk about emotions, hearing this story in the news, you can’t help but feel a sense of fear, maybe helplessness and anxiety, and all these emotions that are driving, maybe not necessarily the international community, but driving officials to understand what is happening. How can we solve it? Well, Planet came in and we captured this image and this image has a lot of data in it to help move these decisions forward, to help these move and capture these emotions.

    Sarah Preston: When we look at this image, we can see where the smoke is drifting. That tells us where the wildfire might be spreading to. We can see how far the wildfire has already spread on a grander scale. We can see how close it is to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. How radiation levels might continue to increase. And it tells us a lot about where we can deploy resources and where we can deploy flame retardant and, at the same time, keep all of our first responders safe. We had these emotions that we were feeling at the beginning, and a really good way to think about it is: Emotions, they move us forward. They encourage us to do something, but facts and data, they move us forward in the right direction. They give us an idea or an insight about where to go.

    Sarah Preston: How do we craft great stories? Great stories is really about taking our audience or, on a business scale, our prospects, on a journey from ignorance to understanding. Now, there are not three key points to creating a great story. This could be an hour long seminar and I’ve been to them before. It’s such a fascinating subject, but, given the time we have, I narrowed it down to three points that I think are really important.

    Sarah Preston: Know your audience. You want to understand what are their motivations? What are their expectations? Maybe what do they feel themselves on a daily basis? What’s their vocabulary? How do they communicate with each other and interact with the rest of the world? You want to really clarify the problem. Every story has its key conflict. You want to understand: what exactly is the conflict of the story you’re building and what is driving it, whether that is the emotions. And then you want to create some insight. What is the data showing us? This is the second half of the storytelling. How do we get past the conflict and use that data to create insight, to move us all forward?

    Sarah Preston: And here is an example, also at Planet, of how we recently used those points to create a broader story. We started work with the New Mexico State Land Office and they were looking to monitor permitting activity in the Permian Basin. You can see that on the right side of the screen, the sample image. And there’s a lot of mining activity out there, but they just couldn’t see in the way they wanted to.

    Sarah Preston: First, what we did here is we had to know your audience, right? We understood, and came to understand, how exactly the office itself functions, how it fits in with the broader civil government. What exactly is their legal mandate, who is our main point of contact and how to best really work with them in the first place. This is knowing how to communicate with them. Now once we know how to communicate with them, we can clarify the problem. Why is the office really experiencing this challenge? Why did they have very poor visibility into the more remote Permian Basin? Well, aerial photography like they’ve tried, was very slow and resource-intensive as was manned surveys. Sending people out there to actually see what’s going on, it was growing expensive. They were growing frustrated, really, that they didn’t really have a good way to monitor this land.

    Sarah Preston: What Planet did was, now that we knew our audience, and we then clarified the problem, we were able to deliver the data to really create a good insight to solve their challenge. This is sample data, again, right here on the right of the screen. We deliver near-daily imagery to them so they can see change and what’s actually happening and activity. And once they see that activity, then they can deploy resources, whether that’s people or anything else to solve that issue.

    Sarah Preston: Before I wrap up, I want to put another little plug. If you’re interested in learning more about storytelling at Planet, we actually have a customer conference coming up in October and we’re going to be featuring customers and partners talking about how they used our imagery for their own storytelling and how they’ve been able to build their own paths to understanding and building their own communities. The reason I want to feature this here is because it’s actually completely free this year and online, so very, very accessible. And before I completely close out, my last point, really, is: We are in a hugely data-driven world, and it’s really not so much about just collecting data anymore. It’s about collecting the right data and really understanding how to use it, how we get insights and go from that, go from that ignorance to that understanding to create solutions and to create great stories around our world. I don’t think I have time for questions, but that is my short brief. Again, this is a topic I could talk about at length, but hopefully you captured something out of this.

    Angie Chang: Great. Thank you so much for that, Sarah, and we are now going to be bringing up Brittany, who is a natural disaster research scientist turned businesswoman.

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    Brittany Zajic: Alright. Thanks, everyone. Hi everyone. Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you all tonight. My name is Brittany Zajic and I’m on the business development team here at Planet. Business development means something different at every company. And here, we focus on strategic partnerships and the commercialization of new markets. I also lead our disaster response operations, which is part of our social impact initiatives, where we provide satellite imagery to first responders and official stakeholders in the event of a large, natural disaster anywhere in the world. And, while not exactly a natural disaster, COVID-19 is very much a global public health crisis reshaping all of our behaviors and our environmental systems. So, today I’m going to talk about how satellite imagery is helping us better understand the impacts of this pandemic.

    Brittany Zajic: By capturing a series of places in different points of time, satellite imagery is able to tell an important story. When millions of people began sheltering in place earlier this year, many looked to Planet, asking how we could help. So, how can satellite imagery help during a pandemic? Tonight I am going to showcase a few of the many applications surrounding the economic and environmental impacts of COVID-19.

    Brittany Zajic: First, we head to Wuhan, China to see the start of their shelter-in-place. In these first two comparisons, we see a stark difference of traffic patterns and these images taken only two weeks apart, with not a single car in sight starting January 28. And I’ll go back one more time. I know this is quick. We then shift to expand further beyond just the limited car transportation, and, instead, think about the closures of factories, construction sites, and all other industrial activities that had a dramatic impact on the air quality in regions of, and parts of, China. Here is a comparison over a portion of Beijing from the start of the year on the left to March 2020 on the right. We then shift to Italy, the next epicenter of COVID-19. Many media outlets spoke of the now quiet canals and the cleaner waters running through the city, which was largely captured in these series of images here. I’ll run through these one more time. This is October 2019, March 2020, February 2020, and March 15th.

    Brittany Zajic: Finally, we have the next epicenter that migrates to the United States, where it continues to remain today. New York was hit hardest and here we can see the construction of a temporary hospital in none other than Central Park, Manhattan, in the heart of New York. The rest of the United States followed suit soon after and shut down as well from the Bay Bridge Toll (that you take from going Oakland to downtown San Francisco) to the decrease in air travel (here’s a Southern California logistics airport — and just to highlight, we can see all the airplanes stacked up, not being in use), to the empty beaches (of Miami, Miami Beach, Florida) and then also the empty parking lots of Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida.

    Brittany Zajic: So, it’s pretty incredible for satellites to be able to so clearly capture this pause on life that has been experienced, that we’ve all been experiencing these past couple of months. Now, there is no question that one data set has been able to tell a great story, but Planet imagery combined with multiple other data sets is going to be able to tell us even more. So I’m going to spend the remainder of this talk today, talking about EOdashboard.org, an international collaboration among space agencies that is central to the success of satellite Earth observation and data analysis.

    Brittany Zajic: The tri-agency COVID-19 Dashboard is a concentrated effort between the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and NASA. The Dashboard combines the resources, technical knowledge and expertise of these three partner organizations to strengthen our global understanding of the environmental and economic impacts of COVID-19. So, if we remember back to my early example in Venice, Italy, we visually saw the difference of boat traffic and water turbidity. Now, with EOS Dashboard, using information from several different satellites and sensor types, we’re able to turn that visualization into a quantitative assessment and observation, which is incredibly valuable when measuring environmental and economic indicators or factors.

    Brittany Zajic: A second example of these quantitative metrics is the air quality in Beijing. Again, deriving these insights from an entire suite of different satellites, the ability to analyze these trends from space aids the effort to fight and defeat this pandemic. I leave you all with encouraging you to further explore this Dashboard and learn more about how COVID-19 is impacting people all over the world and explore it through the lens of satellite imagery, because together we can defeat this. Thank you.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, thank you so much. That was great. Next speaker is Nikki Hampton. Nikki is Planet’s VP of People and Talent, and she would like to share a few words on their commitment to diversity and inclusion. Welcome, Nikki.

    Nikki Hampton: Thank you. I want to thank all the speakers, even though I know all of these women, I learned so much about them and the work they do and how they got to where they are. So, I’m pretty excited about that. I mostly wanted to say that at Planet, we have always been committed to diversity, but we are doubling down on our commitment and particularly so, looking with respect to attracting and retaining communities of color. And for all of you online, we are looking forward to and eager to work with you, to tap into a broader network of talented folks that you might want to consider referring to us or applying and sharing with whom you know, but we’re super excited to have been part of this and are grateful that you all attended.

    Angie Chang: Thank you so much for that, Nikki. Now we’re going to just move into the Q&A. If there are a few questions, I think we have literally like five minutes till 8:00 PM when we kick off networking. So, if you have any questions, please ask them in the Q&A section and we will be sharing them with Planet and you’ll be getting a follow-up email with job links. They are hiring for some positions like senior corporate counsel, systems engineer, software engineer, account executives. So, you can be like Elena. Sales development reps, customer success managers, and more, and the job links are usually in our Girl Geek X Planet emails that you’re receiving. So, just scroll down and click on those links or forward it to a friend who is looking for a new role.

    Angie Chang: We will be heading over to our networking hour at 8:00 PM. It is on a platform called icebreaker.video and you will have the link in your email, if you look in your email, or we can put it in this chat and we’ll be doing some facilitated one-on-one networking where you literally meet one-on-one with people in a non-Zoom environment. It’s going to be a little more fun and you actually get to talk to people and see their faces. So, if you can hop-

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: And I wanted to call out, thank you so much to everybody speaking and thanks to everybody who has been commenting. I definitely see that it has been super valuable for you all. I wanted to mention, because I’ve also been getting asked, how you can get your company to partner with us to do a virtual Girl Geek Dinner. Definitely reach out to us, through the website, sponsor@girlgeek.io — that’s our email — and if you want to reach out individually to Angie or I, our emails are listed on the website as well. The other thing I wanted to say is, if you do get your company to sponsor, you must sign up to be one of the speakers, own it, use the stage that you are creating for everyone else to promote yourself as well. So, that’s all I had.

    Angie Chang: Great. So thank you all for being so good at the chat, and we’ll see you over at icebreaker.video so we can chat one-on-one with everyone. Thank you all and we’ll see you there. We’re going to keep this on so people can see the link and click on it — and hopefully we’ll rejoin and see you over there in a minute. Alright, bye.

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