Meet fellow conference attendees with 1:1 SPEED NETWORKING for 3 minutes each session, with the option to extend the conversation.

Or, ease into a conversation without a time limit in the virtual LOUNGE – a place to meet like-minded attendees and / or talk to folks from sponsoring companies.

Celebrate International Women’s Day with the team behind Girl Geek X – Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhadouria. Join us online as we share our motivations for extending this conference for mid-to-senior career level women – and why it’s so important.

Women in tech hold less than 28% of the leadership positions, despite clear and growing evidence that diverse teams contribute to better financial outcomes. Lack of qualifications isn’t the issue, so why aren’t more women applying for and holding these positions? Stevie believes that the perfect resume is a myth, high level tech sales roles can be done by almost anyone, and that these roles should be the #1 pathway into tech.

Stevie will share her own career path (including being the first professional female gamer), discuss the barriers women have faced rising into leadership roles in tech, and talk about the steps needed for companies to foster women leaders from within their own companies.

Defining ‘Success’ is very personal, but no matter what success means to you, you will likely have encountered setbacks in achieving your individual measure of success. In today’s talk, Rebecca will look at how you can deal with personal or professional setbacks and how you can create a powerful identity and a personal brand, to help achieve your goals.

Connecting to your inner voice and default responsive provides a wealth of information about what is standing between you and the accomplishment of your goals. Self-limiting beliefs show up as insecurities, unwillingness to try, imposter syndrome and in many other ways. Imposter syndrome plagued me for many years.

In this session, Cassandra will share a method to connect with your inner voice and began to reframe the self-limiting beliefs that you discover. She will introduce helpful techniques to build the roadmap to achieve the life that you desire, from goal-setting to vision boards.

Working remotely or in a hybrid environment? For those who do it, there are lots of benefits. But there is a downside – proximity bias. Studies have proved there is an ingrained bias that people physically present in an office get more work done, which often means that promotions are harder to come by for remote workers.

This session will present the facts and data that dispute this point. Attendees will learn how to create an environment which has no proximity bias, specific ways to overcome proximity bias where it does exist, and leave with tactics to ensure their value is noticed and rewarded.

In this fireside chat, Sukrutha interviews cancer survivors who will share inspiring stories of ambition, slowing down to speed up, and resilience. One was ramping up as a new executive at the company while fighting cancer, and the other had already spent a decade at the company (a “squiggly career path”) when she received her diagnosis. These two senior executive women in tech went from being “work mentors” to “cancer mentors” in six months, and have valuable lessons to share on the importance of ruthless prioritization, boundary setting, and self-care.

Instead of defaulting to “now is not the right time”, driven by fear of change, give yourself the chance to fully and honestly evaluate an opportunity and understanding what the optimal time would be. Before you decline an opportunity because you think *you* can’t do it, give yourself some perspective by thinking of all the other people who’ve made similar moves. Are you really that different or less capable? If you don’t do it, who will?

Ever wonder how you apply deep learning to computer-aided design (CAD)?

Dr. Tonya Custis, AI research scientist and Director of AI Research, leads the AI Research team at Autodesk that conducts fundamental and applied research in AI and machine learning with an aim to unlock a new era of AI-powered design tools.

In her talk, she’ll share two topics. The first is on her team’s work and how it makes a difference in the industries Autodesk serves. Her team’s research papers focus on making designers’ jobs easier by using AI to reverse-engineer objects and assemblies into sketches and CAD models, as well as to generate the designs themselves. This includes CLIP-Forge which allows users to describe 3D objects via natural language, and the system then generates 3D models of those objects. It’s an early step in using words for 3D geometry generation, which help users build entire 3D scenes for games, movies, and more. The second topic is on her career journey as Director of AI Research. Here, she’ll share how she learned a lot about management and strategy by playing both offense and defense as a roller derby skater for 10 years.

Investors utilize discounted cash flow models to determine the valuations of a company. In macroeconomic periods where interest rates are high, valuations experience steep drawdowns. User Experience Research is key for helping organizations keep their cash flow healthy during periods of recessions. From this talk, learn how to build and structure a research team that supports strategy and growth through real life case studies, how to calculate the impact of research investments and results against financial models like Discounted Cash Flow, how to speak the language of investors and c-level, so research is leveraged as a strategic hedge against the negative impacts of a recession.

In this session, Maya will share her journey to government and civic tech, and her experience leading government engineering teams. She’ll dive into the types of projects that engineers work on at U.S. Digital Service, along with how to apply your technical skills to improve government programs and services for millions of people across the country.

Learn a time-tested approach that distills team functioning into four interrelated dimensions, with concrete guidance you can implement right away to improve team performance. Attendees will take away the four key dimensions of team functioning, and how to maximize your team’s specific strengths and opportunities in each dimension. Understand what you need in your leadership role to catalyze team high performance. Explore common “hot spots” that can make or break team functioning, and the corresponding team leadership behaviors you can cultivate to overcome them.

Meet fellow conference attendees with 1:1 SPEED NETWORKING for 3 minutes each session, with the option to extend the conversation.

Or, ease into a conversation without a time limit in the virtual LOUNGE – a place to meet like-minded attendees and / or talk to folks from sponsoring companies.

As an ADHD/autistic, Jessica champions womens’ neurodiversity in tech. She will be sharing her tips on how to attract and hire neurodiverse candidates, talking about why women’s neurodiversity gets overlooked – and how to create an atmosphere conductive to amplifying these voices – and leaves you with tips for shining as a neurodiverse woman in a neurotypical work world.

Understanding what are the important players you should have in your career can facilitate growth. Luiza believes these 4 allies you need are: a Role Model, a Sponsor, a Mentor, and a BFF. In this session, she will discuss the challenges of remote work regarding career development and networking, and how promote yourself in this new environment, and how women can leverage the relationship with these important personas to go beyond their dreams.

In this session, Joy will give a basic overview of what feature flags are, share some unusual use-cases (including removing dead code, parity testing and more), andprovide real examples of how we’ve implemented some of these.

A few years ago, Moriel developed what was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek quick tool that replaces gendered language online (neutrality.wtf). The tool became larger and was updated from a mini-monolith to “jamstack”. It exposes interesting impacts of gendered language, as well as technical insights for modern scalable development. In this session, learn about jamstack and modern web development paradigms, open source development and architecting software “in the open”, and about the power of architecting in the open for creating career opportunities.

Shanea will discuss the history and context on why starting a new role, onboarding to your company’s code is hard. In this session, she will share tips, tricks, and tools to make this easier, and support your mental health when dealing with code overwhelm.

Data is everywhere in great quantities, but it’s only valuable if it can be used uncover problems, suggest solutions, and drive decisions. No matter how sophisticated your data wrangling or analysis skills (and even if you aren’t an analyst or data scientist), the best way to get your work seen and acted on is with great communication that is appropriate to your audience and their needs.

Go beyond “what” and “how” questions to “why” and “who” – really think about who it’s for and why they want to see it. In this session, learn to communicate in a way that resonates with your audience to drive action and impact (e.g. influencing decisions).

Ever wondered if one team member’s strength was a weakness for the other? Your team’s talent if leveraged correctly can drive significantly higher productivity and well-being. Use group exercises to find a common language for teams.

The companies truly making strides in hiring at scale are thinking differently and ultimately more strategic (for example, launching apprenticeships with rolling cohort models to address new and existing talent upskilling). In this session, attendees will walk away with what you can do to make the most of this defining moment for your company, and how to develop new and existing talent in exciting and innovative ways, thus ensuring your hiring and retention goals are covered today but also, in the future.

Learn about how to transition from corporate to startups and what skills are required to be successful, the pros and cons of working at a startup vs a big corporate, growing as an individual contributor (IC) without transitioning to management, what IC looks like post the senior engineer title, how to interview for executive IC roles, and what companies look.

Meet fellow conference attendees with 1:1 SPEED NETWORKING for 3 minutes each session, with the option to extend the conversation.

Or, ease into a conversation without a time limit in the virtual LOUNGE – a place to meet like-minded attendees and / or talk to folks from sponsoring companies.

Then, stop by the FLUID lounge for another way to mingle with attendees.

Celebrate International Women’s Day with the team behind Girl Geek X – Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhadouria. Join us online as we share our motivations for extending this conference for mid-to-senior career level women – and why it’s so important.

Want to connect IRL? Our friends at We3 want to help connect women for watch parties, dinner, or coffee locally. We3 is a supportive community of women and non-binary people across cutting edge tech! One of We3’s key pillars is enabling intimate, in-person gatherings. Interested? Just fill out the form!

Check out our supporters’ virtual Booths to meet cool folks and learn about their job opportunities! ELEVATE’s partner companies are actively hiring for many roles. Let them know you’re interested by clicking on the button in their booth to get more information.

Judith shares resources for researching a company’s culture from multiple angles, networking strategies, and questions to ask during the interview process to gain the necessary insights to choose the right company.

In today’s day and age, your resume can live in many different places – from LinkedIn, to your personal webpage – there are so many places to highlight your work. But how can you ensure your ‘resume’ is really showcasing your skills and assets, not just your experience? This session will give you the tools and resources to create a technical resume that highlights everything you have to offer!

Ginger will distill career advice gleaned over a decade of working in academia and corporate / startups. Her three takeaways are: Clarity, Consensus, and Inclusion. She discusses problem statements, consensus building, specs, complexity, death by iteration for academics, momentum-building by inclusion, and much more.

Learn what is a “brag sheet” – and why you should keep one (e.g. gives you something to look back on and learn from, and something to give to your manager when you’re pushing for a promotion, a new role within the company, or looking to lead a project). In this session, glean elements and categories to consider when constructing your own brag sheet to maximize your chances for career success.

Consider this session a sign to start crafting the story of yourself as a professional developer. Jenée will review best practices to customize your GitHub profile so you can stand out to recruiters and other developers. Together, we will be creating a customized personal repo using Markdown and sharing ideas with one another.

In this session, learn about some tips you can consider which starts with not just thinking about the base salary. Aliza will share key questions to ask yourself about what is important to you (and how to prioritize that in your counter offer), understand why having a good negotiating strategy is “good for your soul”, what “total package” means – and which levers can be easily negotiated, and how to thoughtfully and confidently respond back with your own request (the counter).

Xinran will talk about modern data engineering and why it’s an important backbone for data insights (including data analytics, data science, and machine learning). She will cover how data quality is defined and measured, and why it’s important for data engineering to closely connect with business. Lastly, she will discuss challenges and practical tips on designing data systems that consistently produce high-quality data.

In this session, Melsha will talk about the importance of PIE (Performance, Image and Exposure), understanding the importance of PIE at different stages in your career, discuss how to get promoted while working remotely, and give tips for gaining exposure in a large company.

Carly will use her experience in building applications in investment banking to discuss the reasons why obtaining long-term feedback on feature adoption can be difficult to validate. Attendees will take away reasons why it can be difficult to validate qualitative feedback on features, and how it can be difficult to elicit in these institutions outside of review sessions, receive an overview of Google core web vitals and how they can be used to assess user experience, watch a showcase of Real User Monitoring, using Elastic user Experience as an example collector, and learn how combining user activity with metrics such as Google Core Web vitals can help us measure feature effectiveness quantitatively to support qualitative user feedback.

Cynthia examine today’s challenges and opportunities for women in technology, encourages women to become subject matter experts (SMEs) by setting realistic expectations, making intentions known, and exploring multiple entry points in the landscape.

Are you looking to make a career transition into an industry that is trending and is practically recession proof? Per Bloomberg, the cyber professional shortfall could rise to 3.5 million by 2025. Career in cybersecurity are fulfilling, challenging, pay well and most importantly, serves the greater good. Bhawna and Shalini will provideinsight into their career journeys in Cybersecurity to provide some perspective around successful careers in this exciting industry.

Spoiler alert: The term technical is so overrated and very subjective to whomever you ask. Do you feel like you’re not technical enough for a role you’re interested in or the next step in? Curious how technical you need to be in order to be a Solution Engineer or X engineer? In this session, Kelly will share her experiences learning on the job, talk about growth mindset vs fixed mindset (you can learn anything), doing hard things, overcoming imposter syndrome, and more. She will give helpful tips for changing the narrative about your technical skills.

For current and aspiring developers and engineers who want to stand out in their role or job prospects, this workshop will teach you how to create a visual map of your codebase that will help you plan, automate and review your next feature, refactor or code review.

In this talk, Arathi will discuss the creative process of idea generation representing all disciplines. She will encourage attendees to not be afraid to wear another hat. Walking a mile in another’s shoes is crucial for success, and stress that deep multidisciplinary will not always be smooth sailing. In fact, sometimes the path to a great outcome requires sailing the stormy seas.

Allison discusses how taking a sabbatical helps tremendously with burnout. She will describe the 3 games she developed during her sabbatical, and how game development can be a lot of fun and/or it can be a lot of work. During her sabbatical, Allison learned that community-building is hard, but is important and ultimately rewarding.

Check out our supporters’ virtual Booths to meet cool folks and learn about their job opportunities! ELEVATE’s partner companies are actively hiring for many roles. Let them know you’re interested by clicking on the button in their booth to get more information.

Elena will make the case for stronger relationships across your remote team – it’s within reach! She shares stories about how a little listening goes a long way, and community building that really worked.

Mudita discusses how to build products for developers / technical users, share collaboration best-practices with UX research & design for holistic product development, and discuss building low-code solutions to scale product adoption.

AWS is one of the most in-demand skillsets in technology. Whether you’re interested in security, data, internet of things, gaming, or other industries, having knowledge and understanding of AWS can be a benefit to your career. Tasha has been an AWS Educator for AWS Academy and AWS re/Start using different curriculum and strategies to teach AWS skills, while improving her own knowledge and skills as well. In this session, Tasha will identify two training and lab resources that are available to anyone. Then, she will talk about the role of guided notes when teaching the AWS Academy AWS re/Start curriculums. She will finish by creating a lesson plan that allows learners to earn digital badges.

Marilyn will cover optimizing interactions with your UX team and Product Management and Engineering, share key elements of managing a successful UX team, and discuss the steps in the growth and maturity of a UX team.

With degrees in computer science, law, and business combined with identifying as a disabled person, Sheri has a complete 360-degree view of all the issues impacting disability inclusion and accessibility. Sheri was the first Girl Scout to get a badge in computer science in 1972 and authors a popular blog called “This Week in Accessibility.”

Sheri will talk about what accessibility is, how it fits in the overall software development life cycle, and how to prepare for a successful career in accessibility.

In this session, Rashmy will discuss the growing role of robotic medical devices to improve quality of life, share career paths in robotic medical devices, and provide a forward-looking outlook on the industry.

Stop by the FLUID lounge for another way to mingle with attendees.

Want to connect IRL? Our friends at We3 want to help connect women for watch parties, dinner, or coffee locally. We3 is a supportive community of women and non-binary people across cutting edge tech! One of We3’s key pillars is enabling intimate, in-person gatherings. Interested? Just fill out the form!