The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

Most of us have come across a form of bias when we interact with others. These biases can make their way to a machine learning system, leading to unfair decisions. Rachel Thomas, co-founder of fast.ai and researcher in residence at The University of San Francisco explains the origins and implications of bias in machine learning. We also talked about solutions to limit bias. Rachel also explained the role of linear algebra in machine learning and how to teach it effectively for people working in ML applications. We talked about the fundamental concepts and how they are applied in machine learning.

Becoming a better developer is easier than ever. With unlimited resources and the ability to connect with other people, we can learn from other developers. Jess Lee, COO at The Practical Dev, explains how they are building a community to help developers. We talked about how developers are engaging and the type of content they are posting on the platform. Jess also explained the technologies used to build The Practical Dev.

Everyone should learn how to code. Felienne, Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, explains the importance of learning to code even if we are not going to code for a living. We talked about her approach to teach kids about programming and software engineering. Felienne is bringing teaching methods seen in other disciplines like writing into programming. She explained the progress the children make and how to create an inclusive environment that keeps them engaged.

Pokémon Go, an augmented reality game, was released in 2016. The level of popularity it reached was more that the expected. This provided interesting technical challenges to make sure it was available to millions of people. Aparna Sinha, Group Product Manager at Google, and Dawn Chen, Software Engineer Tech Lead at Google, explain how Kubernetes enabled Pokémon Go to quickly scale.

Nature has its own computers, from worms to bacteria, these organisms use calculus and gradient descent to survive. Sabrina Rashid, PhD student in Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon, explains how bacteria are using gradient descent. We also talked about what computational biology is and the problems that are being explored. Sabrina also talked about her work on RNA sequence analysis and the type of data that she works with.

Statistics and Machine Learning are two fields that have advanced Artificial Intelligence. Montserrat Gonzalez, Software Engineer at Google, explains the difference between using traditional statistical approaches, Machine Learning and AI.

Podcasts are the fastest growing form of media. I know first hand the process for sharing a podcast is difficult. Kim Hansen, CEO of Signl.fm is building software to solve this problem. Kim explained the challenges as well as the solutions they are working on to improve the technology podcasters have access to.

In the 80s, Compaq became one of the fastest growing companies in American History. Compaq pioneered the idea of building a computer that was compatible with IBM’s software. Back then, IBM was the dominant player in the personal computers space and their software was used everywhere. Karen Walker was Vice President of Operations at Compaq. She controlled capital investments totaling $1 Billion. Karen oversaw the construction of 11 million square feet of Compaq’s offices around the world and helped grow Compaq, which became the largest supplier of PCs in the 90s.

As more robots are available in the market, we are seeing the different ways in which humans can interact with them. Some people think robots are alive they even feel bad when a Roomba gets stuck. Other people find robots that look a lot like humans scary. Kate Darling, Research specialist at the MIT Media Lab explains the different types of human-robot interactions. We talked about how the design of the robot affects how it is perceived and the role of the person’s culture. At the end we talked about questions that lawmakers will need to address in this space.

Transforming the culture of one of the largest tech companies in the world has unique challenges. Kathleen Hogan, Executive Vice President of HR at Microsoft, explains why a culture shift is needed even for a successful company. Kathleen highlighted how the logistics change when you run a large organization. We also talked about what needs to happen to accommodate different generations of employees. At the end Kathleen explains why HR is a technical job.

A data-driven organization is more efficient because the company can learn what to focus on. Rya Sciban, Product Manager at Periscope Data explains the needs of data teams in an organization. We talked about what data analysis is and how this changes as the amount of data grows. Periscope Data has been successful in retaining women in product and development teams. We talked strategies for having more women in leadership positions.

ChatBots enable us to get things done without launching another application. From buying things, to trouble-shooting a server, we are seeing more companies incorporate chatbots in their workflow. Marlene Jia, Co-founder of TOPBOTS, explains what a chatbot is and how they can be used. We talked about the steps for building a chatbot and the types of tasks that can be automated with artificial intelligence.

At 13 years old, Jasmine Lawrence founded EDEN BodyWorks, a company that provides natural products for the hair and body. Jasmine explained the challenges of building tangible products, and how this is different than building software. Jasmine is a Program Manager at Microsoft in the HoloLens team. She has worked in robotics and designing software in the gaming space.

What is a distributed system? Why is it important to know how distributed systems work? You may be using a distributed system without knowing it. Natallia Dzenisenka, independent Software Solutions Architect answers this questions. We talked about distributed system tools, Data modeling, and the core components of distributed systems. There are many tools that have abstracted how distributed systems work, Natallia explained the benefits of knowing how these systems work.

Wearables are everywhere. In the medical field they are transforming lives. Haiyan Zhang, Innovation Director at Microsoft Research, created a wearable for a young graphic designer that developed Parkinson’s. This wearable allows the Parkinson's patient to write and draw again. Haiyan explained the research process and the technical aspects of how the wearable works. We also talked about the Internet of Things, the components of these systems and the technical challenges.

Working on a product that has 14 million unique users is challenging. Sukrutha Bhadouria, Software Engineering Manager at Salesforce gives an insight into this and explains her transition to a leadership position. We also talked about Girl Geek Dinners, mentorship, and the High Potential Leadership Program at Salesforce.

What is DevOps? How does it relate to Operations and Software Development? Bridget Kromhout, Principal Technologist for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal answers these questions. Bridget explained what Operations Engineering is and what she used to work on when she was focused in this area. We then talked about how DevOps emerged and how it differs from Operations. At the end we talked about VoiceOps and ChatOps and the future of DevOps.

Machine learning is everywhere, it’s used on email, Netflix, social media and for driverless cars. In this episode, Katie Malone gives an introduction to machine learning. Katie is a data scientist in the research and development department at Civis Analytics. She is also an instructor of the intro to machine learning online course from Udacity along with Sebastian Thrun.

Artificial Intelligence is changing every industry. Francesca Rossi, Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM talks about the applications of AI and the idea of embedding an Ethics module in these systems.

Charity Majors is Co-Founder of Honycomb, a tool that allows engineers to inspect and debug complex systems. Charity explained what makes a system complex and how engineers can learn about their systems with a rich data-driven approach. We also talked about pricing strategies for software and why this is challenging. Charity also talked about selling a company that was not profitable yet to Facebook. At the end we talked about when to sell a company or keep it and grow it.

Jessica Naziri is a Tech Expert, Entrepreneur, and an accomplished writer in Tech. Her work has been featured in LA Times, CNBC, USA Today, CNN among others. Jessica has reviewed numerous tech products and helped brands tell their story and market themselves. We talked about what makes a good product, and why some are not successful. Jessica explained the intersection between fashion and technology and what to consider when building a product for this space. Jessica is also working on improving diversity in tech by having more women work in this field.

A team of robots can accomplish tasks that a single robot can’t. They can be in charge of dangerous tasks that are difficult for humans to do and help society. Nora Ayanian, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California explains how robots can work as a team. Nora talked about the components of building a team of robots and gave examples of tasks that they can do as well as the current challenges in this space.

Preethi Kasireddy is a Software Engineer with a passion for sharing everything she learns. Preethi explained how she learned to code in her free time and her experience at a boot camp in San Francisco. Preethi also talked about one of the first projects she built and her initiative to start an email-based course targeted at advanced beginner and intermediate programmers.

Test Automation is an essential component of the Software Development process. Angie Jones, Consulting Automation Engineer at Lexis Nexis, explains what Test Automation is and the process of collaboration across teams.

Web Animation can have personality and character, just like Disney Animation. Val Head, UI Animation Pro, talks about applying Disney Animation principles to web animations. We talked about creating effective and immersive animations by using CSS and javascript. Val also explained what aspects of web animations can lead to poor performance. At the we had an interesting discussion about the future of web animation.

Asta Roseway is Research Designer at Microsoft Research. She designs wearables that are intuitive, engaging, and beautiful. We talked about DuoSkin, a wearable that looks like a beautiful metallic tattoo and its capabilities. We also talked about the intersection between health, wearables, technology and fashion, and where this is headed.

Security vulnerabilities are an important concern in systems. When we specify that we want certain information hidden for example our phone number or our date of birth, we expect the system to hide the information. However, this doesn’t always happen due to human error in the code because programmers have to write checks and filters across the program. In this episode Jean Yang, Assistant professor at the Computer Science Department in Carnegie Mellon, presents Jeeves, a language that allows programmers to specify security policies more intuitively making it harder to leak information that is meant to be protected. Jean explained how Jeeves was implemented and how it can be used. We also talked about what it takes to bring research concepts from academia to the industry. Jean was also named one of the 35 innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review.

Shuah Khan is Senior Linux Kernel Developer at Samsung. The Linux Kernel is one of the biggest open source projects in the world and it is used by devices that we interact with on a daily basis. Shuah explained what an operating system kernel is and how the Linux Kernel is architected to support different types of devices. Shuah also talked about how quality is ensured, how tests are run, and the process of contributing to an open source project. In a project of this magnitude and with contributors all over the world, it is important to have a consistent and effective process in place.

Jessica Jobes is the founder of OnTheGrid, a marketing agency which brings data first to decision making. Jessica brings years of experience working at Microsoft as a Program Manager at Bing. We talked about the key insights that she learned during her time and how they helped her launch a company in online marketing. While at Microsoft, Jessica also worked as Chief of Staff with Derrick Connell, CVP at Bing and Julie Larson-Green, Chief Experience Officer at Office. We talked about what a Chief of Staff does as well as the work involved in creating effective demos.

Stephanie Hurlburt is founder and co-owner of Binomial. Binomial is making one of the best texture compressors. In this episode, Stephanie explains what texture compression is and why this is still a bottleneck in graphics engineering. We also talked about what graphics engineering is, and how she began working in this area when she was building art installations around companies. Stephanie also highlighted several open source projects and gave advice on how to get started in graphics engineering.

Tracy Aiken, General Manager at Galvanize explains how Galvanize is helping entrepreneurs, aspiring technologists, as well as people that already work in technology. Galvanize has beautiful locations in the United states that nurture a community that strives to improve. Tracy talked about what people can do once they are at Galvanize and the variety of opportunities that they give their members. Given Tracy’s 20 years of experience in leadership positions, we also talked about leadership and her work in ensuring that the community at Galvanize remains inclusive.

What is cloud computing? Is this about where we compute or how we compute? Cornelia Davis, Sr. Director of Technology at Pivotal answers these questions. Cornelia also explains the fundamental patterns in cloud computing as they emerge when a service grows from 1000 users to millions. We also talked about the potential end of cloud computing.

Alaina Percival is the CEO of Women Who Code. Women Who Code is a non-profit global organization dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. Alaina explained how Women Who Code grew from a meetup group to a global organization that has connected over 80,000 women. We also talked about building an organization that focuses on women that already have careers in technology and engineering and why this is important. Alaina also explained how being accepted to Y Combinator in 2016 has helped Women Who Code.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evelina Gabasova is developing machine learning models and mathematical models for cancer research. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Cambridge. We talked about how to apply machine learning models in the medical field and the state of AI. Evelina also gave an insight into the types of problems that are being tackled with machine learning and some of the implications on having access to medical data.

Michele Titolo is a Lead Software Developer at Capital One. Michele has built microservices at Capital One which is a Bank in the United States. We talked about the increasing popularity of microservices, what they are, and the value that they add to an organization. Michele also gave an insight on her experience developing microservices and good practices. We also talked about mobile app development and how it has been evolving.