The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

Data is constantly flowing through a system. From telemetry data to data from IoT devices, as the amount of data increases, challenges emerge on how to process it. Holden Karau, Open Source Big Data Developer Advocate at Google, talked about how data can be processed and analyzed in batches or in streams. Holden explained the infrastructure needed to process data at scale and fundamental performan...

When you’re working on a product, an important part of the process is to understand how your customers use it. This helps drive improvements. Avni Patel, CEO and Founder of Poppy explained the role of consumer psychology in analyzing products. Avni also explained the process of launching a tech startup as a solo founder. We talked about how she built and launched the first version without having a...

A data-driven approach is becoming more common across companies from different sectors. These companies have people that are focused on getting insights from data, such as data analysts and data scientists. Hanna Landrus, Data Scientist at Usermind explains the difference between data analyst and data scientist. Hanna has experience in both these roles. She explained the types of problems that she...

As the amount of data has increased, we have been able to apply other machine learning methods like deep learning. Erika Menezes, Software Engineer at Microsoft explains what deep learning is and the problems it has been able to tackle. We talked about artificial neural networks and how these are the core component in deep learning architectures. Erika also explained how a deep learning project is...

What does it mean for a machine to be creative? Maya Ackerman, CEO of WaveAI, addresses this question. We talked about the challenges of building systems that have creativity. Maya explained how she began exploring the idea of computational creativity by building a system that makes songwriting accessible to more people. This system, called ALYSIA, plays the role of a creative partner and helps a...

The workflow of a software developer has evolved a lot throughout the decades. With these advancements we have become more productive and focus on building things that are core to the business that we work on. Simina Pasat, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, explains what developer productivity consists of. We talked about the developing pipeline for building mobile apps and the components that...

Technology is a broad field that touches many other fields. Camille Eddy, Mechanical Engineer explained different areas in technology that she has worked on. We begin the discussion with machine learning. Camille explained different machine learning systems we interact with, how bias can be present in these systems, and ways to combat it. We then talked about Mechanical Engineering and discussed t...

When we open Netflix we get pretty good recommendations for content that we may like. This is one example that shows the data-driven mentality at Netflix. Julie Pitt, Director of Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix, explained other ways in which Netflix is using data and machine learning. We talked about using data for creating content, and for changes in the infrastructure. Julie explained...

Web and mobile applications can become more popular than we had anticipated. If we’re not prepared, our application can have downtime. If we are prepared, it means that our application can scale. Scaling an application comes with numerous challenges. One of those is how we reason about system performance and how that influences architecture changes we make to our system. Kay Ousterhout, Software E...

Cybersecurity has been around for several decades. With technological advances also come more advanced attacks. Michele Guel, Distinguished Engineer and IoT Security Strategist at Cisco, has been in cybersecurity 20 years. She explained how the panorama has changed, the different types of attacks, and also what the security threats in IoT are. In this episode we were also joined by Mandy Galante,...

Managing a large open source project comes with many challenges. Some are about how code is pushed and running tests, others are about the community of contributors. Paris Pittman, Developer Relations Program Manager at Google explains how mentoring is an engineering problem and not a people problem. We talked about the different ways in which they’re scaling mentoring to thousands of Kubernetes c...

Chaos Engineering introduces failures across a system. This helps us evaluate how are system will perform when a failure occurs. Tammy Bütow, Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Gremlin, explains why Chaos Engineering emerged. We talked about the different types of chaos that can be introduced to a system: DNS related attacks, black hole attacks and database attacks. Tammy highlighted the impor...

Working as a programmer is more than just writing writing code. Emily Freeman, Developer Advocate at Kickbox guides us through a path to code craftsmanship. We talked about what makes great code, and other human aspects like mentorship and networking. Emily also talked about technical interviews, and types of risks that we can take on a job.

Security tools are essential in helping tackle vulnerabilities in the cloud. Liz Rice, Technology Evangelist at Aqua Security explained the capabilities of security tools, vulnerability reports, and the process of deploying security patches.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery allowed new tools and technologies to streamline the process of deploying changes within minutes. Sarah Wells, Technical Director for Operations and Reliability at the Financial Times explained the process of migrating to DevOps and Kubernetes. We talked about identifying good places to start a migration, DevOps and Chaos Engineering.

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Programmers can come from anywhere. Some start coding since they are children. Others learn it even after being in a different industry. Dr. Sue Black, Honorary Professor of Computer Science at University College London, was living in a refuge when she looked to science and technology to turn her life around. Sue explained how her interest in math and in technology lead her to focus on Software En...

Thanks to Open Source Software, many companies are able to leverage the technologies from each other. This is a the center of cloud computing. Alena Prokharchyk, Principal Software Engineer at Rancher Labs talked about open source projects that she has worked on. We begin the discussion with Apache CloudStack, and then talked about Rancher, a container platform.

In the 1940s, programming was viewed as women’s work. However, as electronic computing matured the proportion of women working in this field declined. Mar Hicks, author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, explained why programming was viewed as women’s work and how the labor conditions in Britain and the perception of computing pushed...

Artificial Intelligence can be used to make music. From coming up with a beat, to creating a melody, artists are beginning to use it. Taryn Southern an Artist and Musician talked about the user experience for creating music with and without artificial intelligence. We talked about existing tools as well as the APIs that are available to create music with AI.

Hospital patients can end up with an infection they didn’t have when they arrive. This leads to complications and sometimes death. Jenna Wiens, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, worked on building a computational model that can learn to prevent infections by determining the risk of getting one. We talked about what data is useful for building th...

From idea to execution, starting a tech company is a rewarding experience. Wen-Wen Lam, Founder and CEO of NexTravel (YC W15) explains what it took to launch a tech company. We talked about the process of exploring ideas, talking to clients and the execution of building a product. In the early days of NexTravel, a huge player in the market pulled their partnership. This could have meant the end of...

Technologies like Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine make it easier for anyone to manage their applications in the cloud. With decades of experience in managing systems at scale, Google brings that knowledge to the community through its products and open source contributions. Chen Goldberg Director of Engineering at Google Cloud explains the motivation behind Google Kubernetes Engine, also kn...

Containers are being widely adopted as part of an application infrastructure. For existing systems and applications that want to make the switch, they have to migrate part of their infrastructure. Nicole Hubbard, Architect at WP Engine walks us through migrating from virtual machines to containers. We talked about what a VM infrastructure consists of and the reasons why you should consider to use...

As women enter the technology field they can come across challenges to grow in their careers. Part of these challenges are because there are still not a lot of women in technology so we might encounter biases that affect our development and the tech community. Fortunately, as other women learn from their experiences, they have built support groups and platforms to help other women learn and grow i...