The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

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...

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 professo...

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...

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,...

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 h...

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. G...

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 engine...

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. Sahan...

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 attendee...

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...

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...

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 communi...

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...

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 rol...

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...

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...

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...

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 ga...

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...

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 co...

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...