How We Got Into Security with Ashley Burke, Karla Reffold, and Divya Mudgal

Hello everyone and welcome to THE .NET Core Podcast. An award-winning podcast where we reach into the core of the .NET technology stack and, with the help of the .NET community, present you with the information that you need in order to grok the many moving parts of one of the biggest cross-platform, multi-application frameworks on the planet.

I am your host, Jamie "GaProgMan" Taylor. In this episode, I hosted a roundtable discussion with Ashley Burke, Karla Reffold, and Divya Mudgal about how they got into the cybersecurity industry, how you don't necessarily need a technical background or need to be a developer in order to get into it, and how there's way more to the industry than the sensationalist "person in a hoodie, typing random commands into a Linux bash prompt," than you might have realised. We talk about the fact that both Ashley and Karla are from "non-traditional" backgrounds (i.e they didn't study Computer Science or Software Engineering) and how their experience differs from Divya's experience, as she studied Computer Science.

Along the way, we also discuss some of the issues that they have each faced as women in the cybersecurity industry - an industry which is traditionally very male dominated. We also discuss ways that we can help our colleagues who identify as female.

This is a slight departure from our standard topic of .NET, and more into both cybersecurity and the gender divide in our industry. I ask that you listen to what these highly skilled colleagues of ours have to say, and think about what your key takeaways from this conversation are. For instance, some of my favourite takeaways from this were:

Karla saying that sometimes, "it's just a case of getting out of the way."
Divya saying it shouldn't be about "male vs female", and that we should combine each other's skills and experience to create a greater team.
Ashley saying that gender bias can present itself in some of the most subtle ways, and that we should stop teaching those gender biases

I also really appreciated having my viewpoint and a specific long-held understanding (one which I thought would help, but actually might have hurt) challenged and changed throughout this discussion.

Let me know (via the contact page) what your key takeaways where.

The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at https://dotnetcore.show/episode-115-how-we-got-into-security-roundtable/

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