The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

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 contributors and the role of technology in this process. Paris explained how they gathered data and used that to understand the different types of mentoring that can be provided.

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 importance of a Service Level Agreement and went over its components. The discussion continued with topics around what metrics to collect for monitoring, incident management, being on-call and tracking down an issue.

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 Engineering. We also talked about techmums, an organization she founded to empower mothers and their families through technology. Sue also played a fundamental role in the restoration of Bletchley Park, the central site for British code workers during World War II, of which more than half of them were women.

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 women out of the field. We talked about the role of programming during World War II and how women were using computers. Mar also explained the impact that forcing women out of the tech field had on Britain’s technological power.

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.