The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

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.