The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

Cindy Warner, Senior Vice President at NetApp has a career in technology that spans over 30 years. We talked about various technology transformations. Cindy explained how data and data analysis became fundamental to businesses. We also talked about the process of building software, data services, and the ethical side of data.

The insurance industry is incorporating technology to reduce bottlenecks, improve experiences and bring to market new solutions. Vivian Li, Principal, Corporate Ventures, Capital & Labs at CSAA, explained recent advancements in the insurance industry. We also talked about Corporate Venture Capital and different types of investments such as early stage financing and seed capital. Vivian explained the finance process and the role of business plans.

Infrastructure as Code is an important approach used in cloud computing. Kerry Munz, Director of Engineering at HubSpot explained what Infrastructure as Code is. Kerry also talked about leveraging multiple cloud providers and migrating more than 400 SQL databases from AWS to Google Cloud Provider. At the end we talked about ways to evaluate the impact of the new computing environment.

Technological advancements are improving many industries, one example is the finance industry. Trisha Price, EVP of Product Development and Engineering at nCino gave an overview of the bottlenecks in financial services and examples of how these can be improved with technology. We also talked about cloud-based solutions for banking leveraging the Salesforce platform.

Running an application in the cloud involves different tools and technologies, a lot of which are open source. Priyanka Sharma, Director of Technical Evangelism and Cloud-Native at GitLab, explained the tooling panorama in the cloud ecosystem. We talked about different tools and the challenges in integrating them to have an end-to-end cloud workflow using GitLab as an example. We also talked about Serverless and Knative.

Open Source Software has characteristics that affect how marketing is conducted for it. Kiersten Gaffney, VP of Marketing at Buoyant explained what Open Source Software is and how it can be marketed. We talked about the objectives of a marketing campaign, the role of the open source community and software tutorials. Kiersten also explained metrics of success for open source projects.

Kubernetes is one of the main open source systems used for cloud computing. Janet Kuo, Software Engineer at Google explained various Kubernetes patterns. We talked about stateless, stateful, daemons and batch. Janet also explained the declarative nature of the Kubernetes API and examples of its application.

Migrating legacy applications to modern technologies in the cloud computing space can be done in different stages. Idit Levine, Founder and CEO of Solo described how legacy applications can leverage a Hybrid Architecture when migrating to the cloud. We talked about migrating a monolithic application to other architectures like microservices and serverless. Idit also explained software tools that can simplify the migration process.

Communities are an important component of open source software. Karen Chu, Community Manager at Microsoft, talked about communities in the cloud computing space. Karen explained different ways to manage and nurture a community. We talked about marketing, workshops and conferences. Karen is one of the creators of “The Illustratated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes” which we also talked about.

Many technologies that we use today are the product of decades of research. Christine Peterson, Co-founder of the Foresight Institute and CEO at a Stealth company is researching technologies that are of fundamental importance to the human future. One of them is nanotechnology. Christine explained what nanotechnology is and challenges it can tackle in renewable energy, improving health and longevity, supplying clean water among others. We also talked about the misuses of nanotechnology and important things to have in place to prevent them. In 1998 Christine coined the term open source. She explained how that came to be and the impact it had in the software community.