Summit Program

In the lifetimes of Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper, there was no advice or research on "women in computing," no conferences or summits, no blogs to follow, no books published with the key steps to success. Today we live in a far richer world, with many successful female role-models who inspire us to reach farther. And yet as a woman making your way in the field of technology, you may find yourself inundated with advice on what you should do or be. There aren't enough hours in the day to do everything everyone suggests and some of the advice is even outright contradictory. Silence has been replaced by cacophony. How will you survive? How will you find the one true path, the magic bullet to success?

Stop, breathe…

You can and should learn from the experiences of other women and WiAC will be a great opportunity to do just that. But ultimately your path to success and even your definition of "success" will not be exactly the same as anyone else. A world full of clones would be a boring place to live. Instead, as zen teaches that enlightenment is a matter of uncovering what's already inside yourself, success as a woman in computing is a matter of being truly yourself.

Allison Randal is a software developer and open source strategist. In over 25 years as a programmer, she has developed everything from games, through linguistic analysis tools, e-commerce Web sites, and shipping fulfillment, to compilers, database replication systems, mobile apps, and talking smart-home appliances; worked as a language designer, project manager, conference organizer, and editor; been a board member of several open source software foundations; written three books; and founded a tech publishing company. She is co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders, serves on the board of directors of the Perl Foundation, is emeritus director of the Python Software Foundation, is founder and president of Onyx Neon Press and Eigenstate, Inc., and is currently CTO of DrugDev, Inc. She collaborates in the Debian, Ubuntu, Python, and Perl open source projects. Her current hobby is astrophysics.

Each of the panelists has a “how I got there” story to share and can answer questions from the audience on how they traversed situations along the way.

Jean Yang is a Ph.D. student in computer science at MIT, focusing on programming languages. She graduated from Harvard University in 2008 with a degree in computer science. She has done internships at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft Research. In 2009 she co-founded Graduate Women at MIT, which now has over 1200 members, two annual conferences, and a mentoring program.

Kirsten Stewart is an Automation Engineer for Gap Inc. There's no infrastructure problem too great for her. She's scaled rapidly growing startups and has solved complex problems for Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft. She's active in the Hadoop, Puppet, and Chef communities. She hasa BS degree in networking and is currently working on a Masters degree in Database Systems.

Jessica Rothfuss has over a decade of experience working on large-scale infrastructure projects. She recently relocated from the D.C. area to work for Taos on an engagement as an IT program manager at Facebook. Prior to joining Taos, Jessica spent eight years at AOL managing infrastructure projects between one and three million dollars. Before joining the Internet industry, she was an implementation project manager for a software company in New Mexico that produced law firm management software. Jessica is PMP and ITIL certified; she also received her Masters in Information Systems Technology from George Washington University in 2007.

Melinda Graham is a geek girl with a background in Hadoop, storage, and IT architecture. She is currently working at SwiftStack to bring massive, scalable storage to the world at large via the OpenStack Swift project. Past gigs include Oracle, Yahoo, and various startups.

Many people struggle with writing a strong, well-tuned resume. In this short workshop we will work on developing the change in perspective necessary to present yourself as a successful, accomplished professional rather than a laundry list of skills, responsibilities, and duties; discuss some of the common pitfalls to avoid; and briefly review some strategies for moving beyond the "resume blast" version of job-hunting.

Nadine Miller recently made the transition to Information Security at Oak Ridge National Labs after over a decade as a UNIX Systems Administrator in both large and small environments. In 2012 she developed a half-day technical resume writing class which she taught at several regional conferences. Prior to moving into system administration she was a technical trainer. Nadine's academic background focused on technical writing and American literature.

Building a successful career involves way more than just doing the technical work that is your primary responsibility. In this presentation, we'll talk about the following topics: having a plan, but not letting it get in the way of serendipitous opportunities; applying for jobs when you don't have all of the "required" skills; getting paid what you are worth; volunteering for additional assignments without letting people take advantage of you; and becoming known as an expert.

Dawn Foster is the Community Manager for the Puppet community at Puppet Labs. She has more than 17 years of experience in business and technology with expertise in community building, community management, open source software, market research, RSS, and more. She is passionate about bringing people together through a combination of online communities and real-world events. She has experience building new communities and managing existing communities with a particular emphasis on developer and open source communities. Past jobs include work at Intel and Jive Software among others. She is the author of two books and regularly speaks at conferences on a variety of topics.

Studying feminism at an all-women's college gave me tools I have used to combat impostor syndrome, improve my work environment, and form lasting collaborative relationships with people of any gender. This talk will provide an introduction to feminist thought and offer pragmatic ways it can be applied to our day-to-day experiences as programmers.

Beth Andres-Beck is a full-stack software engineer at TripAdvisor, working in Java, JavaScript, HTML5, and Objective-C. Ms. Andres-Beck is a member of the team responsible for TripAdvisor's RESTful API as well as hybrid apps for mobile and tablet platforms. Her undergraduate degree from Smith College included work on Gender and Performance Studies, which she has found particularly useful when applied to user experience design or the social dynamics of our field. 

Keila Banks is an 11-year-old Web designer, programmer, videographer, and publisher of content making use of mostly open source software. She has been a part of SCALE since before birth as her mother manned the registration desk for SCALE 1 while pregnant with her. She with the help of her father (Phillip Banks) wants to show how she can use open source software for fun and games even with some popular online and offline games.

Sheryl Chamberlain, an agent of change, will share leadership stories of women who live outside of the box, drive global change, and hold the keys to economic business growth. You will leave this session with actionable tips on how you can break the boundaries of your day job, using your best talents more often to further enhance your success.

Sheryl has traversed careers beginning her professional life in finance in NYC before moving into high tech sales in Denver, then stepped into a role as CEO of a business consulting company in Phoenix, and now is in a global role as Senior Director in EMC's Corporate Chief Technology Office. A recognized leader who has a number of nonprofit board positions, Sheryl is the Founding President of EMC's West Coast Women's Leadership Forum. Understanding the impact of leadership and innovation in this increasingly connected world, Sheryl is committed to empowering women and creating a corporate culture that spurs innovation.

As a woman in computing, you usually start off being comfortable with having few peers of your gender. When you start out in college, perhaps you have resources available to you like a campus group for women in computing. When you get your first job in the field, perhaps you work for a company that’s large enough to have an organized group for women, or perhaps you just band together with friends for wine and story-sharing.

As you get older, you begin to notice that you have fewer peers of your gender. We know from the research that women drop out of STEM fields in their late 20s and early 30s. There are many reasons for this, and they’re outside the scope of this talk. There are also plenty of women who switch from a technical track to a non-technical track in their career, such as trying out management.

I want to talk about what you can do if you’re in that spot: you’re in your 30s or 40s, and you somehow find yourself the only senior technical woman in the room. I want to address the following questions:

• How do you stay up-to-date technically?
• How do you effectively communicate with younger team members?
• How do you ensure that you maintain credibility?
• How do you find mentors?
• How do you continue to grow your career and decide what your next steps are?
• What can you do to help address that problem of women dropping out of STEM fields?
• How do you find your peers again?

Nadyne Richmond is a Staff User Researcher at VMware, directing user experience efforts across VMware's product suite. She created and led VMware's first internal user experience conference. Nadyne has also worked as a researcher at Microsoft and IBM. At Microsoft, Nadyne architected the user experience for Outlook:Mac 2011, which won a PC Magazine "Best of" award for 2010, as well as OneNote for iPad and OneNote for iPhone.

The research into men in tech is less developed than the research into women in tech, because their experience is assumed to be "normal." However, understanding the way the dudes we work with interact with gendered expectations can be as useful as understanding how we do. While keeping in mind that men are as heterogeneous as women, this workshop will demonstrate how to apply the techniques of gender studies to common patterns of behavior. From geekier-than-thou contests to posting sexist garbage on Hacker's News, understanding the incentives men face can help us craft our responses. I will demonstrate the process involved so that participants will be able to apply the tools of gender studies to situations in the future.

Beth Andres-Beck is a full-stack software engineer at TripAdvisor, working in Java, JavaScript, HTML5, and Objective-C. Ms. Andres-Beck is a member of the team responsible for TripAdvisor's RESTful API as well as hybrid apps for mobile and tablet platforms. Her undergraduate degree from Smith College included work on Gender and Performance Studies, which she has found particularly useful when applied to user experience design or the social dynamics of our field. 

Learn the best practices and tools that are critical when negotiating that next career move. This talk will provide an overview on the strategies and tactics involved in asking for:

• Asking for a raise
• Asking for a promotion
• Negotiations
• Asking to be on a project
• Interviewing for a job
• Speaking up in meetings
• Branding
• Speaking up in the community (Meetups/LUGs, Conferences)

Trish is responsible for the design and oversight of Taos’s talent management strategy.  This includes attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining top technical talent in Silicon Valley. She has worked at Taos for over 13 years in a variety of roles such as Engagement Manager for Applied Materials desktop outsource program, where she helped co-manage the talent and process, and Director of Recruiting, where she was responsible for the day-to-day oversight of the recruiting operations, ensuring the delivery of quality technical talent to clients. Prior to moving to the Bay Area in 1998, Trish held administrative roles at Salomon Brothers and Starwood Design Group, and was a Clinical Case Manager at Bellevue Hospital and Covenant House in New York City. She earned her B.A. in Psychology from Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. 

Trish is also active with organizations like Girl Scouts of Northern California, Year Up Bay Area, and St. Mary’s College in Moraga in advising and helping design long-term solutions for the existing technical skills gap.

Lisa M. Groesz, Ph.D., serves two roles. As an Engagement Manager at Taos Mountain, Inc., she is a face of Taos for consultants and helps build the relationships with current clients. Dr. Groesz also is a clinical psychologist in San Francisco (see: www.lmgroeszpsychotherapy.com). Dr. Groesz received her Ph.D. from University of Texas, Austin, and completed her predoctoral internship in behavioral medicine at UCSD medical center. She completed two postdoctoral fellowships: one at UCSF and one at Stanford Medical Center. The current talk, entitled “Speaking Up and Selling Yourself,” will examine how women can best negotiate for themselves in the work place in terms of competitive salary and beyond-the-glass-ceiling positions

Cultivating your personal brand is an effective way to differentiate yourself and help propel your technical career. While it is important to understand how others perceive you, ultimately your personal brand is your reputation. Your reputation should stand for something that truly matters and reflect your values and vision. Join me to learn more about how to articulate your personal values and embody them through your work. You'll walk away with a technique for how to develop a personal vision statement for your career. I'll share stories of my own successes (and failures) in cultivating a brand that reflects my personal values and vision. We'll also talk about how to keep yours authentic and current as you evolve and change.

Terrell Cox is a Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft for the Enterprise Client team, delivering key scenarios in application and settings virtualization, Bitlocker administration, and mobile device and PC management. During her 15 years at Microsoft, she has worked as an individual contributor, a line manager, and a director, and her career path includes technical writing, engineering program management, and user experience. Terrell is proud to be a founding member of the Women's Leadership Council, a vibrant women's community in the Server & Tools Business of Microsoft that grew from 10 members to over 300 since 2002.  She currently lives in Brookline, MA, with her husband and two daughters, who are her true happiness.