Femgineer » Talks

SXSW Panel: “That’s Not My Job: Being A Career Generalist”

Poornima — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:51:55 +0000

I will be speaking on a panel Saturday March 12th at 5pm. Click here for additional details: “That’s Not My Job: Being A Career Generalist”

Tweet This Post

I Don’t Know to CEO: Transforming Passion in Action

Poornima — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:16:02 +0000

On Saturday May 1, 2010, I will speaking on a panel entitled: “Taking Flight – Launching a Belief into a Brand” at the I Don’t Know to CEO: Transforming Passion into Action conference at the Annenburg Auditorium at Stanford University.

Tweet This Post

Social Developers Summit

Poornima — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:15:08 +0000

I will speaking at the Social Developer Summit on June 29, 2010 (9:30-10:20am). The session will be about Scaling Social Analytics. I’ll cover some of the data analytics I worked on at Mint.com, and propose suggestions for building analytics in from the start to then help with scale.

Tweet This Post

Deploy 2010

Poornima — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 07:20:56 +0000

I will be speaking at Deploy 2010 hosted by Seattle 2.0 on Thursday June 24th at Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle, WA. The focus of my talk is pre-launch planning for startups, geared towards engineering. I aim to cover technologies to use, best practices, and trade-offs to make before crunchtime!

Tweet This Post

Careers of the Future: Which One is Right for You?

Poornima — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 06:14:53 +0000

I will be on a panel at the Invent Your Future Conference for Women, on Tuesday April 20, 2010 (10:15am – 11:45am). The title of the panel is: Careers of the Future: Which One is Right for You? The conference will be held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA.

Tweet This Post

PairUp Conference: Building a Startup

Poornima — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:00:24 +0000

I will be speaking at the PairUp Conference April 8-9, 2010 in London; doing a pair presentation with Nick Pellant. The both of us will be speaking on how to go about starting a tech startup, and focused on inspiring the youth of the UK!

Tweet This Post

Takeaways from Girls in Tech: Catalyst Conference

Poornima — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:27:44 +0000

Today I attend the Girls in Tech: Catalyst Conference at the Common Wealth Club in San Francisco. It was a great meeting ground for all girls in tech. I was introduced to VCs, CEOs, and of course fellow femgineers! My panel was: “Curious About Coding & Developing: Developing Creativity & Building a Business.” Here is what I learned from the Q&A period and hallway conversations I had with other girls:

Women want to code!
Entrepreneurs want to understand where they can meet developers and how to interact and motivate them to join their startups (this is gender neutral).
There is a growing gap between entrepreneurs and engineers (once again gender neutral).

Because the panel was brief some questions on each of these points went unaddressed. I’m going to attempt to address some of them now.

1. Just do it! Seriously, if women in their 20s can run companies, 30s can run marathons, 40s can give birth then they can certainly code! Any new skill is daunting (believe me I’ve tried snowboarding on blues…) But the key to learning a new skill is patience, practice, and perseverance. Start by figuring out what you ultimately want to do e.g. designing websites (CSS, HTML, Illustrator/PhotoShop), creating software programs or web applications (Java, Ruby), or pulling data for business reports (mySQL). Next evaluate what kind of learner you are: self or group? If you are good at self-study then go do some tutorials. Don’t do it all in one shot, pace yourself! And if you like learning in groups then go attend a workshop or a class. You can enhance your learning with podcasts on the subject (there are a ton on iTunes), and reading books on the topic.

2. Its no secret developers are a nose-to-the-grindstone bunch. Good developers are especially hard to meet in the wild Here are a few secret hide-outs: Hacker Dojo (Mountain View), Meetups (Ruby, Java, iPhone, Android) along the peninsula hosted monthly, and of course un-conferences like CodeCamp, She’s Geeky, and Chirp.

I hate to stereotype but I think there are two key motivating factors: building cool stuff, and solving tough problems. By building cool stuff I mean developers who like to work in a fast paced environment, like a startup, and be a part of a product’s evolution. By solving tough problems I mean developers who like to work in a stable environment and think about tough engineering problems like scaling a database or improving the performance of a site to load photos really fast. Figure out which you want for your company or team. Then motivate them, first and foremost with projects, and second with the autonomy to build or work on those projects and drive the direction of them.

3. This is mostly a communication issue. I’ve noticed a growing trend in entrepreneurs understanding jargon, and even what technologies work best for front vs. back-end development. But I have yet to see a movement in the developer community to create a more articulate bunch of coders that can clearly explain tradeoffs in laymen’s terms e.g. more servers == more $$ or more code clean up == more developer time. I think such initiatives needs to start at the university level, perhaps by incorporating a public speaking component to the curriculum. And in companies managers should force their developers to explain projects and give presentations that are across departments. I don’t think agile does a good job of emphasizing the need to be articulate, but I think it would help with the entire product development process.

Tweet This Post

Duke Talk: From Duke to Mint: The Blue She-Devil and Successful Startup

Poornima — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:02:48 +0000

I will be speaking to MEM (Masters in Engineering Management) students at my alma mater, Duke University, on Friday January 22, 2009. I’ll talk about how I contributed to Mint.com’s success two years after I graduated from the Pratt School of Engineering.

Tweet This Post

Building an Engineering Team – Videos

Poornima — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:19:17 +0000

I was invited to speak to the Berkeley CS students for their e-talks series. Here is the video from my talk last night.

Berkeley Talk: Building an Engineering Team

Poornima — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:30:29 +0000

I will be speaking on how I weighed the option to work for a large company versus a startup, the unique experience I’ve had starting out as the second engineer at Mint.com, and how I helped develop the code base and grow the engineering team starting as a junior engineer. The talk will be held at the University of Berkeley’s CS department on Wednesday November 3, 2009 at 310 Soda 6-7pm.

Tweet This Post