Learning How to Tell Your Story @WalmartLabs

Poornima Vijayashanker

12 years ago

By Justin Reyes

This holiday season, Femgineer hosted its last forum of the year @WalmartLabs.

The attendees, who were primarily software developers, made the drive to San Bruno to get the chance to peek into the @WalmartLabs headquarters, network with other women in tech, and participate in Femgineer’s Building Online Cred workshop. Attendees had the opportunity to network with software engineers and directors that worked @WalmartLabs, and the @WalmartLabs engineers shared their experiences and background with attendees.

When asked about how @WalmartLabs compares to others, many replied that @WalmartLabs has a great amount of diversity and a welcoming culture that is often missing from big tech companies in Silicon Valley. Attendees got to hear in depth from @WalmartLabs engineering directors: Kavisha Arora and Seena Ganesh as they shared their backgrounds, how they’ve advanced @WalmartLabs, and what the engineering teams are working on today.

Kavisha shared how she was unaccustomed to everyone being so nice when she arrived compared with her previous job, and resources available to women like @WalmartLabs’ Women’s Resource Council. While Seena spoke about the different ways @WalmartLabs helps engineers develop into tech leaders, and how she structures her own team to fulfill that. The talks made it clear to the audience that @WalmartLabs was a place where you can develop innovative products, lead engineering teams, and receive mentorship.

Delving into the presentation of the evening on Building Online Cred, Poornima shared with the audience how your online presence should really convey a story. The story can be communicated through a number of social media channels such as your LinkedIn profile, Github repository, or SlideShare account. These can then be added to your blog or personal website.

Poornima emphasized the importance of not only sharing projects and positions from your past, but also what you’d like to do in the future. This gives recruiters, mentors and others a sense of where you’re headed next and what you’re interested in.

After the talk, attendees broke out into groups to practice strategies from the talk, and were finally asked to present.One attendee walked us through her journey of learning how to write and debug kernel code. While another spoke about how she picked the Kohana framework for PHP. It was amazing to hear everyone share stories of how they’ve grown as developers, and the contributions they’ve made to their companies.

The last forum of the year was a hit thanks to our brilliant attendees and kind sponsor @WalmartLabs, we look forward to hosting more in 2014!

If you missed this Femgineer Forum or ones in the past, then you can find the slides from all our forums here.

[quote author=”Paula Renee”]Left feeling much more confident in building my online cred not to mention speaking with Poornima and all the attendees was very motivating. Cannot wait to see what January holds.[/quote]

[quote author=”Michelle Aden”]Very instructive and relevant advice for novices and well as more seasoned on-line users.[/quote]

[quote author=”Kelley Nielsen”]Wonderful talk. I was already familiar with most of what was discussed, but it was good to be able to assess my knowledge. There was excellent feedback and mutual support during the exercise sessions.[/quote]

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