Grace Hopper Conference 2018-A melting pot of ideas for Woman in tech
On 14-16th Novemeber ,I was honored and humbled to be a part of the biggest conference for women in technology ,namely the Grace Hopper Conference India(GHCI) 2018.I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of women who had assembled (5000+) solely to celebrate technology and Grace Hopper.Grace was one of the smartest woman the world of computer programming has seen,aptly called Grandma COBOL ,because of her work around machine independent programming language which led to the development of one of the early programming languages COBOL.
The Grace Hopper Conference is organised every year by the AnitaB.org, started by Anita Borg a prominent computer scientist who was passionate about equal representation of woman in computing and technology and a strong voice in the crusade to end stereotyping of woman in engineering.
This was my first time in the conference and was certainly a rewarding experience for me.The preparation to attend the conference started days before from NetApp office ,be it numerous contact session conducted by the WIT(women in tech) team or the technical sessions meant to prepare the delegates to handle the tech booth.It was a good place to connect with fellow engineers in the organisation and also to be aware of other cutting edge products in the organisation.
Day 1:
Day one started late with the delegates getting themselves registered and getting the entry passes and registration kit with goodies from various gold sponsors.I was proud to know that NetApp was one of the gold sponsors of the event.Afternoon,there were keynote sessions from Lori Beer,CIO ,JPMC and Vaishali Kasture,founder,Sounder Connect Entertainment.Both the ladies were truly inspiring as they shared they stories and experiences about how they got their foot in the door in the otherwise male dominated industry. They also shared some insights as to how to balance personal life and a successful career.
Day 2:
The second day started pretty early and I was looking forward for the numerous tech sessions I had planned to attend from the list of sessions already published in the schedule.The first session that I had attended was from the Philips Innovation Campus,where the speaker demonstrated how they moved their single large monolithic desktop application ,which was mission critical(MRI machine) into the micro services architecture ,one service at a time.This was extremely informative and fascinating as we are trying to move our application to complete a micro services based architecture.The other session was from IBM which emphasized on the need of detecting GDPR compliance at Object storage level using Machine learning techniques.Yet another session was from Microsoft research which spoke about Inclusive design and they showcased what Microsoft has done for blind programmers through their products for Visual studio and eye gaze tracking.This session was one of its kind because the whole session was communicated via ISL(Indo-Pak Sign language) for the benefit for the deaf audience, if any present.This was an eye opening session for me because we often develop the product keeping the majority population in mind and sometimes it is important that the design is inclusive for certain outliers and that in turn will enhance the experience of your product for the regular users.
The Grace Hopper Conference is organised every year by the AnitaB.org, started by Anita Borg a prominent computer scientist who was passionate about equal representation of woman in computing and technology and a strong voice in the crusade to end stereotyping of woman in engineering.
This was my first time in the conference and was certainly a rewarding experience for me.The preparation to attend the conference started days before from NetApp office ,be it numerous contact session conducted by the WIT(women in tech) team or the technical sessions meant to prepare the delegates to handle the tech booth.It was a good place to connect with fellow engineers in the organisation and also to be aware of other cutting edge products in the organisation.
Day 1:
Day one started late with the delegates getting themselves registered and getting the entry passes and registration kit with goodies from various gold sponsors.I was proud to know that NetApp was one of the gold sponsors of the event.Afternoon,there were keynote sessions from Lori Beer,CIO ,JPMC and Vaishali Kasture,founder,Sounder Connect Entertainment.Both the ladies were truly inspiring as they shared they stories and experiences about how they got their foot in the door in the otherwise male dominated industry. They also shared some insights as to how to balance personal life and a successful career.
Day 2:
The second day started pretty early and I was looking forward for the numerous tech sessions I had planned to attend from the list of sessions already published in the schedule.The first session that I had attended was from the Philips Innovation Campus,where the speaker demonstrated how they moved their single large monolithic desktop application ,which was mission critical(MRI machine) into the micro services architecture ,one service at a time.This was extremely informative and fascinating as we are trying to move our application to complete a micro services based architecture.The other session was from IBM which emphasized on the need of detecting GDPR compliance at Object storage level using Machine learning techniques.Yet another session was from Microsoft research which spoke about Inclusive design and they showcased what Microsoft has done for blind programmers through their products for Visual studio and eye gaze tracking.This session was one of its kind because the whole session was communicated via ISL(Indo-Pak Sign language) for the benefit for the deaf audience, if any present.This was an eye opening session for me because we often develop the product keeping the majority population in mind and sometimes it is important that the design is inclusive for certain outliers and that in turn will enhance the experience of your product for the regular users.
Post lunch,I was assigned NetApp technical Expo booth duty and initially I was apprehensive as I was assigned with the job of explaining the features of NetApp's cloud offering,which I personally have not worked with.However as people started approaching the booth ,all apprehension faded and I thoroughly enjoyed the process as we were trying to market the products and were able to (hopefully 😊) justify our tagline #DataDriven. I also chimed in a bit about SnapCenter(the product I work for) when some of the visitors were inquiring about Application consistent Data protection offerings from NetApp. Special thanks to the Tech booth organizers for going beyond the call of duty and preparing us through various sessions and documents so that we could easily transition to our role of product ambassadors in the tech booth in the slots assigned to us.
Day 3:
The third day was special for NetAppians because our very own Chief of Staff,Chief Transformation Officer,Sheila Rohra was holding a session about her journey in transforming her career and the future of the organization.This was a truly inspiring session as ,she spoke about her life ,milestones in her career and how she took up the role of Chief Transformation Officer at NetApp ,when the company was going through a rough period.She spoke about how she convinced the CEO to trust her with this challenging task putting her own badge at stake.She is a truly inspiring woman and her story definitely transcends the multi tasking and risk taking abilities that women inherently posses.Her talk was followed by a fun photo session with Sheila,other execs and the entire NetApp crowd aptly dressed in DataDriven T-shirts 😊.The rest of the day was distributed between attending tech session and attending the numerous expo booths set up by various tech companies. The sessions from VmWare and Oracle were around container optimization and ML based SOC for cloud apps respectively.I also got to satisfy my penchant for technologies around Augmented Reality ,through a session from Accenture about extended reality.Post lunch ,as I didn't have any more tech sessions to attend ,I spent time at the tech booths and was overwhelmed by the overflow of cutting edge technologies on display around me.I was specially fascinated by the Microsoft booth as I got to try on the Holo Lens and virtually walk through a paved street in Rome as Cortana guided me through the city 😊.Some of the booths were really cool like the Nao Robot with built in IBM Watson at IBM booth.Also,got to check out some competitor products from VmWare in their cloud offerings.
It was a really fun filled and educative experience.My heartfelt gratitude to the WIT team in NetApp for tirelessly working behind the scenes and making this such an enjoyable experience for the participants. Also, a big thanks to my project management for nominating me for this conference.A loud shout out to the women in tech for breaking the glass ceiling and achieving greatness in a field deemed unattainable for our gender a few decades back.
-Ritu
Comments
Post a Comment