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On this Screaming in the Cloud Replay, we revisit our fall of 2021 conversation with Chloe Condon. At the time of recording, Chloe was a Senior Cloud Advocate for Microsoft, and today, she works for Google as a Senior Developer Relations Engineer. When we spoke to her, Chloe had recently started the Master Creep Theatre (yes, with the British spelling) which is a project to bring some more creative and artistic efforts into the tech world! Given Chloe's non-traditional background she's able to bring a lot of great perspective to weaving these two worlds together. Chloe also discusses the politics of navigating DMs as a woman on the internet, fun. Her and Corey discuss internet culture in general and how to make the most of it, in spite of all the baggage. Tune in for Chloe's take!Show Highlights:(0:00) Intro(0:47) Sonrai sponsor read(1:48) Master Creep Theatre (6:16) The wide world of creepy DMs(12:21) What's the root of the creep behavior?(15:52) Harassment and privilege in tech(20:00) The fight for privacy(27:58) Backblaze sponsor read(28:24) Designing things to be more inclusive and "jerk-free"(37:49) Where you can find more from ChloeAbout Chloe Condon:Chloe is a Bay Area based Developer Advocate for Google Cloud and AI. Previously, she worked at Microsoft, as well as Sentry.io where she created the award winning Sentry Scouts program (a camp themed meet-up ft. patches, s'mores, giant squirrel costumes, and hot chocolate), and was featured in the Grace Hopper Conference 2018 gallery featuring 15 influential women in STEM by AnitaB.org. Her projects and work with Azure have ranged from fake boyfriend alerts to Mario Kart 'astrology', and have been featured in VICE, The New York Times, as well as SmashMouth's Twitter account. Chloe holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. She prides herself on being a non-traditional background engineer, and is likely one of the only engineers who has played an ogre, crayon, and the back-end of a cow on a professional stage. She hopes to bring more artists into tech, and more engineers into the arts.Featured in the Grace Hopper Conference 2018 gallery featuring 15 influential women in STEM by AnitaB.org: https://vimeo.com/289762602/30c246c503Links:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChloeCondonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/gitforked/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChloeCondonVideosSponsorsSonrai: http://sonrai.co/zombieBackblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/

About ChloeChloe is a Bay Area based Cloud Advocate for Microsoft. Previously, she worked at Sentry.io where she created the award winning Sentry Scouts program (a camp themed meet-up ft. patches, s'mores, giant squirrel costumes, and hot chocolate), and was featured in the Grace Hopper Conference 2018 gallery featuring 15 influential women in STEM by AnitaB.org. Her projects and work with Azure have ranged from fake boyfriend alerts to Mario Kart 'astrology', and have been featured in VICE, The New York Times, as well as SmashMouth's Twitter account. Chloe holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. She prides herself on being a non-traditional background engineer, and is likely one of the only engineers who has played an ogre, crayon, and the back-end of a cow on a professional stage. She hopes to bring more artists into tech, and more engineers into the arts.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gitforked/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChloeCondonVideos TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Somehow in the years this show has been running, I've only had Chloe Condon on once. In that time, she's over for dinner at my house way more frequently than that, but somehow the stars never align to get us together in front of microphones and have a conversation. First, welcome back to the show, Chloe. You're a senior cloud advocate at Microsoft on the Next Generation Experiences Team. It is great to have you here.Chloe: I'm back, baby. I'm so excited. This is one of my favorite shows to listen to, and it feels great to be a repeat guest, a friend of the pod. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yes indeed. So, something-something cloud, something-something Microsoft, something-something Azure, I don't particularly care, in light of what it is you have going on that you have just clued me in on, and we're going to talk about that to start. You're launching something new called Master Creep Theatre and I have a whole bunch of questions. First and foremost, is it theater or theatre? How is that spelled? Which—the E and the R, what direction does that go in?Chloe: Ohh, I feel like it's going to be the R-E because that makes it very fancy and almost British, you know?Corey: Oh, yes. And the Harlequin mask direction it goes in, that entire aesthetic, I love it. Please tell me what it is. I want to know the story of how it came to be, the sheer joy I get from playing games with language alone guarantee I'm going to listen to whatever this is, but please tell me more.Chloe: Oh, my goodness. Okay, so this is one of those creative projects that's been on my back burner forever where I'm like, someday when I have time, I'm going to put all my time [laugh] and energy into this. So, this originally stemmed from—if you don't follow me on Twitter, oftentimes when I'm not tweeting about '90s nostalgia, or Clippy puns, or Microsoft silly throwback things to Windows 95, I get a lot of weird DMs. On every app, not just Twitter. On Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, oh my gosh, what else is there?Corey: And I don't want to be clear here just to make this absolutely crystal clear, “Hey, Chloe, do you want to come back on Screaming in the Cloud again?” Is not one of those weird DMs to which you're referring?Chloe: No, that is a good DM. So, people always ask me, “Why don't you just close your DMs?” Because a lot of high profile people on the internet just won't even have their DMs open.Corey: Oh, I understand that, but I'm the same boat. I would have a lot less nonsense, but at the same time, I want—at least in my case—I want people to be able to reach out to me because the only reason I am what I am is that a bunch of people who had no reason to do it did favors for me—Chloe: Yes.Corey: —and I can't ever repay it, I can only ever pay it forward and that is the cost of doing favors. If I can help someone, I will, and that's hard to do with, “My DMs are closed so hunt down my email address and send me an email,” and I'm bad at email.Chloe: Right. I'm terrible at email as well, and I'm also terrible at DMs [laugh]. So, I think a lot of folks don't understand the volume at which I get messages, which if you're a good friend of mine, if you're someone like Corey or a dear friend like Emily, I will tell you, “Hey, if you actually need to get ahold of me, text me.” And text me a couple times because I probably see it and then I have ADHD, so I won't immediately respond. I think I respond in my head but I don't.But I get anywhere from, I would say, ohh, like, 30 on a low day to 100 on a day where I have a viral tweet about getting into tech with a non-traditional background or something like that. And these DMs that I get are really lovely messages like, “Thank you for the work you do,” or, “I decided to do a cute manicure because the [laugh] manicure you posted,” too, “How do I get into tech? How do I get a job at Microsoft?” All kinds of things. It runs the gamut between, “Where's your shirt from?” Where—[laugh]—“What's your mother's maiden name?”But a lot of the messages that I get—and if you're a woman on the internet with any sort of presence, you know how there's that, like—what's it called in Twitter—the Other Messages feature that's like, “Here's the people you know. Here's the people”—the message requests. For the longest time were just, “Hey,” “Hi,” “Hey dear,” “Hi pretty,” “Hi ma'am,” “Hello,” “Love you,” just really weird stuff. And of course, everyone gets these; these are bots or scammers or whatever they may be—or just creeps, like weird—and always the bio—not always but I [laugh] would say, like, these accounts range from either obviously a bot where it's a million different numbers, an account that says, “Father, husband, lover of Jesus Christ and God.” Which is so [laugh] ironic… I'm like, “Why are you in my DMs?”Corey: A man of God, which is why I'm in your DMs being creepy.Chloe: Exactly. Or—Corey: Just like Christ might have.Chloe: And you would be shocked, Corey, at how many. The thing that I love to say is Twitter is not a dating site. Neither is LinkedIn. Neither is Instagram. I post about my boyfriend all the time, who you've met, and we adore Ty Smith, but I've never received any unsolicited images, knock on wood, but I'm always getting these very bait-y messages like, “Hey, beautiful. I want to take you out.” And you would be shocked at how many of these people are doing it from their professional business account. [laugh]. Like, works at AWS, works at Google; it's like, oh my God. [laugh].Corey: You get this under your name, right? It ties back to it. Meanwhile—again, this is one of those invisible areas of privilege that folks who look like me don't have to deal with. My DM graveyard is usually things like random bot accounts, always starting with, “Hi,” or, “Hey.” If you want to guarantee I never respond to you, that is what you say. I just delete those out of hand because I don't notice or care. It is either a bot, or a scam, or someone who can't articulate what they're actually trying to get from me—Chloe: Exactly.Corey: —and I don't have the time for it. Make your request upfront. Don't ask to ask; just ask.Chloe: I think it's important to note, also, that I get a lot of… different kinds of these messages and they try to respond to everyone. I cannot. If I responded to everybody's messages that I got, I just wouldn't have any time to do my job. But the thing that I always say to people—you know, and managers have told me in the past, my boyfriend has encouraged me to do this, is when people say things like, “Close your DMs,” or, “Just ignore them,” I want to have the same experience that everybody else has on the internet. Now, it's going to be a little different, of course, because I look and act and sound like I do, and of course, podcasts are historically a visual medium, so I'm a five-foot-two, white, bright orange-haired girl; I'm a very quirky individual.Corey: Yes, if you look up ‘quirky,' you're right there under the dictionary definition. And every time—like, when we were first hanging out and you mentioned, “Oh yeah, I used to be in theater.” And it's like, “You know, you didn't even have to tell me that, on some level.” Which is not intended to be an insult. It's just theater folks are a bit of a type, and you are more or less the archetype of what a theatre person is, at least to my frame of reference.Chloe: And not only that, but I did musicals, so you can't see the jazz hands now, but–yeah, my degree is in drama. I come from that space and I just, you know, whenever people say, “Just ignore it,” or, “Close your DMs,” I'm like, I want people to be able to reach out to me; I want to be able to message one-on-one with Corey and whoever, when—as needed, and—Corey: Why should I close my DMs?Chloe: Yeah.Corey: They're the ones who suck. Yeah.Chloe: [laugh]. But over the years, to give people a little bit of context, I've been working in tech a long time—I've been working professionally in the DevRel space for about five or six years now—but I've worked in tech a long time, I worked as a recruiter, an office admin, executive assistant, like, I did all of the other areas of tech, but it wasn't until I got a presence on Twitter—which I've only been on Twitter for I think five years; I haven't been on there that long, actively. And to give some context on that, Twitter is not a social media platform used in the theater space. We just use Instagram and Facebook, really, back in the day, I'm not on Facebook at all these days. So, when I discovered Twitter was cool—and I should also mention my boyfriend, Ty, was working at Twitter at the time and I was like, “Twitter's stupid. Who would go on this—[laugh] who uses this app?”Fast-forward to now, I'm like—Ty's like, “Can you please get off Twitter?” But yeah, I think I've just been saving these screenshots over the last five or so years from everything from my LinkedIn, from all the crazy stuff that I dealt with when people thought I was a Bitcoin influencer to people being creepy. One of the highlights that I recently found when I was going back and trying to find these for this series that I'm doing is there was a guy from Australia, DMed me something like, “Hey, beautiful,” or, “Hey, sexy,” something like that. And I called him out. And I started doing this thing where I would post it on Twitter.I would usually hide their image with a clown emoji or something to make it anonymous, or not to call them out, but in this one I didn't, and this guy was defending himself in the comments, and to me in my DM's saying, “Oh, actually, this was a social experiment and I have all the screenshots of this,” right? So, imagine if you will—so I have conversations ranging from things like that where it's like, “Actually I messaged a bunch of people about that because I'm doing a social experiment on how people respond to, ‘Hey beautiful. I'd love to take you out some time in Silicon Valley.'” just the weirdest stuff right? So, me being the professional performer that I am, was like, these are hilarious.And I kept thinking to myself, anytime I would get these messages, I was like, “Does this work?” If you just go up to someone and say, “Hey”—do people meet this way? And of course, you get people on Twitter who when you tweet something like that, they're like, “Actually, I met my boyfriend in Twitter DMs,” or like, “I met my boyfriend because he slid into my DMs on Instagram,” or whatever. But that's not me. I have a boyfriend. I'm not interested. This is not the time or the place.So, it's been one of those things on the back burner for three or four years that I've just always been saving these images to a folder, thinking, “Okay, when I have the time when I have the space, the creative energy and the bandwidth to do this,” and thankfully for everyone I do now, I'm going to do dramatic readings of these DMs with other people in tech, and show—not even just to make fun of these people, but just to show, like, how would this work? What do you expect the [laugh] outcome to be? So Corey, for example, if you were to come on, like, here's a great example. A year ago—this is 2018; we're in 2021 right now—this guy messaged me in December of 2018, and was like, “Hey,” and then was like, “I would love to be your friend.” And I was like, “Nope,” and I responded, “Nope, nope, nope, nope.” There's a thread of this on Twitter. And then randomly, three weeks ago, just sent me this video to the tune of Enrique Iglesias' “Rhythm Divine” of just images of himself. [laugh]. So like, this comedy [crosstalk 00:10:45]—Corey: Was at least wearing pants?Chloe: He is wearing pants. It's very confusing. It's a picture—a lot of group photos, so I didn't know who he was. But in my mind because, you know, I'm an engineer, I'm trying to think through the end-user experience. I'm like, “What was your plan here?”With all these people I'm like, “So, your plan is just to slide into my DMs and woo me with ‘Hey'?” [laugh]. So, I think it'll be really fun to not only just show and call out this behavior but also take submissions from other people in the industry, even beyond tech, really, because I know anytime I tweet an example of this, I get 20 different women going, “Oh, my gosh, you get these weird messages, too?” And I really want to show, like, A, to men how often this happens because like you said, I think a lot of men say, “Just ignore it.” Or, “I don't get anything like that. You must be asking for it.”And I'm like, “No. This comes to me. These people find us and me and whoever else out there gets these messages,” and I'm just really ready to have a laugh at their expense because I've been laughing for years. [laugh].Corey: Back when I was a teenager, I was working in some fast food style job, and one of my co-workers saw customer, walked over to her, and said, “You're beautiful.” And she smiled and blushed. He leaned in and kissed her.Chloe: Ugh.Corey: And I'm sitting there going what on earth? And my other co-worker leaned over and is like, “You do know that's his girlfriend, right?” And I have to feel like, on some level, that is what happened to an awful lot of these broken men out on the internet, only they didn't have a co-worker to lean over and say, “Yeah, they actually know each other.” Which is why we see all this [unintelligible 00:12:16] behavior of yelling at people on the street as they walk past, or from a passing car. Because they saw someone do a stunt like that once and thought, “If it worked for them, it could work for me. It only has to work once.”And they're trying to turn this into a one day telling the grandkids how they met their grandmother. And, “Yeah, I yelled at her from a construction site, and it was love at first ‘Hey, baby.'” That is what I feel is what's going on. I have never understood it. I look back at my dating history in my early 20s, I look back now I'm like, “Ohh, I was not a great person,” but compared to these stories, I was a goddamn prince.Chloe: Yeah.Corey: It's awful.Chloe: It's really wild. And actually, I have a very vivid memory, this was right bef—uh, not right before the pandemic, but probably in 2019. I was speaking on a lot of conferences and events, and I was at this event in San Jose, and there were not a lot of women there. And somehow this other lovely woman—I can't remember her name right now—found me afterwards, and we were talking and she said, “Oh, my God. I had—this is such a weird event, right?”And I was like, “Yeah, it is kind of a weird vibe here.” And she said, “Ugh, so the weirdest thing happened to me. This guy”—it was her first tech conference ever, first of all, so you know—or I think it was her first tech conference in the Bay Area—and she was like, “Yeah, this guy came to my booth. I've been working this booth over here for this startup that I work at, and he told me he wanted to talk business. And then I ended up meeting him, stupidly, in my hotel lobby bar, and it's a date. Like, this guy is taking me out on a date all of a sudden,” and she was like, “And it took me about two minutes to just to be like, you know what? This is inappropriate. I thought this is going to be a business meeting. I want to go.”And then she shows me her hands, Corey, and she has a wedding ring. And she goes, “I'm not married. I have bought five or six different types of rings on Wish App”—or wish.com, which if you've never purchased from Wish before, it's very, kind of, low priced jewelry and toys and stuff of that nature. And she said, “I have a different wedding ring for every occasion. I've got my beach fake wedding ring. I've got my, we-got-married-with-a-bunch-of-mason-jars-in-the-woods fake wedding ring.”And she said she started wearing these because when she did, she got less creepy guys coming up to her at these events. And I think it's important to note, also, I'm not putting it out there at all that I'm interested in men. If anything, you know, I've been [laugh] with my boyfriend for six years never putting out these signals, and time and time again, when I would travel, I was very, very careful about sharing my location because oftentimes I would be on stage giving a keynote and getting messages while I delivered a technical keynote saying, “I'd love to take you out to dinner later. How long are you in town?” Just really weird, yucky, nasty stuff that—you know, and everyone's like, “You should be flattered.”And I'm like, “No. You don't have to deal with this. It's not like a bunch of women are wolf-whistling you during your keynote and asking what your boob size is.” But that's happening to me, and that's an extra layer that a lot of folks in this industry don't talk about but is happening and it adds up. And as my boyfriend loves to remind me, he's like, “I mean, you could stop tweeting at any time,” which I'm not going to do. But the more followers you get, the more inbound you get. So—Corey: Right. And the hell of it is, it's not a great answer because it's closing off paths of opportunity. Twitter has—Chloe: Absolutely.Corey: —introduced me to clients, introduced me to friends, introduced me to certainly an awful lot of podcast guests, and it informs and shapes a lot of the opinions that I hold on these things. And this is an example of what people mean when they talk about privilege. Where, yeah, “Look at Corey”—I've heard someone say once, and, “Nothing was handed to him.” And you're right, to be clear, I did not—like, no one handed me a microphone and said, “We're going to give you a podcast, now.” I had to build this myself.But let's be clear, I had no headwinds of working against me while I did it. There's the, you still have to do things, but you don't have an entire cacophony of shit heels telling you that you're not good enough in a variety of different ways, to subtly reinforcing your only value is the way that you look. There isn't this whole, whenever you get something wrong and it's a, “Oh, well, that's okay. We all get things wrong.” It's not the, “Girls suck at computers,” trope that we see so often.There's a litany of things that are either supportive that work in my favor, or are absent working against me that is privilege that is invisible until you start looking around and seeing it, and then it becomes impossible not to. I know I've talked about this before on the show, but no one listens to everything and I just want to subtly reinforce that if you're one of those folks who will say things like, “Oh, privilege isn't real,” or, “You can have bigotry against white people, too.” I want to be clear, we are not the same. You are not on my side on any of this, and to be very direct, I don't really care what you have to say.Chloe: Yeah. And I mean, this even comes into play in office culture and dynamics as well because I am always the squeaky wheel in the room on these kind of things, but a great example that I'll give is I know several women in this industry who have had issues when they used to travel for conferences of being stalked, people showing up at their hotel rooms, just really inappropriate stuff, and for that reason, a lot of folks—including myself—wouldn't pick the conference event—like, typically they'll be like, “This is the hotel everyone's staying at.” I would very intentionally stay at a different hotel because I didn't want people knowing where I was staying. But I started to notice once a friend of mine, who had an issue with this [unintelligible 00:17:26], I really like to be private about where I'm staying, and sometimes if you're working at a startup or larger company, they'll say, “Hey, everyone put in this Excel spreadsheet or this Google Doc where everyone's staying and how to contact them, and all this stuff.” And I think it's really important to be mindful of these things.I always say to my friends—I'm not going out too much these days because it's a pandemic—and I've done Twitter threads on this before where I never post my location; you will never see me. I got rid of Swarm a couple [laugh] years ago because people started showing up where I was. I posted photos before, you know, “Hey, at the lake right now.” And people have shown up. Dinners, people have recognized me when I've been out.So, I have an espresso machine right over here that my lovely boyfriend got me for my birthday, and someone commented, “Oh, we're just going to act like we don't see someone's reflection in the”—like, people Zoom in on images. I've read stories from cosplayers online who, they look into the reflection of a woman's glasses and can figure out where they are. So, I think there's this whole level. I'm constantly on alert, especially as a woman in tech. And I have friends here in the Bay Area, who have tweeted a photo at a barbecue, and then someone was like, “Hey, I live in the neighborhood, and I recognize the tree.”First of all, don't do that. Don't ever do that. Even if you think you're a nice, unassuming guy or girl or whatever, don't ever [laugh] do that. But I very intentionally—people get really confused, my friends specifically. They're like, “Wait a second, you're in Hawaii right now? I thought you were in Hawaii three weeks ago.” And I'm like, “I was. I don't want anyone even knowing what island or continent I'm on.”And that's something that I think about a lot. When I post photo—I never post any photos from my window. I don't want people knowing what my view is. People have figured out what neighborhood I live in based on, like, “I know where that graffiti is.” I'm very strategic about all this stuff, and I think there's a lot of stuff that I want to share that I don't share because of privacy issues and concerns about my safety. And also want to say and this is in my thread on online safety as well is, don't call out people's locations if you do recognize the image because then you're doxxing them to everyone like, “Oh”—Corey: I've had a few people do that in response to pictures I've posted before on a house, like, “Oh, I can look at this and see this other thing and then intuit where you are.” And first, I don't have that sense of heightened awareness on this because I still have this perception of myself as no one cares enough to bother, and on the other side, by calling that out in public. It's like, you do not present yourself well at all. In fact, you make yourself look an awful lot like the people that we're warned about. And I just don't get that.I have some of these concerns, especially as my audience has grown, and let's be very clear here, I antagonize trillion-dollar companies for a living. So, first if someone's going to have me killed, they can find where I am. That's pretty easy. It turns out that having me whacked is not even a rounding error on most of these companies' budgets, unfortunately. But also I don't have that level of, I guess, deranged superfan. Yet.But it happens in the fullness of time, as people's audiences continue to grow. It just seems an awful lot like it happens at much lower audience scale for folks who don't look like me. I want to be clear, this is not a request for anyone listening to this, to try and become that person for me, you will get hosed, at minimum. And yes, we press charges here.Chloe: AWSfan89, sliding into your DMs right after this. Yeah, it's also just like—I mean, I don't want to necessarily call out what company this was at, but personally, I've been in situations where I've thrown an event, like a meetup, and I'm like, “Hey, everyone. I'm going to be doing ‘Intro to blah, blah, blah' at this time, at this place.” And three or four guys would show up, none of them with computers. It was a freaking workshop on how to do or deploy something, or work with an API.And when I said, “Great, so why'd you guys come to this session today?” And maybe two have iPads, one just has a notepad, they're like, “Oh, I just wanted to meet you from Twitter.” And it's like, okay, that's a little disrespectful to me because I am taking time out to do this workshop on a very technical thing that I thought people were coming here to learn. And this isn't the Q&A. This is not your meet-and-greet opportunity to meet Chloe Condon, and I don't know why you would, like, I put so much of my life online [laugh] anyway.But yeah, it's very unsettling, and it's happened to me enough. Guys have shown up to my events and given me gifts. I mean, I'm always down for a free shirt or something, but it's one of those things that I'm constantly aware of and I hate that I have to be constantly aware of, but at the end of the day, my safety is the number one priority, and I don't want to get murdered. And I've tweeted this out before, our friend Emily, who's similarly a lady on the internet, who works with my boyfriend Ty over at Uber, we have this joke that's not a joke, where we say, “Hey if I'm murdered, this is who it was.” And we'll just send each other screenshots of creepy things that people either tag us in, or give us feedback on, or people asking what size shirt we are. Just, wiki feed stuff, just really some of the yucky of the yuck out there.And I do think that unless you have a partner, or a family member, or someone close enough to you to let you know about these things—because I don't talk about these things a lot other than my close friends, and maybe calling out a weirdo here and there in public, but I don't share the really yucky stuff. I don't share the people who are asking what neighborhood I live in. I'm not sharing the people who are tagging me, like, [unintelligible 00:22:33], really tagging me in some nasty TikToks, along with some other women out there. There are some really bad actors in this community and it is to the point where Emily and I will be like, “Hey, when you inevitably have to solve my murder, here's the [laugh] five prime suspects.” And that sucks. That's [unintelligible 00:22:48] joke; that isn't a joke, right? I suspect I will either die in an elevator accident or one of my stalkers will find me. [laugh].Corey: It's easy for folks to think, oh, well, this is a Chloe problem because she's loud, she's visible, she's quirky, she's different than most folks, and she brings it all on herself, and this is provably not true. Because if you talk to, effectively, any woman in the world in-depth about this, they all have stories that look awfully similar to this. And let me forestall some of the awful responses I know I'm going to get. And, “Well, none of the women I know have had experiences like this,” let me be very clear, they absolutely have, but for one reason or another, they either don't see the need, or don't see the value, or don't feel safe talking to you about it.Chloe: Yeah, absolutely. And I feel a lot of privilege, I'm very lucky that my boyfriend is a staff engineer at Uber, and I have lots of friends in high places at some of these companies like Reddit that work with safety and security and stuff, but oftentimes, a lot of the stories or insights or even just anecdotes that I will give people on their products are invaluable insights to a lot of these security and safety teams. Like, who amongst us, you know, [laugh] has used a feature and been like, “Wait a second. This is really, really bad, and I don't want to tweet about this because I don't want people to know that they can abuse this feature to stalk or harass or whatever that may be,” but I think a lot about the people who don't have the platform that I have because I have 50k-something followers on Twitter, I have a pretty big online following in general, and I have the platform that I do working at Microsoft, and I can tweet and scream and be loud as I can about this. But I think about the folks who don't have my audience, the people who are constantly getting harassed and bombarded, and I get these DMs all the time from women who say, “Thank you so much for doing a thread on this,” or, “Thank you for talking about this,” because people don't believe them.They're just like, “Oh, just ignore it,” or just, “Oh, it's just one weirdo in his basement, like, in his mom's basement.” And I'm like, “Yeah, but imagine that but times 40 in a week, and think about how that would make you rethink your place and your position in tech and even outside of tech.” Let's think of the people who don't know how this technology works. If you're on Instagram at all, you may notice that literally not only every post, but every Instagram story that has the word COVID in it, has the word vaccine, has anything, and they must be using some sort of cognitive scanning type thing or scanning the images themselves because this is a feature that basically says, hey, this post mentioned COVID in some way. I think if you even use the word mask, it alerts this.And while this is a great feature because we all want accurate information coming out about the pandemic, I'm like, “Wait a minute. So, you're telling me this whole time you could have been doing this for all the weird things that I get into my DMs, and people post?” And, like, it just shows you, yes, this is a global pandemic. Yes, this is something that affects everyone. Yes, it's important we get information out about this, but we can be using these features in much [laugh] more impactful ways that protects people's safety, that protects people's ability to feel safe on a platform.And I think the biggest one for me, and I make a lot of bots; I make a lot of Twitter bots and chatbots, and I've done entire series on this about ethical bot creation, but it's so easy—and I know this firsthand—to make a Twitter account. You can have more than one number, you can do with different emails. And with Instagram, they have this really lovely new feature that if you block someone, it instantly says, “You just blocked so and so. Would you like to block any other future accounts they make?” I mean, seems simple enough, right?Like, anything related—maybe they're doing it by email, or phone number, or maybe it's by IP, but like, that's not being done on a lot of these platforms, and it should be. I think someone mentioned in one of my threads on safety recently that Peloton doesn't have a block user feature. [laugh]. They're probably like, “Well, who's going to harass someone on Peloton?” It would happen to me. If I had a Peloton, [laugh] I assure you someone would find a way to harass me on there.So, I always tell people, if you're working at a company and you're not thinking about safety and harassment tools, you probably don't have anybody LGBTQ+ women, non-binary on your team, first of all, and you need to be thinking about these things, and you need to be making them a priority because if users can interact in some way, they will stalk, harass, they will find some way to misuse it. It seems like one of those weird edge cases where it's like, “Oh, we don't need to put a test in for that feature because no one's ever going to submit, like, just 25 emojis.” But it's the same thing with safety. You're like, who would harass someone on an app about bubblegum? One of my followers were. [laugh].Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: The biggest question that doesn't get asked that needs to be in almost every case is, “Okay. We're building a thing, and it's awesome. And I know it's hard to think like this, but pivot around. Theoretically, what could a jerk do with it?”Chloe: Yes.Corey: When you're designing it, it's all right, how do you account for people that are complete jerks?Chloe: Absolutely.Corey: Even the cloud providers, all of them, when the whole Parler thing hit, everyone's like, “Oh, Amazon is censoring people for freedom of speech.” No, they're actually not. What they're doing is enforcing their terms of service, the same terms of service that every provider that is not trash has. It is not a problem that one company decided they didn't want hate speech on their platform. It was all the companies decided that, except for some very fringe elements. And that's the sort of thing you have to figure out is, it's easy in theory to figure out, oh, anything goes; freedom of speech. Great, well, some forms of speech violate federal law.Chloe: Right.Corey: So, what do you do then? Where do you draw the line? And it's always nuanced and it's always tricky, and the worst people are the folks that love to rules-lawyer around these things. It gets worse than that where these are the same people that will then sit there and make bad faith arguments all the time. And lawyers have a saying that hard cases make bad law.When you have these very nuanced thing, and, “Well, we can't just do it off the cuff. We have to build a policy around this.” This is the problem with most corporate policies across the board. It's like, you don't need a policy that says you're not allowed to harass your colleagues with a stick. What you need to do is fire the jackwagon that made you think you might need a policy that said that.But at scale, that becomes a super-hard thing to do when every enforcement action appears to be bespoke. Because there are elements on the gray areas and the margins where reasonable people can disagree. And that is what sets the policy and that's where the precedent hits, and then you have these giant loopholes where people can basically be given free rein to be the worst humanity has to offer to some of the most vulnerable members of our society.Chloe: And I used to give this talk, I gave it at DockerCon one year and I gave it a couple other places, that was literally called “Diversity is not Equal to Stock Images of Hands.” And the reason I say this is if you Google image search ‘diversity' it's like all of those clip arts of, like, Rainbow hands, things that you would see at Kaiser Permanente where it's like, “We're all in this together,” like, the pandemic, it's all just hands on hands, hands as a Earth, hands as trees, hands as different colors. And people get really annoyed with people like me who are like, “Let's shut up about diversity. Let's just hire who's best for the role.” Here's the thing.My favorite example of this—RIP—is Fleets—remember Fleets? [laugh]—on Twitter, so if they had one gay man in the room for that marketing, engineering—anything—decision, one of them I know would have piped up and said, “Hey, did you know ‘fleets' is a commonly used term for douching enima in the gay community?” Now, I know that because I watch a lot of Ru Paul's Drag Race, and I have worked with the gay community quite a bit in my time in theater. But this is what I mean about making sure. My friend Becca who works in security at safety and things, as well as Andy Tuba over at Reddit, I have a lot of conversations with my friend Becca Rosenthal about this, and that, not to quote Hamilton, but if I must, “We need people in the room where it happens.”So, if you don't have these people in the room if you're a white man being like, “How will our products be abused?” Your guesses may be a little bit accurate but it was probably best to, at minimum, get some test case people in there from different genders, races, backgrounds, like, oh my goodness, get people in that room because what I tend to see is building safety tools, building even product features, or naming things, or designing things that could either be offensive, misused, whatever. So, when people have these arguments about like, “Diversity doesn't matter. We're hiring the best people.” I'm like, “Yeah, but your product's going to be better, and more inclusive, and represent the people who use it at the end of the day because not everybody is you.”And great examples of this include so many apps out there that exists that have one work location, one home location. How many people in the world have more than one job? That's such a privileged view for us, as people in tech, that we can afford to just have one job. Or divorced parents or whatever that may be, for home location, and thinking through these edge cases and thinking through ways that your product can support everyone, if anything, by making your staff or the people that you work with more diverse, you're going to be opening up your product to a much bigger marketable audience. So, I think people will look at me and be like, “Oh, Chloe's a social justice warrior, she's this feminist whatever,” but truly, I'm here saying, “You're missing out on money, dude.” It would behoove you to do this at the end of the day because your users aren't just a copy-paste of some dude in a Patagonia jacket with big headphones on. [laugh]. There are people beyond one demographic using your products and applications.Corey: A consistent drag against Clubhouse since its inception was that it's not an accessible app for a variety of reasons that were—Chloe: It's not an Android. [laugh].Corey: Well, even ignoring the platform stuff, which I get—technical reasons, et cetera, yadda, yadda, great—there is no captioning option. And a lot of their abuse stuff in the early days was horrific, where you would get notifications that a lot of people had this person blocked, but… that's not a helpful dynamic. “Did you talk to anyone? No, of course not. You Hacker News'ed it from first principles and thought this might be a good direction to go in.” This stuff is hard.People specialize in this stuff, and I've always been an advocate of when you're not sure what to do in an area, pay an expert for advice. All these stories about how people reach out to, “Their black friend”—and yes, it's a singular person in many cases—and their black friend gets very tired of doing all the unpaid emotional labor of all of this stuff. Suddenly, it's not that at all if you reach out to someone who is an expert in this and pay them for their expertise. I don't sit here complaining that my clients pay me to solve AWS billing problems. In fact, I actively encourage that behavior. Same model.There are businesses that specialize in this, they know the area, they know the risks, they know the ins and outs of this, and consults with these folks are not break the bank expensive compared to building the damn thing in the first place.Chloe: And here's a great example that literally drove me bananas a couple weeks ago. So, I don't know if you've participated in Twitter Spaces before, but I've done a couple of my first ones recently. Have you done one yet—Corey: Oh yes—Chloe: —Corey?Corey: —extensively. I love that. And again, that's a better answer for me than Clubhouse because I already have the Twitter audience. I don't have to build one from scratch on another platform.Chloe: So, I learned something really fascinating through my boyfriend. And remember, I mentioned earlier, my boyfriend is a staff engineer at Uber. He's been coding since he's been out of the womb, much more experienced than me. And I like to think a lot about, this is accessible to me but how is this accessible to a non-technical person? So, Ty finished up the Twitter Space that he did and he wanted to export the file.Now currently, as the time of this podcast is being recorded, the process to export a Twitter Spaces audio file is a nightmare. And remember, staff engineer at Uber. He had to export his entire Twitter profile, navigate through a file structure that wasn't clearly marked, find the recording out of the multiple Spaces that he had hosted—and I don't think you get these for ones that you've participated in, only ones that you've hosted—download the file, but the file was not a normal WAV file or anything; he had to download an open-source converter to play the file. And in total, it took him about an hour to just get that file for the purposes of having that recording. Now, where my mind goes to is what about some woman who runs a nonprofit in the middle of, you know, Sacramento, and she does a community Twitter Spaces about her flower shop and she wants a recording of that.What's she going to do, hire some third-party? And she wouldn't even know where to go; before I was in tech, I certainly would have just given up and been like, “Well, this is a nightmare. What do I do with this GitHub repo of information?” But these are the kinds of problems that you need to think about. And I think a lot of us and folks who listen to this show probably build APIs or developer tools, but a lot of us do work on products that muggles, non-technical people, work on.And I see these issues happen constantly. I come from this space of being an admin, being someone who wasn't quote-unquote, “A techie,” and a lot of products are just not being thought through from the perspective—like, there would be so much value gained if just one person came in and tested your product who wasn't you. So yeah, there's all of these things that I think we have a very privileged view of, as technical folks, that we don't realize are huge. Not even just barrier to entry; you should just be able to download—and maybe this is a feature that's coming down the pipeline soon, who knows, but the fact that in order for someone to get a recording of their Twitter Spaces is like a multi-hour process for a very, very senior engineer, that's the problem. I'm not really sure how we solve this.I think we just call it out when we see it and try to help different companies make change, which of course, myself and my boyfriend did. We reached out to people at Twitter, and we're like, “This is really difficult and it shouldn't be.” But I have that privilege. I know people at these companies; most people do not.Corey: And in some cases, even when you do, it doesn't move the needle as much as you might wish that it would.Chloe: If it did, I wouldn't be getting DMs anymore from creeps right? [laugh].Corey: Right. Chloe, thank you so much for coming back and talk to me about your latest project. If people want to pay attention to it and see what you're up to. Where can they go? Where can they find you? Where can they learn more? And where can they pointedly not audition to be featured on one of the episodes of Master Creep Theatre?Chloe: [laugh]. So, that's the one caveat, right? I have to kind of close submissions of my own DMs now because now people are just going to be trolling me and sending me weird stuff. You can find me on Twitter—my name—at @chloecondon, C-H-L-O-E-C-O-N-D-O-N. I am on Instagram as @getforked, G-I-T-F-O-R-K-E-D. That's a Good Placepun if you're non-technical; it is an engineering pun if you are. And yeah, I've been doing a lot of fun series with Microsoft Reactor, lots of how to get a career in tech stuff for students, building a lot of really fun AI/ML stuff on there. So, come say hi on one of my many platforms. YouTube, too. That's probably where—Master Creep Theatre is going to be, on YouTube, so definitely follow me on YouTube. And yeah.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:37:57]. Chloe, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it, as always.Chloe: Thank you. I'll be back for episode three soon, I'm sure. [laugh].Corey: Let's not make it another couple of years until then. Chloe Condon, senior cloud advocate at Microsoft on the Next Generation Experiences Team, also chlo-host of the Master Creep Theatre podcast. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment saying simply, “Hey.”Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

You might have started hearing about women's only coding bootcamps popping up. Listening to some of the women I've mentored, I can promise you that some of these don’t deliver on their promise to set women up for success in the tech industry. My main objective for this episode was to see if this coding bootcamp helped women become more confident and resourceful, and actually put them in the software engineering industry. We got to talk about whether or not Hackbright Academy delivered on that promise.Guests:Bahar Asefi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bahar-asefiEloisa Furnaguera - https://www.linkedin.com/in/eloisa-furnagueraAngie Howard - https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelarhoward-----------------

Joseph I. Castro, Fresno State's president, will become chancellor of the California State University System in January. The system is one of the nation's largest, enrolling roughly 500,000 students across 23 campuses. Castro talked about his top priorities as he steps into the new role, including to continue Cal State's push to improve student completion rates while cutting achievement gaps. He also discussed the need for state, federal and philanthropic investment to help Cal State students stay on track. Tim White, the system's current chancellor, joined us in May to discuss the system's early decision to stick with a largely online fall. Castro revisited that move and talked about how it may have contributed to record enrollment levels and improved student retention rates at Fresno State and across Cal State. Education drives economic mobility. Strategic Education, Inc. is dedicated to helping improve lives through education. Strategic Education's institutions -- including Strayer and Capella Universities, the Jack Welch Management Institute, Hackbright Academy and Sophia Learning -- create innovative and relevant learning experiences that prepare our students for the workforce -- today and in the future. Learn more at strategiceducation.com.

This year has been filled with challenges for college athletics, as programs wrestle with safety protocols, COVID-19 outbreaks, game cancellations and the elimination of some team sports amid widespread financial pain. To help get a handle on where things stand -- and where they're headed -- we spoke with Amy Privette Perko, CEO of the Knight Commission, a nonprofit organization of college leaders focused on reforming athletics. Perko spoke about big-time college football's season so far, budget crises, revenue distribution and the commission's top priorities -- including changes to FBS football. This podcast is sponsored by Strategic Education, Inc. At Strategic Education, our mission is to help advance economic mobility for all. Strategic Education institutions -- including Strayer and Capella Universities, the Jack Welch Management Institute, Hackbright Academy and Sophia Learning -- innovate and infuse technology into higher education to provide a highly relevant and flexible education experience that results in economic mobility for working adults. Learn more at strategiceducation.com.

If you have wondered about how people with non-technical backgrounds can survive coding bootcamps and then thrive in a technical role, this podcast is for you. Becca Rosenthal is not a relauncher and she graduated from college in 2015, so she is much younger and much earlier in her career than the typical guests we have on our podcast. We asked her to join us today because of the unlikely route she took to what is now a highly technical career. After leaving her non-profit work and a period of exploration, she enrolled in a full stack immersive training bootcamp at Hackbright Academy. Becca is now a software engineer at Reddit, where she has been for almost three years. Listen to find out how she did it, what bootcamp was like, and what her work has been like since. "Hello my name is 'potential'", "Be shameless", and "Referrals are your friend" are just the tip of the iceberg of the excellent advice and commentary from Becca that is relevant for relaunchers making this kind of career transition.

Today we talk with Siobhán, an Engineering Manager at Landed. She shares her experiences in working for a series A start up and what helped her when getting started in software development.Siobhán advises small companies to be proactive and build intentional community connections during times when they are not hiring. This way once a position is open, they will have a pipeline to tap into with a range of diverse candidates. She believes that there needs to be a conversation to reexamine all the pathways to get started in a tech role. Opinions will vary on the value of a CS degree and perhaps some retooling of what goes into these programs is necessary. Siobhán shared how she worked alongside her husband when she was getting started in software development and is very excited to see the apprenticeship model being used in industry. Organizations benefit from having an apprentice program as it builds a talent pipeline right into their team and provides senior engineers a way to cultivate the practice of mentorship. One way to retain diverse staff is to build a culture of inclusion where employees don't feel like they have to code switch to be accepted. Organizations talk a lot about getting folks to the table but what are you asking them to become to get to that table?Siobhán is an engineering leader with a passion for platform engineering, machine learning, and nurturing strong communities of practice. She began her career studying how humans learn at Harvard University & Harvard Medical School, spent several years researching embodied cognition, and now helps teams of computers and humans collaborate to solve problems that matter. She is an Engineering Manager at Landed, the lead developer for SwarmOpt (an open-source swarm intelligence library), a guest researcher at Slow Research Lab, and an engineering mentor at Hackbright Academy.Siobhán K Cronin: www.linkedin.com/in/siobhankcroninLanded: www.landed.comMore episodes of the SnackWalls Podcast: http://podcast.snackwalls.comSnackWalls is powered by San Diego Code School: https://sdcs.ioPlease share like and subscribe for more reach

Episode 1: Conversation with Angie Chang, Founder, Connector and Innovator of Girl Geek X Welcome to the inaugural episode of the At Her Best Podcast, with Minji Wong, founder of At Her Best. Our podcast features conversations with modern courageous women who pursue their passion amongst adversity and hustles with heart. At Her Best partners with Fortune 500 companies and individuals to help achieve goals to help YOU be at YOUR best. In our first episode, Angie gets candid about the realities of entrepreneurship and hustling with heart. Fresh off hosting her annual Girl Geek X Elevate conference which draws thousands of women in tech, Angie shares perspective around branding, content marketing hacks and insight into her career evolution jungle gym. Angie started Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners in 2008 to network women across the Silicon Valley. Prior to that, Angie co-founded Women 2.0 in 2006, a media company promoting female entrepreneurship, where she was editor-in-chief. Angie led partnerships with employers at Hackbright Academy (a women's engineering school), building valuable hiring partnerships with Slack, Redfin, Indiegogo and more. She created the mentorship program which enlisted 700+ industry engineers as volunteers for over four years, and connected countless women to new jobs in tech. Angie was named in Fast Company's “Most Influential Women in Technology”. She holds B.A. degrees in English & Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. atherbest.co girlgeek.io For more episodes, visit: atherbest.co/podcast Executive Producer: Pauline Ang

Chloe Condon is a senior cloud advocate at Microsoft, where she evangelizes on behalf of Azure. Prior to that, she held developer evangelist roles at companies like Sentry and Codefresh. She’s also a freelance writer and has performed in over 30 musicals in the Bay Area, in theaters large and small (50 seats to 4,000 seats). Chloe, who holds a degree in theatre performance from San Francisco State University, is also a graduate of Hackbright Academy, a highly selective accelerated software development program. Join Corey and Chloe as they discuss what it’s like to be a developer advocate, why Chloe built a fake boyfriend alert and how she got a retweet from Smash Mouth, the importance of making the cloud “fun,” what it was like to leave an industry dominated by women and join one dominated by men, how the tech industry stands to benefit from outside perspectives (e.g., stage managers and sommeliers), the role Chloe played in the resurgence of Clippy, and more.

Ruben Harris (@rubenharris), founder of Career Karma (www.careerkarma.com), and David Phillips (@davj), founder of Hackbright Academy and BloomJoy, join Erik on this episode.They discuss:- The history and evolution of bootcamps, including how and where they got their start.- Why Ruben thinks that in the long term the cost of education goes to zero.- Whether bootcamps for non-technical skills can become as big as those for technical skills.- Why there haven’t been bigger exits in the space.- Their requests for startups.- Why big companies like Microsoft or Google haven’t yet created their own bootcamps.- Their predictions for how the landscape will have changed in the next ten years.For more on ISAs, check out this report from Career Karma: https://careerkarma.com/blog/income-share-agreements-market-report-summary-2019/Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Ruben Harris (@rubenharris), founder of Career Karma (www.careerkarma.com), and David Phillips (@davj), founder of Hackbright Academy and BloomJoy, join Erik on this episode.They discuss:- The history and evolution of bootcamps, including how and where they got their start.- Why Ruben thinks that in the long term the cost of education goes to zero.- Whether bootcamps for non-technical skills can become as big as those for technical skills.- Why there haven’t been bigger exits in the space.- Their requests for startups.- Why big companies like Microsoft or Google haven’t yet created their own bootcamps.- Their predictions for how the landscape will have changed in the next ten years.For more on ISAs, check out this report from Career Karma: https://careerkarma.com/blog/income-share-agreements-market-report-summary-2019/Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Wendy Zenone is a Senior Information Security Engineer for Netflix, responsible for managing the 3rd Party Risk Program. Wendy loves the ever-changing landscape of vendor security and enjoys working in a position that allows her to partner with many different teams across the company. Prior to working at Netflix, Wendy worked at Lending Club on their Application Security Team managing their bug bounty program, developer security training and vulnerability management. Wendy is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. Outside of work, Wendy enjoys spending time with her family traveling, snowboarding, watching Netflix and hanging out with their new puppy.

My guest on today’s show is a Staff Operations Engineer from Zendesk.  He describes himself as a Linux systems geek with a passion for making systems serve great content.  And he is recognized as an expert in metrics and monitoring, about which speaks, as well as a featured panellist for the MonitoringScale Live community panel.   EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil’s guest on today’s show is Jeff Pierce. He has been working in the industry since 2003 when he started Coldflare Internet Services. Later, he moved into systems administration working for several firms. Jeff then changed direction a bit, taking up a role as a senior systems engineer for Apple in 2011. Then again when he started work as a DevOps Engineer for Krux Digital and a Senior DevOps Engineer for Change.org. After a few years working as a software and infrastructure engineer, he is now Staff Operations Engineer for Zendesk. He specializes in automating large clusters of Linux systems. Metrics and monitoring are his other passions. He is an expert in this field and regularly speaks on this subject. Jeff was also a featured panelist for the MontoringScale Live community panel. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (00.49) – Can I ask you to tell us more about the metrics and monitoring that you focus on and speak about? Jeff starts by pointing out the only way to do effective system administration is to have access to good software data. You need that data to be gathered automatically. Over the years, Jeff has focused on making sure companies are able to collect the data they need to be able to scale things and optimize what they are doing. (1.26) – So, you are following the principle – if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it. Jeff agrees but explains that it is a little more than that. He says if you can’t see what your system and software are doing, you are already broken. You just don’t know it yet. (1.44) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. Career Energizer audience? Jeff’s advice is not to share your salary with your new employer. This is because they will simply offer you a percentage over what you already earn. If you want to make sure that you are paid the market rate, keep your salary history to yourself. Let it be known that you want to be paid a certain percentage over the market rate and let them negotiate from there. In fact, in the US in Massachusetts employers are no longer allowed to ask future employees how much they earn. The authorities are recognizing that being able to do this gives firms a huge amount of power over prospective employees. Continuing to base what they pay on what previous employers is only making pay gaps worse. (4.16) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. Interestingly, the experience Jeff shares turned out to be a combination of the best and the worst moment of his career. It happened when he was working for the petition site change.org. They help campaign groups and people to put pressure on government and corporations, using petitions, to literally drive change. About four years ago they were involved in using petitions to stop the dog eating festival in Yulin, China. The data involved was huge. So much so that it uncovered a bug in their Galera MariaDB Cluster. The error caused every node to go into data protection mode. When all your nodes go down like that you do not have a cluster anymore. Instead, you end up with four separate servers. In their case, there was also a fifth arbitral process in place to break ties. The nature of the problem meant that their 4th server was serving virtually the whole site while they worked on the bug. Fighting to keep the site online at a time when they were getting four times more traffic than normal was a challenge. There were other issues too. On the one hand, existing on a few hours sleep and working in a highly stressed environment, was awful. For any engineer that time spent fire-fighting keeping the system going knowing that you could not fix it yet, for five straight days, was a nightmare scenario. But, it was also one of the best times. The strength of the team he was working with shone through. Plus, he learned a huge amount from getting the system into working order. That learning carried on for weeks after as they forensically examined what had happened. He delved into areas of the system and technologies he had barely touched before.  (11.12) – What was your best career moment? Deploying the first piece of code he had a hand in writing into production was a real highlight for Jeff. He had just moved from the ops side to DevOps, so he knew it had the potential to make a big difference and help a lot of people because they were able to make it Open Source. For change.org having the ability to store the stats in Cassandra was very helpful. It is a no sequel database format, which means that it is highly scalable. Exactly what they needed, at the time, although now they have moved on to using DataDog. But, when Jeff wrote and deployed the code it was a step change. At this point, Jeff reminds the audience of the value of Open Sourcing something you wrote in terms of energizing your IT career. Being able to do this demonstrtes to a prospective employer that you are good at what you do. So, good that you are confident enough to put your work out there so others can use it. To this day, Jeff mentions it to hiring managers. They are still impressed by it. Coming up with a fresh idea and being able to take it to the point where it is available for general use proves you have a good skill set. Learning code is a lot like learning how to play the guitar. At first, you can only play one chord and you struggle with that. You think you are never going to get it. But, you persist and practice your chords. Before you know it you can play a song. (19.38) – What excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? To use a cliché “software is eating the world.” It is everywhere, which is really exciting because the possibilities are endless. Now, anyone can easily put a product out on the internet using the products Amazon provides. When Jeff was working in the field of systems administration you had one manager for every 50 servers minimum. Now AWS and Google Cloud are available, one person can manage huge scalable systems. Nowadays, nobody asks you what is the biggest environment you have managed? They just want to know that you are familiar enough with the software so you can run the system. Of course, this shift means that you do not need as many system administrators. But, fortunately, these days, as one door closes, others open up. No matter how smart the devices and tech are, end users will always need some sort of support. The robots that are used to automate tasks still need to be maintained. There will always be a geek working in the background. There are still plenty of opportunities for those who want to get involved in the industry. The list of possibilities is endless, which is also exciting. (23.34) – Phil comments on that the fact it is impossible to predict what will happen next. Jeff agrees this is exciting. Ten years ago he thought Linux branded zones which are sometimes called Solaris Containers would be huge. But, Docker came along and totally changed the landscape. Set up properly, with all of the right permissions in place it is safe to give junior system admins access. Plus, you can guarantee that everything will work once it goes into production. Even more surprising was seeing the GPU becoming big again. In the IT world, you can never be sure what will happen next. (25.32) – What drew you to a career in IT? Jeff has been a computer geek since he was a kid when his dad bought him a BC286 from ComputerLand. Jeff loved using it from the start. It had a 640k ram, 10 times more than they used to get to the moon. At the time, Bill Gates said that was all the ram anyone would ever need. When it broke it was too expensive to have it repaired. So, he learned how to do it himself. He loved solving puzzles, so when he realized he could do it for a living, he leaped at the chance. Jeff is on the spectrum, so without IT, he is not sure where he would be today. Being able to work in the industry opened up the chance for him to earn good money and find work easily. (26.06) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? It came from his dad who insisted that Jeff learn a trade. He was an auto mechanic. When he could no longer physically do the work, he switched to teaching auto mechanics. Jeff did not get much formal education. But, once he realized he wanted to work in IT he approached learning how to do it and building his career as if it were a trade. From the start, he realized that he would only master it if he practiced. Repairing someone’s PC is not dissimilar to fixing someone’s car. In both situations, the person handing it over to you does not really understand how it works. So, they have to trust you to do it for them. (27.38) - Conversely, what is the worst career advice you've ever received? Someone once told Jeff to stay at least a year with each company. There will be times when things will not be working out. In that situation, staying the year just does not make sense. If you are learning something and have no problems with the work environment, by all means, stay at least a year. If not, don’t be afraid to move on. Of course, during the interview, you will find that hiring managers will ask you why you left so soon. But, there is no need to be worried about that. Just be honest. For example, they just weren’t a good fit or I was just not learning anything there. It is best to prepare a good answer prior to the interview. Jeff was fired once. At the time, he was suffering from depression and it was affecting his work. He has been hired twice since then. In both interviews, he disclosed what had happened and still landed the jobs. (29.40) – If you were to begin your IT career again, in today’s world, what would you do? Jeff says he would go to a code boot camp. Some of the brightest people Jeff has worked with have done attended coding camps like Hack Reactor and Hackbright Academy. It is a great way to get into coding. Unless you are involved in developing leading-edge technologies like AI or neural networking you don’t really need a computer science degree. For many people, it turns out to be a waste of education. Even with a first class degree in all likelihood, your first job is going to be something like working on a mobile API or website. (32.44) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? Right now, Phil is building his online presence back up by using social media. He is also planning to speak more again. But, top of his list is getting more involved in educating others. He wants to mentor more. Jeff only learned to code in 2011. So, he is still developing his DevOps skills. (34.42) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Jeff is autistic so he has had to actively learn people skills. For example, looking someone in the eye when having a conversation does not come naturally to him. In fact, he still can’t quite do it, but has learned that looking at someone’s forehead is close enough. Focusing on and honing these skills has enabled him to progress within the industry. Today, he is better than most people at things like navigating a crowd or public speaking. (37.40) - What do you do to keep your own IT career energized? Jeff finds taking on side projects keeps him energized. Often it is his non-IT interests that determine what he does next. For example, he is currently learning C# because that is what the Unity game engine uses. This feeds into his desire to start his own video games company. He is a big gaming fan and is especially proud of being listed on Marvel Heroes as a member of the senior technical operations staff. He does not like sitting on his laurels. Constantly challenging himself keeps him interested and energized. (41.37) - What do you do in your spare time away from technology? Jeff plays the guitar and bass. He used to play in a punk band, but now mostly creates and records as a solo artist. Jeff is also a big video game fan who enjoys role-playing and strategy games. (43.07) – Phil asks Jeff to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. Get a mentor, someone who can guide you and help you to work out what to do next. He also advises the I.T. Career Energizer audience not to be afraid to apply for jobs for which they are not fully qualified. Hiring managers do not expect you to have every single skill that is on the list. Jeff’s suggestion is to apply if you meet around half of them. He has never met the full criteria asked for, yet has still been hired many times. On your application spend time explaining why you are a good fit for the job in the cover note you provide. Often, you will land yourself an interview. Thirdly, Jeff explains that effective networking is key when it comes to developing a successful IT career. When you are looking for work, often, your network will introduce you to people who are hiring. BEST MOMENTS: (1.36) JEFF – "If you can’t see what your system and software are doing, you are already broken. You just don’t know it yet." (2.11) JEFF – "Never share your salary history with a new employer. Instead, ask for the market rate plus a percentage." (15.18) JEFF – "When you’re passionate about a project you do your best work." (21.58) JEFF – "End users always need technical support, no matter how smart the devices get." (22.27) JEFF – "You will always need the geek behind the scenes." (28.48) JEFF – "Don't stay in a situation that isn't good for you or for the company you are working for." (32.04) JEFF – "For the programming side of the industry, code school is one of the best ways to get your foot in the door. " (39.48) JEFF – "Don't get comfortable, keep seeking out something harder.”   CONTACT JEFF: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Th3Technomancer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrpierce/ Website: https://almostinteresting.net

Diva Tech Talk interviewed actor-turned-technologist/evangelist, Chloe Condon , Cloud Developer/Advocate for Microsoft.    Chloe is a passionate supporter of women in technology, with an extensive social media brand following, and  “non-traditional background,” since she “grew up doing musical theater in all shapes and forms.”  Chloe’s father is a director/playwright. Her mother is a theatrical costume designer and graphics designer.  “So, I grew up in a trunk!” She had little exposure to tech. “I had blinders on. I just knew that I wanted to be an actress.” After performing arts high school, Chloe matriculated at San Francisco University for a bachelors’ degree in theater performance. “I booked my first starring role, playing Kira in Xanadu,” a San Francisco stage production.  Reality brought Chloe up short when “they handed me $500 for three to four months of rehearsal.” She addressed cash flow through “bizarre 9-to-5 jobs to support my nights/weekends in theater.” She took numerous retail jobs, then landed an Account Executive position at (pre-IPO) Yelp. She became fascinated by the startup, tech environment, but “was terrible at sales.”   She “stumbled into other tech roles” including Zirtual, the first virtual personal assistant company.  There she met Ben Parr, (then editor-at-large of Matchable), who co-founded VC fund The Dominate Group. Ben has gone on to be a columnist at Inc., a sought after speaker, and philanthropist. During this discovery period, Chloe was unhappy, from a deficit of free time combined with minimal personal autonomy.  Then she attended a Google-sponsored talk focused on girls interested in programming. It inspired her to find a bootcamp for coders (“these can be life-changing”).   She chose “HackBright Academy, since it was all women. It felt very empowering.”  Hackbright’s message, to the male-dominated programming world, is “change the ratio!”  Initially, Chloe suffered from “Impostor Syndrome” which she thinks is more pervasive in technology than other field. A key to making progress, at the bootcamp, was to adjust learning style from simply reading about concepts to reading AND doing.  “I had to think of it like choreography,” she said. Her tenure at the focused camp culminated in a project: a social media application that rigorously timed postings to achieve optimal exposure, no matter your time zone. As she prepared for “Demo Night,” Chloe’s revelation was that “building the app was hard; talking about it was not. I had always viewed my theater degree as a setback but I use my theater degree, every day, as an engineer, and doing public speaking.” Initially interviewing for junior engineering roles, Chloe experienced “a significant change” when she “pivoted my brand to be more ‘developer relations’.”  Her blend of speaking, performing, and communications merged with newly minted programming skills. She was hired by start-up Code Fresh, specializing in Docker innovation.  After a year, Chloe left Code Fresh  to join Sentry.io, a company focused on error-tracking for developers working in open source. She lauded the company’s culture.  “You wanted to go to work, every day. The people were so fun and cool.” There, she reveled in creative, fun projects. Through that work, she collaborated with Microsoft, who gave her “an offer I couldn’t refuse.” At Microsoft, Chloe currently works with the cloud-based Azure platform.  Most recently, she concentrated on cognitive services, infusing applications, websites and bots with intelligent algorithms to interpret in natural language. “I built an app that analyzes images of Cosplay Mario Kart characters to determine their mood and emotions. 95% of my demos are funny, quirky or solve a unique problem. I try to have fun elements in everything I do.” Chloe shared classic advice. “Treat people like humans. As they say in The Book of Mormon, let’s just be really nice to everyone. It’s not that hard.”  When faced with a challenge that seems insurmountable (like code not working) Chloe advised: “Take a walk and come back with the solution.”  She also counseled people to take breaks to achieve higher productivity. And “ask for help!” She cited Twitter as a rich source of feedback and advice.  Chloe is amazed by the generosity of experts in the tech industry. “People are willing to help. This community is welcoming and warm.” Chloe has evolved to revel in her differences.  “I do not look like an engineer. And I fully embrace that,” she said, discussing the male, middle-aged technocrat stereotype. “I think it educates people” when she is the keynote speaker at a tech conference.  In 2017, she wrote an article matter-of-factly describing how it feels to be a sole woman at a tech conference.  It went viral because it allowed others to empathize without judgement. To protect herself, from Internet intrusion, she wryly said “I am very sharp, and witty, on Twitter.  Anyone who comes at me, publicly, will get destroyed by my awesome jokes!” More pragmatically, she is building a bot to respond to inappropriate DM’s. In terms of job-hunting, Chloe urged women to be selective.  “Work at a place you are comfortable.” She cited “red flags” like a company uncomfortable with negotiation; or a company displaying paucity of women leaders in the interview process.  Positively, she expressed appreciation for companies who cultivate sensitivity to diversity issues. She also cited Ru Paul’s advice to “silence your inner saboteur” and proceed with confidence. Chloe noted the industry is missing the mark by not considering those with degrees that are not technical. “If you are going to claim you are a diverse company, be open to hiring people from bootcamps! Put your money where your mouth is.” As an evangelist for Microsoft, Chloe measures success by “folks approaching me and telling me that the work I am doing changed something fundamental for them.  At the end of the day, if I have affected one person, or opened eyes to something new, that is success for me!” For other women in the field, she urged “be authentically you. Don’t feel like you must act like one of the guys. We need more ideas, and diverse thoughts.” Make sure to check us out on online at www.divatechtalk.com, on Twitter @divatechtalks, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/divatechtalk. And please listen to us on SoundCloud, Stitcher, or your favorite podcasting channel and provide an online review.

Today, Jessica and I chat about the path she took to become a Developer Advocate at Google. After studying Sociology and Education in college, Jessica dedicated herself to working for both Girls Inc. and Girl Scouts. After five years of doing that, she transitioned her focus onto mental health advocacy work. After facing some extremely difficult tragedies in that role and receiving encouragement from friends and family, she decided to take a class at her local college to learn C++ in hopes of transitioning yet again. That was the moment she fell in love with programming and the rest is history! She attended Hackbright Academy and even went on to teach there for a few years afterwards. Today, she is a Developer Advocate at Google, where she creates content in innovative ways to help other developers build with Google Assistant. We speak about the power of community and the importance of relationships in this industry. Jessica shares incredible advice on how to leverage those relationships while job hunting. She provides tips for those interested in exploring a role within Developer Relations and presents some tangible ideas to help recruiters find you. Jessica is an absolute rockstar and is ever so inspiring- this episode is not one to miss! Find Jessica online on Twitter & Instagram as ChataSweetie

Becca Rosenthal is a Middle East Studies major turned software engineer. After college, she spent a few years working at a Jewish non-profit in Jackson, MS. And when she moved back home to Oakland, she realized quickly that tech would be her ticket to stay in her beloved city. Thus, she decided to learn to code by attending Hackbright Academy. After graduation, she quickly landed an engineering job at Reddit. Today, Becca and I dive deep into how she did just that. A year into her tech career, she attributes her successes to her ability to slay at office karaoke, her intense curiosity, and her absolute refusal to eat a meal at her desk. Her day to day life at Reddit is filled with puns and banter and if you’re ever searching for someone to write or perform a nerdy song for your tech company, Becca is the person for the job! Our conversation ranges from silly topics such as what the lyrics to Reddit the Musical would be to the power of eliminating the word “Sorry” from your vocabulary. Becca is an absolute badass and this episode is packed with incredible advice and powerful ideas. It is not one to miss! Resources: - The Mentor Song. It's fictional. - An AMA Becca and two other Reddit engineers did about Hackbright and bootcamps in general - r/GirlsGoneWired - r/CSCareerQuestions- The resources that Becca gives to Hackbrighters at the end of the bootcamp. (It includes all of the problems she got in coding interviews, an amazing study guide, and the comically long post where she told us about everything she did from Hackbright to getting a job.)- Find Becca on Twitter @BeccaRoRo and on Reddit as u/SingShredCode.

Meggie Mahnken joins the show to share about Hackbright Academy, the all-women software engineering bootcamp.

Creating an inclusive workplace based on respect, belonging and empowerment may not be top of mind for many organizations, but the research and business benefits present compelling reasons for making it a priority. Organizations with inclusive cultures are two times as likely to meet or exceed financial goals, three times as likely to be high-performing, six times as likely to more innovative and agile, and eight times more likely to achieve business outcomes. A recent survey found 83% of millennials say they are more engaged at work when they believe their company fosters an inclusive culture. Diversity has been linked to more creativity and innovation in the workplace, and it’s no surprise why. When people with different skill sets, backgrounds, and experiences are brought together in one workspace, it leads to more effective problem-solving. Dr. Carol Langlois, a lifelong educator who ran the MBA programs at University of San Francisco, spoke to Kintone’s Marketing Director Nicole Jones about women’s leadership and how to create inclusive organizations that value diverse backgrounds, cultures and work styles. Dr. Carol’s educational resume is a bright one. In addition to her work at University of San Francisco, she served as the Dean and Associate Provost at Mills College as well as Vice President of Hackbright Academy, the first all-female coding school in San Francisco that welcomes and trains women for the software engineering fields. She's also the author of the book, "Girl Talk: Boy, Bullies and Body Image,” a compilation of interviews with teen girls on the topic of self-esteem, and is the founder of Empowered Tech, a community space for women in tech to come together to share tips, tools and resources with one another. The question for you is: What can you do in your business to actively support employees, maybe women, maybe others, who might be experiencing impostor syndrome? Share your wisdom and best practices with host Nicole Jones on social media: @kintone on Twitter or via email, at nicole@kintone.com. Read the full show notes for this episode at kintone.com/womendrivingimpact, and find out about how kintone can change your business for the better at kintone.com.  

Angie Chang is CEO and Founder at Girl Geek X (formerly Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners). Prior to Girl Geek X, she was VP of Strategic Partnerships at Hackbright Academy, a women's engineering school which has graduated over 500+ female software engineers. Hackbright was acquired by Capella Education Company in April 2016. Angie led partnerships with employers from February 2013 to February 2017 at Hackbright, where she built valuable hiring partnerships (Uber, Slack, GoDaddy, Redfin, Indiegogo and more), launched the mentorship program (enlisting 700+ industry engineers as volunteers in 4 years) and connected countless women to new jobs in tech. Prior to that, she co-founded Women 2.0 in 2006, a media company which promotes women in high-tech entrepreneurship, and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners in 2008 (now Girl Geek X). She was named in Fast Company's 2010 "Most Influential Women in Technology"​ and more recently Business Insider named her one of "30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech"​. Angie has been invited by the U.S. State Department to speak on women's high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurship in the West Bank, Switzerland and Germany. In her early career, Angie held positions in product management and web/UI production at various Silicon Valley startups. She holds a B.A. in English and Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. Angie shares how she says yes to what life offers her and how it has helped her become the successful entrepreneur that she it today.  Check out her episode to listen to her story. Check out thetaoofselfconfidence.com for show notes of Angie's episode, Angie's website, resources, gifts and so much more.

Guest Bio: Chloe Condon is a former musical theater actress and Hackbright Academy graduate. She is now a developer evangelist for Sentry. She’s passionate about bring people from non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech, and in February of this year, Chloe was named one of the “200+ Thought Leaders in Crypto and Blockchain.” And yet, she claims to know absolutely nothing about them.   Episode Description: In this episode, Phil interviews Chloe Condon, an engineer who has written many articles on her experiences as both a woman in the tech industry and also someone coming from a very non-traditional background in musical theater. Chloe talks with Phil about the ways her theater experience has proved to be an advantage, whether it’s speaking confidently at conferences or creating more entertaining and engaging events for meetups. She also stresses the importance of speaking up for yourself and continuously learning new things.   Key Takeaways: (1.02) Phil kicks the interview off by asking Chloe more about herself, and she refers to the joke at the end of her bio, saying that she frequently writes about her experiences as a woman in tech from a non-traditional background. However, she found out that her name had been copy-pasted into an article about the best people to speak at conferences about Crypto and Blockchain, and that she really doesn’t know anything about these topics.   (2.42) Phil asks Chloe to share a unique career tip, and she says the biggest tip she can think of is to be authentic and real about yourself and your background, talking about how she was worried about not fitting in as an engineer, but that her background has actually helped her in the tech industry, including public speaking and event planning.   (4.00) Phil then asks Chloe to describe her worst IT career moment and what it taught her. Chloe replies that one of her lowest moments came when she was working in tech but before she was an engineer. She worked in various admin roles after college to try and support her theater career. She felt very invisible at her job and that the work she was doing was being taken for granted. This has taught her to always be appreciative and supportive to everyone she works with.   (7.15) Phil shifts things over to Chloe’s greatest career success so far, and she talks about publishing an article called, “What It’s Like to Be a Woman at a Tech Conference,” and the experience of coming from the female-dominated profession of theater to the much more male-dominated world of tech. People responded really well to it because it gave men insight into how isolating it could be to be a woman in tech, and also Chloe has received very positive international recognition for it.   (10.20) Chloe goes on to add that when she’s at conferences and gets asked if she’s enjoying being there with her husband and being able to respond that actually, she’s the keynote speaker, it can feel equal parts good and upsetting.   (10.47) Phil continues the interview with the question of what excites Chloe the most about the future of the IT industry. She says that, broadly, the tech industry is exciting because everything’s always changing and there are always new things to learn. Specifically, she’s excited about developing mobile apps and also machine learning. It’s an interesting time in technology to see how we interact with machines.   (12.08) Phil moves things into the Reveal Round, beginning with why Chloe started working in IT. She says that it began with wanting to learn a new skill that was so different than what she had been learning as a theater major and that technology has always fascinated her.   (12.29) On the topic of best career advice she’s received, Chloe re-emphasizes the importance of being yourself and bringing your background and perspective into the industry. She also says some very good advice she got as a woman in IT was to not be afraid to speak up and let herself be heard.   (13.05) Next, Phil asks Chloe what she would do if she were to start her whole career over from scratch, to which she replies tongue-in-cheek that she would not get a theater degree and instead teach herself to code online and take her tuition money and buy a house with it.   (13.39) Phil then asks Chloe to talk a bit about her current career objectives, which are focusing on mobile development and enjoying getting creative with a smaller design space and what applications she can make in it.   (14.10) When asked about the most useful non-tech skill that’s helped her in her career, Chloe refers back to earlier in the interview, mentioning that her theater background has given her an advantage when it comes to both public speaking and event planning to make tech meetups more fun and entertaining.   (16.21) Finally, Phil closes things out by asking Chloe for any parting words of career advice for the listeners, and she says that it’s never too late to learn a new skill, whether it’s changing from musical theater to coding or just feeling pigeonholed into a particular language or job title. There’s plenty of time and room within the industry to do something new.   (17.55) Chloe adds on that in the performing arts, you can work hard and put effort in and there will always be things out of your control that can keep you from succeeding, down to not having the right hair color, whereas, in technology, you can put in 110% knowing that you will get it back.   Best Moments: (2.50) Chloe: “My unique career tip would be to be as authentic and real as you can, regarding not only your brand but just your background.”   (6.34) Chloe: “My rule of thumb is to be nice and supportive and mentor and lift up everyone that you work with.”    (9.24) Chloe: “It feels really wonderful to be recognized for work and to look back at my life two years ago and go ‘Wow! I actually do have a voice in a community, this is really cool!’”   (11.05) Chloe: “It’s so exciting to me that in this industry, everything is always changing. There’s always new technologies, there’s always new things to learn, so you’re not stuck in one particular field or industry or expertise.”   (15.15) Chloe: “I think it’s just proof that diverse perspective is so important in technology.” Phil: “Definitely, it can be a bit dry and staid at times, so yes, a bit of energy is what it requires.”   Contact Chloe Condon: https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon @ChloeCondon https://www.instagram.com/gitforked/?hl=en @gitforked    

Hello listeners, and welcome back to Tech Forward! This week, I’m excited to share my conversation with Paria Rajai, Founder and CEO of ModelExpand. Using the best practices that Paria and her team have observed over the years, ModelExpand partners with companies who want to attract and retain employees from diverse backgrounds. Paria began her work in diversity in 2008, designing global women in tech events with Yahoo's Business and Human Rights division. Since then, she has played an integral role leading the marketing team at Hackbright Academy, helped organize the inaugural Women of MENA in Tech Conference, and was profiled in Forbes for being a leader and advocate in the world of tech, marketing and diversity. We discussed her history of work around diversity and inclusion, as well as her recommendations to companies who know they want to change, but aren’t quite sure where to start. As the business world has struggled to match the growing diversity in the world at large, it’s important to clarify the differences between diversity, inclusion, and belonging. At a diverse company, your employee base should be representative of your customer base. Taking it a step further, inclusion refers to whether or not employees have “a seat at the table” and ample opportunities for career advancement. In Paria’s words, belonging means “you can take your mask off and be yourself, and be accepted and celebrated.” For a deeper dive on these concepts, and how they benefit your business, I encourage my listeners to read her excellent blog post on the ModelExpand website. The team at ModelExpand work with their clients to broaden their company’s hiring pool, build relationships with nontraditional candidates, and share success stories from other organizations. This process has particularly promising applications for the tech sector, where concrete skills are often more important than a prestigious degree, but legacy hiring practices still shut out a massive talent pool. While building a diverse and inclusive company might feel overwhelming, Paria emphasizes that even seemingly minor tweaks can have meaningful results. “It’s about progress — not perfection.” As for first steps, Paria recommends focusing on these 3 areas: Visual branding. When potential applicants see themselves reflected in your company’s visual branding, they feel encouraged and welcomed to apply. Use of language. Changing even a single word in a job posting — for example, saying “develop” a team, rather than “manage” a team — will change who you attract. Paria recommends Textio, a data-driven writing tool that provides users with data on how to attract a broader audience. Community groups. Not only do community groups build relationships and trust, they’re also a fantastic source of talent with long-lasting recruiting effects. “Getting to know your groups does great things for your pipeline.” Paria, thank you so much for coming onto the show and sharing your advice. Thank you as well to all of you out there listening, sharing, and reviewing the show. See you next week! Connect with us Website | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

Apathy and Exhaustion - Surf/Harp; Theory - Tuning Probe; Juice - The BeatJackers, Personal Jesus - MAGNETIK SURF, Exotica - Juanitos; Geeknotes: 06/09 - Girls in Tech Bootcamp @ Hackbright Academy, SF; Practice - Booster Weeds; Take It Personal - The BeatJackers

Former musical theatre actress and Hackbright Academy graduate, Chloe Condon is now a Developer Evangelist at Sentry. Pre-Hackbright, she spent her nights and weekends performing in the Bay Area as a singer/actress and worked in tech by day. To support her theatre career, she started to learn to code on her own through online resources. Perhaps the only engineer you’ll meet who has been in “Hairspray”, “Xanadu”, and “Jerry Springer: the Opera”- she is passionate about bringing people with non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech. If you’re trying to place her face, yes- she’s the young woman giving the awkward thumbs up in the “What It’s Like to be a Woman at a Tech Conference” article (which she also wrote). Chloe is also the organizer of TechLadyPicnic (a SF women in tech meet-up group), as well as the hostess/organizer of Sentry Scouts (a camp-themed monthly tech meet-up… yes there are patches for each meet-up). A quick Google search of her will provide you with getting started with Docker videos, observability articles, theatre reviews, tech blogs, and videos of her singing- enjoy! EXTRAS: Hackbright Academy (https://hackbrightacademy.com/) Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits–to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life by Gretchen Rubin (http://amzn.to/2DLeHPn) The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim (http://amzn.to/2HSFJqq) https://breakingintostartups.com/ (https://breakingintostartups.com/) Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thich Nhat Hanh (http://amzn.to/2ucgKMZ) CONTACT: https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon (https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon) https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloecondon/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloecondon/) https://medium.com/@chloecondon (https://medium.com/@chloecondon) https://blog.sentry.io/2018/01/10/sentry-scouts-meetup (https://blog.sentry.io/2018/01/10/sentry-scouts-meetup) BONUS: Click on this link and Help support this podcast becuase I love puppies : ) https://www.patreon.com/advanceyourart (https://www.patreon.com/advanceyourart) This podcast is brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years, and I love audiobooks. Click on the link to get a 30-day free trial, complete with a credit for a free audiobook download Audible.com (http://www.audibletrial.com/Yuri) QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

April Wensel, founder of Compassionate Coding, is a veteran software engineer and technical leader whose varied career spans such fields as education, research, healthcare, and entertainment. She has also mentored and led workshops with diversity-focused organizations like Hackbright Academy and Black Girls Code. In this episode, April talks about her past as a jerk programmer, … Continue reading #011 – Jerk Programmer to Compassionate Coder with April Wensel The post #011 – Jerk Programmer to Compassionate Coder with April Wensel appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

Chloe Condon, a former musical theatre actress and Hackbright Academy graduate, is a Developer Evangelist at Sentry. Perhaps the only engineer you’ll meet who has been in “Hairspray”, “Xanadu”, and “Jerry Springer: the Opera,” she is passionate about bringing people with non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech. If you’re trying to place her face, … Continue reading #006 – Developer Evangelism and Lessons from Musical Theatre with Chloe Condon The post #006 – Developer Evangelism and Lessons from Musical Theatre with Chloe Condon appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

Hackbright Academy is a coding bootcamp for women to become software engineers. As a leader of the business, Erin Geiger creates vision, strategy, programs and partnerships with employers to #changetheratio of women working in tech. Since joining in 2017 she has grown the business of hiring women engineers beyond the tech industry to include health, finance and government industries needing top tech talent. She has diversified the types and quality of B2B partnerships by listening and working with employers to design tailored programs to solve critical business challenges. Developed a new team of professionals and is scaling operations for continuous growth to advance the movement of "Diversity & Inclusion in Tech." Thought leader, public spokesperson and champion of diversity to advance Hackbright Academy's mission to #changetheratio of women in tech.

Drew Perkins talks with Erin Geiger, VP of Business Development at Hackbright Academy, about the role of women in the tech industry and how increasing that presence can impact women and society.

Based in San Francisco, Hackbright Academy is focused on teaching women how to code. We're recording several interviews with Hackbright graduates including our guest today, Chloe Condon. Growing up in a family of artists in the Bay Area, Chloe ended up working at startups by day and performing as a theater actress by night. Prior to her current role as a Developer Evangelist at Codefresh, Chloe held a number of jobs including an Account Executive at Yelp and an office manager role at another startup. In one of her previous jobs working as an Executive Assistant to the CEO of NewCo, she attended an event that changed her life and put her on a trajectory to study software engineering through Hackbright Academy.

From dancing to coding, Carly Robinson left her theater career in New York and Chicago to break into tech. She attended Hackbright Academy and is now working as a software engineer at Slack. Prior to coding, Carly got involved with Freedom For All, a nonprofit organization that tackles issues related to human trafficking. She continues to do so up to this day in her commitment to make a difference. Carly’s secret sauce to success is sheer mastery of the fundamentals topped with good networking. It’s all about putting in the work, having that tunnel vision, committing to it, and deciding that you’re not going to give up.

Dr. Julie Krugler Hollek, co-organizer of PyLadies San Francisco and Data Scientist at Twitter, joins us to discuss efforts to democratize participation in open source communities and the future of data science. PyLadies helps people who identify as women become participants in open source Python projects like The SciPy Stack, a specification that provides access to machine learning and data visualization tools. Dr. Hollek highlights the ways that her own engagement with Pyladies and Hackbright Academy laid the foundation for her current role as a Data Scientist at Twitter. Additionally, Dr. Hollek addresses the importance of ethical data use in creating unbiased data science algorithms. For more information on PyLadies, please visit http://www.pyladies.com/ and follow Dr. Hollek on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jkru.

In 2013, Jessica Mong arrived in the Bay Area with $100 in her pocket and a desire to enter the field of software engineering. Fast forward two years, and Jessica is now a software engineer with SurveyMonkey, a tech company that creates and designs custom online surveys. Jessica works on the billing side, writing code to ensure that customers can access and pay for surveys. Growing up in Nigeria, Jessica excelled at science and math. She received a scholarship to attend college in the United States at Claflin University in South Carolina to study computer engineering. When she started applying for software engineering jobs, she realized she lacked hands-on software engineering experience. She made the decision to attend Hackbright Academy, a software engineering school for women in San Francisco. Not only was she able to broaden her programming skillset, but she was able to make connections with other people in her field. "I don't know where I'd be without mentors who supported me," says Jessica. Her advice to others interested in becoming a software engineer? Build a network and don't get discouraged.

On Course Report Coding Bootcamp Podcast, we share everything you need to stay up to date with the blossoming coding bootcamp industry. On Episode 2, we talk DevMountain & Hackbright Academy acquisitions, student outcomes reporting, and more! bit.ly/May-News-Roundup-Podcast

Angie Chang (@thisgirlangie) joined us to talk about the coding bootcamp Hackbright Academy, their upcoming hardware hackathon, Girl Geek Dinners, and the extreme awkwardness of networking. Sign up to be a hackathon mentor (not gender limited) or to be on the waitlist to attend (women only). Get your team together on Hackathon IO. Sign up to be a Hackbright Academy mentor. Oh look! Elecia signed up to speak on Sunday! Grace Hopper Conference The article on Peter Thiel and women founders by Kate Losse that Chris referenced toward the end of the show.