In March of this year, I spoke at the Southern California Area Linux Expo (SCaLE), a conference I’ve been attending for years and highly recommend for its kind community, and great people and content.
Here’s the video of my talk:
I’m submitting this talk to other conferences, and it will evolve over time, so I hope to get a chance to continue refining it and sharing what I know with more people.
People tend to stay with Ericsson for many years, some for their entire careers – which can make it a little weird to be a newbie around here. There’s a lot I still don’t know about this huge, complex, historic company, and I really didn’t know what to expect when … well, let me tell this story in some kind of order.
I started with Ericsson in June, 2014, in a business unit (Cloud & IP) that was only just being formed. I was immediately thrown into the thick of things, and was loving my job: exciting challenges, great colleagues, lots of travel… In fact, I was in Paris at a tech conference in early November when I got my breast cancer diagnosis.
Being told that you have cancer is very, very scary. Wondering whether your job may be at risk because of your illness makes it all the more frightening. I knew that I had great benefits at Ericsson, including very good health insurance. I also knew that the state of California, where I live and work, has a law protecting employees and their jobs in case of catastrophic illness (your own or a family member’s) – but that law applies only after you’ve been in a job for a year, and I had been an employee for less than six months.
Since the early 1990s, I have attended tech events large and small in the US, Italy, Germany, and India. I was usually one of a small number of women attending or staffing in some technical capacity, i.e. able to speak knowledgeably about technologies and products. There were always other women around, but most of those were contracted for the duration of the event to work in a booth, taking business cards and giving out schwag. That work is useful and needed, but was not what I was there for.
I understood early on that I was an anomaly. A few times I even played on it: wearing a miniskirt while on booth duty, then waiting in glee to see how long it would take people to realize that I actually knew what I was talking about. (In Italy, it is not unusual for women to wear miniskirts to professional events.) But, even when I played with it, I wanted to be recognized for my brains and technical knowledge, not for my body.
No matter how I dressed, it was always an uphill battle.
Continue reading Twenty Years of Being a Woman at Tech EventsIn early 2013, I submitted a talk to OSCON entitled “Marketing Your Tech Talent.” It was turned down, but soon after I was honored to have it accepted for Monktoberfest, where it was well received. I was amused and flattered that, as soon as I finished the talk, Laurel Ruma jumped up to congratulate me – and suggest that I submit it for OSCON. So I did, it was accepted, and I delivered the talk at OSCON 2014.
The Monktoberfest version was aimed more at tech marketing departments or individuals who need persuading that letting technical staff speak for themselves is a great way to market technical products. For the OSCON version, I spoke directly to the techies themselves, encouraging them to market themselves and their talents because “there’s no IMDB for geeks – you are responsible for your career.” The video here was done by OSCON; they don’t share all OSCON talks on their YouTube channel (they’d like you to pay for a viewing package to see them all), but they do allow individual speakers to share them ourselves.
The slides for both (in notes and non-notes versions), as well as other talks of mine, are available here.
Both conferences are fun to attend, great ways to learn a lot on many topics, and meet interesting people. As a speaker or attendee, I recommend both.
At USENIX LISA`13, Brendan Gregg led a Metrics Workshop, along with Narayan Desai, Kent Skaar, Theo Schlossnagle, and Caskey Dickson. “This was an opportunity for many industry professionals to discuss problems with performance metrics and monitoring, and to propose and discuss solutions.” More details from Brendan here.
I filmed the day, above is a playlist of all the resulting videos. Below is the gallery of photos from all of that edition of LISA, which was… eventful.
