Elizabeth K. Joseph shares her experience at the recent DevPulseCon for women in engineering that took place in Mountain View, California.
May 16, 2017
Elizabeth K. Joseph
D2iQ
5 min read
On April 20th I joined nearly 200 fellow women in engineering at the third annual DevPulseCon, put on by CodeChix down in Mountain View, California.
The event is advertised as "a two-day technical and educational micro-conference focused on women engineers, developers, users, administrators and geeks working in industry and academia." I was invited to give a technical talk on "Using DC/OS for Continuous Delivery" (CD), and join an afternoon panel on "Getting Your Next Job - Groundwork You Need To Do Before You Start Interviewing."
In my CD talk I demonstrated how using Jenkins on Apache Mesos with DC/OS simplifies CD environment support. I'm a big fan of the Mesos plugin for Jenkins, so it was enjoyable to get to show that off. Afterwards, I had great discussions with fellow attendees about their work on CD environments. My most recent background is in CI/CD, so I got to share some of my experience running a code review system, Git cluster and Jenkins for OpenStack. Slides from my talk are up here.
The afternoon panels were closed to outside participation so that everyone could speak openly about their experiences as women in tech. I was really grateful for everyone who participated in the discussion (both panel members and audience members; there was a lot of wisdom in the room that afternoon.
It's really nice to see Mesosphere investing in events for women in tech. In addition to my attendance at DevPulseCon, we recently hosted a Women in Big Data meetup at the San Francisco office, where engineers Amita Ekbote and Susan Huynh spoke about and gave a demo of DC/OS. Our own Suzanne Scala wrote about it on the Women in Big Data blog, Big Data on DC/OS. In October Mesosphere will also be one of the Silver sponsors for the 2017 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which I'm really looking forward to attending!
I wrote more about some of the other talks and the rest of DevPulseCon over on my blog.
In all, I found DevPulseCon a rewarding event to attend; I highly recommend it—and the CodeChix programs throughout the rest of the year—to women in the Bay Area hoping to meet other women systems and software engineers.
