#BITTechTalk by Blacks In Technology

On this episode of the Blacks In Technology #BITTechTalk podcast Greg is joined by guest Yolanda Conyers, Vice President, Worldwide Functions and Human Resources ,Chief Diversity Officer at Lenovo, Author and Speaker.

Yolanda is vice president of worldwide functions HR and chief diversity officer at Lenovo, providing overall leadership to
a global team of HR business partners to support Lenovo’s Executive Committee level leaders of Strategy, Legal, Ecosystem,
Research and Technology, I/T and Business Transformation, Human Resources, Finance, Worldwide Services, and Marketing.

Yolanda received her bachelors degree in computer science from Lamar University and an MBA in International Business from Our Lady of the Lake University. She also completed the University of Michigans Advanced Human Resource Executive Program, graduating in 2012.

On this episode of the #BITTechTalk podcast we are joined by UI/UX (User interface/User eXperience) expert, Dr. Danielle Paige Smith. Check it out as we discuss UI/UX as a career in technology and the research that goes on in the field. This is one you don’t want to miss!


Dr. Smith is a Human Factors psychologist specializing in user research, marketresearch, and user experience design. Her academic research focused on risk perception, medical Human Factors, Human-Systems Integration processes, and the design of safety communications to aid in decision-making. Her systems approach to research program development helps to ensure results are both human-centered and relevant to business problems. Dr. Smith has experience in a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods. As aHuman Factors engineer and User Experience professional, her toolkit also includes requirements management, information architecture creation, wire-framing, and prototyping.

Dr. Smith has extensive industry experience focusing on complex technology development. She has led funded Human System Integration research projects for NASA’s Exploration Program. Her work has appeared in the Handbook of Warnings, Advances in Patient Safety and the publications of IEEE, Society of Human Resource Development, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the International Ergonomics Society, and the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Her designs for Dell’s Data Protection client encryption and user authentication products are currently in market.

Looking at server logs, or any type of logs for that matter, can be a tedious and painstaking task for any sys admin. Most often we have to remote into each individual server and then if we have to piece together time lines and logs from other servers just to get somewhat of a picture as to what happened and when.

So what do we do? We usually set up a centralized log server like syslog and send all of our logs to it. At least this takes away some of the issues. No more remoting into multiple servers right? Right! But we are still left log with files being located in separate files and looking like a bunch of gobbledy gook.

Getting our data out so that it makes sense can be done with a commercial product but those things can cost some serious coinage! So what do we do about that? Did someone say opensource to the rescue, and more specifically, ELK to the rescue? I think they did and I think that person is Jordan Sissel of Elasticsearch!

In this year end episode of the Blacks In Technology #BITTechTalk podcast we'll be speaking with Logstash (The "L" in ELK ) creator, Jordan Sissel and talking about logging using the ELK (Elasitcsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack.

Also joining us as a guest co-host is BIT member Shawn Jackson (a.k.a. gt50).

If you want to know how to make sense of your data, this is the podcast for you!

On this episode of the Blacks In Technology #BITTechTalk podcast as we discuss Dev bootcamps. What are they? Are they worth the money? These are some of the questions we’ll answer as we speak with our guest, Krista Williams, a dev bootcamp graduate, and Maurice Rabb, a dev bootcamp instructor.

Krista is currently a software engineer at Zipcar. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pittsburgh in Linguistics in 2010. While working at a language services agency during her first two years after graduating, she began intrigued by the idea of learning to program and changing careers. After learning more about web development and starting to study coding in her spare time, she decided to pursue a career in web development and began her journey by attending an immersive bootcamp, MakerSquare, in Austin, TX during the summer of 2013.

Over the past 25 years, Maurice has worked in a wide variety of programming languages, favoring pure dynamic languages such as JavaScript, Smalltalk, and Ruby. He has expertise in domain modeling, design patterns and framework development, and has the rare knack for communicating complex concepts to engineers, business people, and customers alike. As a young man, Maurice earned a BS in product design and an MS in engineering.
After working corporate engineering positions at GM, Motorola, and Lockheed, Maurice returned to Chicago to start a company, Stono Technologies, LLC with his brother Christopher, developing a couple of software patents along the way. Post internet bubble, after a stint in management consult, he moved into academia. Over the past 9 years, he’s taught software engineering at the University of Illinois, at Columbia College Chicago, and now at Dev Bootcamp.
Maurice is passionate about demystifying technology, and making computing more accessible to underrepresented groups. Maurice loves traveling, tinkering, playing boardgames, going on adventures with his 7-year-old daughter, and being the building super (aka Bookman) at his extended family compound.

On this episode of the Blacks In Technology #BITTechTalk podcast we delve into the world of bitcoins and crypto-currency. Joining us to answer questions about crypto-currency, it’s potential impact in the black community and their digital wallet application, Pheeva, is our guests Lafe Taylor and Lamar Wilson, co-founders of Love Will Inc, a software company that develops applications for the crypto-currency market.

On this episode of the Blacks In Technology #BITTechTalk podcast “Founders Hour” Greg speaks with Tiffany St. Bernard and Keshia Ashe of Many Mentors as they answer questions about their startup, mentoring and running a non-profit company.

In this episode of the Blacks In Technology #BITTechTalk podcast we are revisiting the topic of diversity at tech conferences. Given our recent partnerships with PuppetLabs, StrangeLoop, O’Reilly and DevOpsDays Chicago, as well as our attendance at some of these events, we felt it was worth another podcast to talk about increasing participation at these cons as well as why attending tech conferences is important to a tech professionals career.

Joining us on this podcast is our guest Mary Scotton. Mary is a Principal Developer Evangelist for salesforce.com. Mary’s mission is to educate and enable Administrators and Developers building on the Salesforce1 Platform. She has over 20 years of software development experience, a passion for enabling non-programmers to build powerful business applications, and a drive to increase diversity and inclusion in the tech workforce.

Yes, once again it’s that time of year. Time for the leaves to begin changing colors. Time for the us to start breaking out our jackets and coats. Time for the pools to close up shop. It’s the end of summer and Blacks In Technology is ending it off with a bang! We broadcasted live from the StrangeLoop conference in St. Louis and talked about what’s ahead for BIT in the future.

Joining us on this edition is #BITTechTalk alum Daphne Larose, founder of the Black Female Coders website.

Topics covered include:

Upcoming conferences you should look out for
Strangeloop conference 2 day recap
The new BIT Jobs board
Upcoming Hackathons
Talent BIT is seeking
NOT talking diversity
and of course Tech