Continuing our focus on women in tech, we discuss the multiple pathways to enter the tech industry, including coding, with our 3 guests, Elena Kolevska, a Senior Technical Enablement Architect at Redislabs, Helen Tabunshchyk, Director of ‘Women Who Code’ London, and Kristina Kushner, a Senior Project Manager at PMP. 

Coding’s gendered history

Though it’s not the case anymore, coding used to be more friendly to women. Helen explains, “Until the mid-1980s, programming was most often a woman's job. But as the profession started to bring in more money, the competition started rising. And then suddenly, it wasn’t a woman's job anymore.” 

Impostor syndrome is a symptom

Impostor syndrome is an issue all our guests share. Helen says, “Often, you start thinking, ‘It must be me.’ But when you have a community of women who all share the same story, you can totally see the common patterns. And you realize it's not you, it’s society and our gender education.”

Elena also links the chronic self-doubt characteristic of impostor syndrome to how women are socialized as children. “I think it's related to how we are taught to handle failure. As girls, we are taught to do everything perfectly and never make any mistakes,” she says, “And well, boys will be boys. But the world is not like that. We should be held accountable to the same standards.”

To code or not to code

There are many other touchpoints to enter the tech industry that aren’t coding. Our guests name several:

• Project or product management

But how can you tell if coding is right for you? If you prefer to work with people more, consider one of the above roles, says Kristina. “But if you prefer to work on your own, to go deep into analysis mode, give coding a try.”

Mentorship + teamwork are critical to diversity

In a previous episode, we’ve spoken about the importance of mentorship; studies also back this up. Helen says, “Research supports that it’s not diversity and inclusion training that’s effective, but mentorship programs.” She adds, “And working in teams as well. Those are the two deciding factors on how inclusive the work environment is.”

Get more ideas for closing the gender gap in your workplace at Women in Tech or Women Who Code.

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Today we speak with three leaders and women in tech, Susan An, the Senior Sales Director of Tessian, Jessica Alderson, the Co-Founder & CEO of So Syncd, and Maria Antinkaapo, VP of Customer Success at Platform.sh, on the gender imbalance in tech, including the impact of internal and external biases.

Fixing the disparity in tech requires a perspective shift

The ratio of women to men in tech is often as unbalanced as 25:75. Susan is blunt, “We don't have enough female talent or leaders. Globally, only 2% of venture capital investment goes to all female-led teams.”

However, this disparity can depend on what roles or departments you’re looking at; Susan points out that management teams are often full of women. “So the question is if women are good enough to manage teams, why wouldn't they be considered leaders? What's the perception difference between a woman managing versus a woman leading?” She asks.

Imagining a different “profile” of success

When she started her career, her employers told Susan there was a “type” of salesperson to hire.“Loud and confident and aggressive ones,” she says. In addition to being more typically male-associated traits, which skews the hiring process, she adds, “I found that that’s not necessarily the profile that gets results. You can hire introverts with softer personality types, who are thinkers, introspective, or more methodical. They also sell very well to customers and add great value to the trajectory of the company.”

Jessica agrees. “When I talk to investors and ask the differences they see in women vs. men pitching to them, most of them say, ‘Men pitch a lot more boldly or exaggerate their numbers to some extent,’ But that’s a bias, because the stats show that that's not an indication of whether they'll be successful in running a company or not. Specifically, you should be more focused on the results you’ve achieved so far rather than these more superficial things.”

Becoming a parent can make you a better leader

Some companies still hesitate to hire or promote women for fear of losing them if they start a family. Susan has a strong rebuttal to that line of thinking. “Becoming a parent is not a handicap. After I became a parent, it changed something in me as a leader. I really started to think about translating how I parent to how I manage my team. I feel like I've become a much more empathetic and insightful leader as a result of being a parent.”

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Our guests today, Jane Frankland, owner and CEO of KnewStart, Fareedah Shaheed, CEO and founder of Sekuva, and Eliza-May Austin, Co-Founder of th4ts3cur1ty.company,  help us determine the state of the cybersecurity world today and how it can affect you.

Defining cybersecurity

All three guests admit the term “cybersecurity” is broad. Eliza May says,” Cybersecurity is broad for a reason; it has to encompass lots of different avenues of data; computer, network, phone, apps, and there is a social aspect to it as well.”

Education and social responsibility in cybersecurity

Jane believes those in the cybersecurity field have a responsibility to push the field in the right direction, but she acknowledges the difficulties. She says, “Cybersecurity professionals have a job to do in terms of trying to influence and steer countries into making the right decisions. But it’s very difficult as technology advances, and we become more connected — we lose a certain amount of control.”

Bringing more people into understanding cybersecurity can help lift the burden, explains Fareedah, “When we're trying to educate the public on phishing or social engineering attacks, we have to talk to them as if they're as smart as they actually are and in a way that they can understand, especially if they’re from different backgrounds. Really breaking down concepts and being there with them and helping them understand how it affects them and their daily life is critical.”

Cybersecurity strategies at a business level

As with most things, there is no way to protect yourself 100% when it comes to cybersecurity. But Eliza-May suggests some steps you can take to make your business more secure.

• Know your risk level and level of risk-tolerance

The work is never over

Our three guests emphasize that the cybersecurity field can be challenging for those who work in it. “Many cybersecurity professionals are stressed and under-resourced,” Jane admits. But that’s also because the nature of the work is inherently more complex. “It’s much easier for attackers; they only have to find one way in. Our job of protecting and defending is much harder.” she says.

Learn more about our guests’ organizations; KnewStart, Sekuva, and th4ts3cur1ty.

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

EZContent is a Drupal distribution, decoupled framework, and publishing platform created by Srijan. It has many out-of-the-box reusable components for layout building and editing, including AI and machine learning features. We discuss EZContent with experienced Drupal folks, Ishan Mahajan, Kamalpreet Kaur, and Vinay KG.

EZContent’s features address modern-day marketer’s needs

As a CMS, EZContent has many features that make editors’, publishers’, and marketers’ lives easier, such as a drag-and-drop layout builder, the ability to preview drafts, and component-based architecture. 

In addition to these tools, EZContent addresses some key concerns for marketers today. Ishan says, “Marketers have so much on their plates these days, many KPIs they need to keep track of related to SEO, performance, and accessibility.” The burden of these responsibilities can be exacerbated or reach a bottleneck if a site has or needs fast content turnover. Ishan specifies three main ways EZContent can help.

• Multichannel outreach — An omnichannel experience is easier to deliver to customers with a decoupled framework like EZContent

What differentiates EZContent

Two aspects of EZContent set it apart from other distributors: support for decoupled frameworks and its AI and machine-learning capabilities. EZContent’s AI/ML features include:

• Auto-tagging and captioning of images — Kamalpreet explains, “Relevant tags will automatically be populated, which makes it very easy and quick for editors and marketers to do their work.”

The goal of these AI/ML features is to free marketers up for other tasks that require their attention. Vinay says, “We want to give marketers the ability to focus on more creative tasks where they’re more needed.”

EZContent is an intelligent CMS that speeds your time-to-market

Kamalpreet, Vinay, and Ishan have a lot of faith in their platform. Says Vinay, “At the end of the day, EZContent is for anyone who wants to save time and resources, gain a faster time-to-market, and improve the flexibility of their publishing platform.”

Try EZContent on Platform.sh today. 

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

We speak with María Paula Fernández, Mattias Nystrom, and Stefan Adolf about the Golem Network, and the implications of creating a future internet based on distributed computing, with more focus on privacy.

The Golem Network

The Golem Network is an accessible, reliable, open access and censorship-resistant protocol, which democratizes access to digital resources and connects users through a flexible, open source platform. As María Paula Fernández defines it, “At the highest level, Golem is a protocol for the exchange of digital resources. And not just digital resources like computing power, but also devices. It’s a constellation of digital marketplaces where you can exchange with users across the globe.”

To enable these exchanges, Golem works with a reference implementation called the Yagna daemon. Mattias explains the daemon’s function, “The Yagna daemon helps you sort out your agreements as a requester, provider, or developer on the Golem Network.” Golem is anonymous and permissionless to join, so anyone can make use of the network and become a requester or provider. Golem uses Ethereum-based tokens, called GLMs, to enable the peer-to-peer exchanges.

Golem solves problems with monopolies and deplatforming

If you need more computing power or storage, Golem can help — but the network also goes beyond those issues. The motivation for Golem is not to be at the mercy of corporations which often don’t have your best interests in mind. María explains, “If the project you're running maybe doesn't fit with any of the tech giants like Google, AWS, Azure, Microsoft, or Instagram’s terms and conditions, which can be really vague, you risk being taken down, and you lose your work. If you get deplatformed and that’s your livelihood, that’s a really big deal. That’s why we need decentralized and censorship-resistant alternatives to the platforms that we have.”

Try the Golem Network as a provider, requester, or developer.

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Calling APIs to retrieve data can be a difficult and messy process. Our two guests, Mark Stuart and Shruti Kapoor, are both engineers at PayPal who use GraphQL to bring order to their APIs and data.

What is GraphQL

GraphQL is a query language for your API, but as Shruti says, “A common myth people have about GraphQL is that we’re querying the database. But we’re not; we’re querying the API.” She adds, “GraphQL provides a way to call your API and get the data that you need.” Mark adds his own definition. “GraphQL is a query language that’s used to grab data and as a way to tell the backend system to change things, such as mutating operations. It also hides the mess of your APIs by putting almost a facade in front of it.” 

GraphQL as an orchestration layer

Shruti says another way they use GraphQL at PayPal is as an orchestration layer. She explains this more in-depth: “Let's say you've got five different rest APIs, and now you want to combine them under GraphQL. So what you want is that your client should only see GraphQL APIs. But behind the scenes, you've got like this dirty table of all these REST APIs, which send you so much data, so you want to clean that up, right? So you put a nice tablecloth on it. That tablecloth is a GraphQL orchestration layer.”

How GraphQL combines with Apollo

The Apollo Graph Platform is one of the most popular tools to combine with GraphQL, with additional resources and documentation to help out. Shruti sums up Apollo’s uses for us: “They have Apollo Client for consuming GraphQL API on the client-side, and then they have Apollo server for building a GraphQL API on the server-side.” Apollo includes tools for consistent error handling, different hooks, as well as enterprise-level tools. Mark can attest to its usefulness. “At PayPal, we had a lot of duplication, a lot of graphs,” Mark says. “Apollo has some really cool tools to help merge all of that.” 

Try Apollo and GraphQL to declutter your APIs.

Platform.sh

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

As e-commerce has developed as an industry, the old guard e-commerce tools are phasing out to make way for new guard: headless e-commerce. Our two guests today, Product Marketing Manager at Strapi, Anastasiia Shpiliak, and Ryan Szrama, founder of Centarro, discuss the benefits of headless e-commerce and how to achieve it with Strapi and Centarro.

Strapi + headless e-commerce

Strapi is an open source, Node.js based, headless CMS with an e-commerce solution. Why headless? As Anastasiia explains, Strapi has been headless from the beginning because, “the founders wanted to give other developers this great experience of integrating their own tools, choosing their own stack, and the freedom to do what they want with the frontend.” 

Headless enables online shopping, performant fast, and personalized shopping experiences much more easily than traditional monolithic systems, says Anastasiia. It’s also more future-proof and easier to deliver omnichannel experiences, especially with Strapi. Strapi’s headless e-commerce solution appeals to businesses who are keen on:

• Flexibility — spin up your own architecture and front end

Centarro + headless e-commerce

Centarro (formerly known as “Commerce Guys”) is Drupal’s headless e-commerce solution. Ryan explains Centarro further. “We natively extend the data model of Drupal so that all of the things it does for content management like extensible data structures, database querying workflow content moderation, the whole nine yards, all that applies equally to commerce data.” This allows you to run Drupal Commerce full-stack or headless. Ryan adds, “In a sense, it’s really similar to Strapi, but based on PHP instead of JavaScript.”

The Centarro headless e-commerce experience appeals to customers who are interested in:

• Scalability

Try Strapi or Centarro for your move to a faster, e-commerce experience with an improved customer experience.

Platform.sh

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

OpenStack: scalable, automated cloud infrastructure

We introduced OpenStack, powerful open source software that automates the management of hardware and infrastructure, in our 50th episode. Organizations like Sardina Systems use OpenStack to offer their clients scalable, pay-as-you-grow cloud infrastructure. Today we have two guests from Sardina Systems, Kenneth Tan and Mihaela Constantinescu, who manage OpenStack installations for their customers. Our other guest, Dr. Jens Krüger, uses Sardina to deploy OpenStack for the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Sardina Systems deploys OpenStack to private cloud customers

Sardina Systems knew they needed an open source cloud infrastructure base to build on. They researched the market and ended up picking OpenStack due to its “tremendous velocity of development,” as Kenneth puts it.

Sardina Systems’ flexibility, ability to scale, and attention to privacy and security are desirable to organizations in industries with particular needs regarding security and privacy. Sardina Systems’ enterprise cloud platform, Fish OS, is specifically geared toward creating private clouds for finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and government clients. Sardina Systems is also highly cost-effective compared to many big-name competitors — a private cloud is a fraction of the cost compared to others like Azure or Google Compute Cloud. 

The University of Tübingen chose Sardina Systems because, according to Dr. Kruger, “Sardina provides a supportive environment for rolling updates with, theoretically, zero downtime, and practically, something very close to that. It saves the university a lot of headaches.” 

Open Source creating natural alliances where the competition can’t

Platform.sh also uses OpenStack, enabling us to offer public and private cloud services to various customers. Since OpenStack is open source, it can bring together ecosystems of cloud infrastructure service providers like Sardina Systems and Platform.sh in a way that public (often proprietary) cloud can’t. There are alternatives to OpenStack, such as NFS, which work well for storage. But they tend to be slower, and they lack the self-healing and re-balancing that OpenStack offers.

Try powerful open source software OpenStack to help manage your cloud infrastructure.

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Three different paths to tech

Elina Valeeva, CEO of Meditivity, Anna Radulovski, Founder of Coding Girls, and Claudia Mendes Silva, Project Manager for Siemens and an Ambassador of Portugal’s Women in Tech chapter, each came into the tech industry in their own ways. 

Claudia Mendes Silva and Elina Valeeva both met  Ayumi Moore, the President and Founder of Women in Tech through their tech connections.  When Elina met Ayumi at a tech conference, she says, “We had a really deep conversation about how diversity, inclusion and female empowerment  are being discussed, but not really solved.”  When Ayumi and Claudia met, Ayumi encouraged her to start the Portugal chapter of Women in Tech.

Anna Radulovski noticed and wondered about the low ratio of women to men in tech. “I wanted to know what was causing it, so I started researching,” she explains. “I found out that the problem actually starts in childhood, when girls and boys are exposed to sharply gendered toys and ways of playing.” To help remedy this issue, Anna started her own organization, Coding Girls, in 2017, which teaches coding to girls aged 7-12. “We announced one workshop, and then parents liked the idea so much, we ended up having two workshops in the same day,” she says proudly.

Four steps toward gender parity at your company 

Anna, Claudia, and Elina have advice for organizations that want to achieve more gender parity on their teams.

• Be realistic on job postings. “It’s more common for women to apply to positions when they have 100% of the skills listed, but for men it’s 60%,” says Elina. In light of this information, take a hard look at the job skills the role truly calls for.

Learn more about the Women in Tech organization.

Platform.sh

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The Open Infrastructure Foundation

Julia Kreger, Mark Collier, and Mohammed Naser are all part of the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), a nonprofit that builds communities around IaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The OIF is vast and global — it spans 100,000 members across over 180 countries, and it focuses on projects in multiple areas, including:

• Edge computing

The OIF origin story

The Foundation traces its roots to another open source project, OpenStack, which provides software for creating private and public clouds. Julia describes OpenStack. “OpenStack is a whole slew of projects that we've had to build, orchestrate, and integrate, which allow you to use software to manage your infrastructure.” These projects include Airship, Kata Containers, and Zuul, an open source CI/CD platform for gating changes across multiple systems.

OpenStack accelerated and began to build a larger community. “Since its inception, over 8,500 developers have contributed to OpenStack.” says Mark. The team wanted to take their work with OpenStack even further. Mark explains the journey from OpenStack to OIF. “We wanted to apply the things we learned with OpenStack to make an even bigger impact, so we became the Open Infrastructure Foundation.”

The Four Opens

The OIF follows a set of guiding principles dubbed “The Four Opens.” Mohammed explains them in the quotes below.

• Open source: “All the software we build is 100% open source — no paywalls and all with open source licenses.”

Learn more about the Open Infrastructure Foundation or try one of their projects.

Platform.sh

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