Tech, Rebalanced Podcast

• (0:00) Zuri Hunter - “We need everyone to be in tech. We need to make sure we have a supportive environment for people to grow and be valued… so if you’re hearing this, recognize those red flags and go where you are welcomed.”

• (0:32) Eva Reid - “How do we build a community of women in technology that not only helps support us as women but helps us to be a larger part of the tech community, women and otherwise?”

• (0:51) Leilani Battle - “I think it’s the community’s responsibility to support members of the community. So if we don’t reach out to each other, then we’re sort of failing everybody.”

• (1:09) Eva Reid - “It's easy to say, ‘Hey let's do a happy hour,’ but it's another thing to make that consistent and to connect people and get people talking to each other and actually having some impact on the community. So I am also extremely proud of that.”

• (1:35) Zuri Hunter - “What makes DC tech scene a really great place -- and actually a good place for diversity and inclusion -- is because they care, to some level. They care about having a diverse and inclusive community. And what I mean by this is that they support local organizations like DC FemTech, Women Who Code, Black Girls Code...”

• (2:06) Alexis Ewing-Moody - “It’s definitely a testament to the DC tech community, and especially the underrepresented groups within the larger DC tech scene. I put it out there very quickly that I was looking again, and a lot of opportunities opened up for me.”

Loved this mini episode? Check out our full episodes with Eva Reid, Alexis Ewing-Moody, Leilani Battle, and Zuri Hunter on the Tech, Rebalanced podcast.

• (6:08) “When I go to these hackathons, I don’t go with the intent of trying to win something. I go with the intent of: ‘What do I not know right now? And what can I learn through these next 24-72 hours?’ – because the goal is for me to learn something new about myself.”

•  (20:57) “We need everyone in tech. We need to make sure we have a supportive environment for people to grow and be valued… so if you’re hearing this, recognize those red flags and go where you are welcomed.”

• (22:56) (On DCFemTech) “This has had a huge impact on our community, it has given a lot of our ladies the courage to definitely stay in the industry, get the support they need, the networking opportunities, and grow overall throughout their career.”

• (25:58) “I think what makes DC tech scene a really great place – and actually a good place for diversity and inclusion – is because they care, to some level. They care about having a diverse and inclusive community… We have companies in the area that care about the cause and want to do anything they can to help.”

• (30:25) “One of the biggest blockers we have in the tech world is that we have folks in places to make decisions that do not give people from underrepresented communities a chance.”

• (32:54) “It’s very fulfilling – and it really does make an impact – when you have somebody who is not a white male in a leadership position. Cuz it gives hope for us, there is a path… I see myself up there.”

• (44:40) (On how technology can help the anti-racist and Black Lives Matter movements) “So if anybody has time and the tech talent to contribute, I would recommend that you reach out to the folks at Black Lives Matter and ask them what help they need…”

Bio
Zuri Hunter is a software engineer at Black Cape based in the DMV area.  She attended the illustrious Howard University where she obtained her bachelor's in Computer Information Systems.  While completing her undergraduate degree, she taught herself Ruby on Rails and applied this knowledge at several local hackathons. She  has worked on several projects such as the US Presidential Innovations Fellow, Hack the Pay Gap and AngelHack Incubator, SlimSpace.  After her 5th hackathon, she was presented with her first introduction in the tech industry with opportunity at HumanGeo with web applications in a microservice architecture.  Outside of building amazing applications, our guest is heavily involved in increasing diversity and inclusion within the DC tech community.  She volunteers regularly with Women Who Code, Black Girls Code, Bison Hacks, and DCFemTech.  As of 2018, she was nominated as DCA Live Power Women in Tech.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Black Cape

• Black Girls Code

• DCFemTech

• Black Lives Matter - DC Chapter and national organization

• (7:16) “I would say some struggles in terms of technology is that it moves so fast and it's hard to keep up and when you get older it's about figuring out what it is you want to keep up with. It's impossible to keep up with everything and being okay if you're behind in some technologies.” (8:26) “I would say [struggles] from a non-technical perspective, being a woman in technology is hard as any woman who works on a tech team could probably co-sign that. And being a black woman on a tech team is very hard.”

• (11:44) “Through the years I became a much more vocal person. I am that person that will correct you now. That experience taught me don't be quiet, don't take what anybody says at face value, speak up and if they don't want to listen find another job where people will and that's exactly what I did.”

• (17:41) “I think sometimes we undervalue the things that we are good at and I think specifically women tend to undervalue the things that we are good at because there is I think a greater expectation of us.”

• (18:28) “I know that's like a huge taboo thing to talk about money with other people and I strongly believe you should openly talk about how much you make. We need to know what everyone makes and that is a way of keeping the people who hire us and the people who sign your paychecks honest.”

• (24:50) “Teaching for me is a break from the actual development part because it's me excitedly sharing these things that I love to do. I love my job, I love what I do at my job and for me I find a lot of joy in sharing that with somebody and somebody reciprocating that joy.”

• (27:11) “Having that break from that thought process when you are in development mode is so beneficial and I promise you it will make you at the end of the day it'll make you a better developer because you are allowing yourself to rest and repair.”

• (32:16) “Don't be afraid to ask in interviews for the things that you want in a work environment and don't be afraid to say you know I don't think this is for me.”

• (37:17) “One of the things that gets on my nerves the most as a person of color in development is when companies do have people of color that work there but none of them are managers or are on the c-suite. To me that says that you're just looking for the diversity but you're not looking for the inclusion. Inclusion means being at the table to be able to make those decisions and be able to be a person who influences the decisions that are made.”

• (41:16) “If you work at a company and you notice that there is no diversity on your teams or in the company bring it up and you don't have to be a person of color to bring up those questions and you don't have to be a woman to bring up those questions.”

• (45:35) “Don't be afraid to try. I think a lot of times when I was younger I was afraid to try because I was afraid to fail.” (46:37) “Challenging yourself and stepping outside of your comfort zone will do wonders for you as you grow as a person.”

Bio

Erika is a designer and front-end developer specializing in WordPress theme development, HTML, CSS and responsive web development. During the day he works as a Wordpress Tech Lead at Kanopi Studios in Washington, DC. He creates clean, semantic, standards-compliant, responsive themes for WordPress, working with UX and Design teams to evaluate the development feasibility of proposed approaches and suggest potential solutions. He brings a unique and valued perspective to development given his background in design and experiences gained over the years in project management, technical architecture and user experience.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Black Girls Code

• Kanopi Studios

• (1:48) “The broad umbrella I fall under is data science, but what I do specifically is I, my research aims to help researchers and help developers design tools for data science that are more human-centered. And a lot of that work is focused on evaluation. Basically, helping researchers and developers think more what real people will actually do with the tools that we build and how these interactions between people and data science tools can affect the overall performance of the tools themselves.”

• (13:24) “If you couldn’t interact in any way with a computer, it would be useless. So without human-computer interaction I hope everyone realizes that computer science just wouldn’t even exist as a field. It’s a really important facet of computer science that I think a lot of us take for granted.”

• (21:45) “Grad school… was the hardest thing I did in my life probably. The hardest thing. I’ve done a lot of hard things too, so far as a professor, but grad school was just really… it does sort of feel like a trial by fire. Very rewarding but very hard.”

• (35:34) “Definitely do not try to face those things by yourself. Knowing what I know and experiencing what I’ve experienced, if something were to happen to me in the future, the last thing I would do is keep it to myself. I wouldn’t go advertising it all over the world or anything, but I would talk to people that I trust. Definitely more than one person. And get advice, get support. Because for all of the things that I’ve had to deal with I definitely would not keep it to myself. I think that’s toxic for the individual that has to deal with that situation and I think it’s the community’s responsibility to support members of the community. So if we don’t reach out to each other, then we’re sort of failing everybody.”

• (42:28) “Switching to getting feedback as a thing I should seek out regularly, rather than a thing I have to put up with, I think changed things a lot.”

• (47:02) “The first thing I would recommend is to distinguish between what is a racist act versus a racist identity. So, doing something racist versus being a racist. Because they’re not at all the same thing.”

Bio

Leilani Battle is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). She is also affiliated with the UMD Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL). Her research focuses on developing interactive data-intensive systems that can aid analysts in performing complex data exploration and analysis. Her current research is anchored in the field of databases, but utilizes research methodology and techniques from HCI and visualization to integrate data processing (databases) with interactive interfaces (HCI, visualization). She was named one of the 35 Innovators Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review in 2020.

Mentioned in the episode:

• MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35

• (4:40) “It’s definitely a testament to the DC tech community, and especially the underrepresented groups within the larger DC tech scene. I put it out there very quickly that I was looking again, and a lot of opportunities opened up for me. Especially with COVID and quarantine and everything, a lot more remote opportunities opened up too.”

• (7:33) “Until about 2018 -- when there was an opening for a developer role with the [International Quidditch Association]. I’d seen all these problems with the organization from a global perspective, and I thought that my expertise as a software engineer, especially building products for users, web developer, could really help modernize the organization and make it more efficient. So that all of these volunteers could spend more time actually improving the sport and getting more people to play. Getting people active. And supporting our values in terms of gender diversity and inclusion, all these great things.”

• (12:40) “I just felt like I was plateauing. And I couldn’t really go anywhere or do anything that I wanted to do, or be the person that I wanted to be. As a Lyft driver, I picked up some passengers that were bootcamp students and they were talking about a project. I asked them about it and they told me about the program, and that’s what got me into wanting to code.”

• (18:45) “I say all of that to demonstrate how astronomically hard it is to get that first job. Once you get your first job, and you maintain good relationships with people that you work with and people within your larger network and community, getting the next job is, I don’t want to say easy, but it’s easier.”

• (49:45) “I’d said both in the article and in other comments that it’s not that the word [master] itself is racist. It’s that the context within American culture, especially with you using “slave” in conjunction with that term, is a call to a racist system. And on top of that, it doesn’t even accurately describe the thing that you’re doing or using.”

• (54:40) “I would say that everybody should be thinking about every user at all times. We have to be intersectional in our beliefs and how we build our systems. Accessibility isn’t just an afterthought. We should all be ensuring that our applications are accessible to as many people as possible. It’s good business. It’s good for humanity overall. And it’s just necessary.”

Bio

Alexis is a Software Engineer(III) at Morning Consult where she works on both sides of the stack to scale products that are changing the industry of public opinion data. Before becoming a software engineer, via bootcamp, she was a lighting designer in the midwest and collector of odd jobs like barista, Lyft driver, and dog walker. In her spare time Alexis is the IT Director for the International Quidditch Association (https://www.iqasport.com/) where she builds products that make the organization and its constituents better at coordinating logistics in the sport. When she isn't coding Alexis enjoys spending time with her wife and dog, watching/analyzing Disney movies, and cooking.

Mentioned in the episode:

• International Quidditch Association

• Byte Back

• Medium — “My Time as a Black Woman Engineer at Capital One”

• (10:50) “I'm really interested in how we build community in technology. And I think part of it is because -- as a woman in technology we're not necessarily, or we haven't been historically, as visible in the community. And so one of my thought processes is around, how do we build a community of women in technology that not only helps support us as women but helps us to be a larger part of the tech community, women and otherwise.”

• (17:56) “And I think for me too though even just asking that question was really difficult. Like what do I need to do to make it to the next level? And I think the difficulty there is -- there isn’t always a position available. And so I think coming to the point where I realized that as a person in technology, I was, you know, I was at a certain grade level and wanting to move up and not really sure how to do that. And ultimately it came down to just asking.”

• (23:32) “I think it's talking yourself up into doing something but also recognizing that you deserve something. I think in both of those cases I very much deserved what I ended up getting. And the only reason I did get it was because I asked. And because I made it clear what my expectations were and why I felt I deserved the thing.”

• (35:31) “How do we teach tech people to communicate with non-technical people? Some of it is definitely teachable.”

• (41:34) I think inclusion is really important. We talk about diversity and we talk about hiring, you know, different people for roles. And we talk about achieving parity for whatever group we’re talking about. But again, once people come in, do they feel engaged and do they feel connected to the community? And in this case the community that we're talking about is leadership, C-suite, whatever you want to call it. Do we see people like us in those roles? Do we feel like the organization actually cares about us as people, as people of the particular group? I think that's really key in getting people to stay.

Bio

Eva Reid is a Senior Analyst and GIS Training Coordinator for the District of Columbia Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO). She is also the owner of Eva Reid Consulting, a life design and coaching firm for women in technology and fields where women are under-represented.

Eva has over 25 years of experience in information technology, training and project management. Eva is noted for the caliber and creativity of her work as a technical workshop presenter and facilitator in professional, corporate and government settings. Eva’s commitment to impact the numbers of women who enter the field of technology is evident in her networking and academic activities. She provides leadership and oversight for the DC Area Women in GIS Group and the DC Government Women in Technology Group, and is the Chapter Coordinator for Women in GIS, the international organization.

The native New Yorker earned a B.A. in Geography (Cum Laude) from Macalester College and a Master of Public Administration (M.P.A.) from Arizona State University.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Women in GIS

• Women in Technology

• Office of the Chief Technology Officer

• FABWOMEN

• Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science

• Black Lives Matter

• Diversify Tech