Meet our 2019 Women Techmakers Belfast Speakers!
Building on our first open call last year, we’re thrilled that this year’s call for speakers received over 50 submissions (!) from women of all sorts of backgrounds & fields of expertise - we are so grateful to everyone who submitted - please keep doing so! PaperCall anonymised the selection process as far as possible, and we hope you enjoy this awesome mix of backgrounds, talents & topics!
Building on our first open call last year, we’re thrilled that this year’s call for speakers received over 50 submissions (!) from women of all sorts of backgrounds & fields of expertise - we are so grateful to everyone who submitted - please keep doing so! PaperCall anonymised the selection process as far as possible, and we hope you enjoy this awesome mix of backgrounds, talents & topics!
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Kerrie Egan
10.10am – Barriers to Automation? Let’s remove them About Kerrie I have worked in the IT industry for 14 years. I started out working in IT Support for a local retail supplier but quickly realised this wasn’t for me. I then moved into a graduate testing role with Kainos. I worked with Kainos for 11 years through various QA roles until last year when I moved to Made to Engage where I am the Head of QA. Outside of work, I am also a busy mum of three, a runner and a girls football coach – I basically don’t like sitting still!! Barriers to Automation? Let’s remove them This talk is based on my own experience of moving out of my comfort zone as a manual Tester and into the world of automated testing. When I started out in testing everything was manual. I had done a Computer Science degree but was never a natural programmer. I had a good understanding of how code worked and was meticulous with the details so testing suited me down the ground. Then in 2013, everything changed! I had returned from maternity leave after having my third child and all of a sudden, I was expected to pick up test automation using Selenium WebDriver! To put it bluntly, I was terrified. It’s hard coming back to work after maternity leave with trying to find out where you fit in again and remember how to do your job but to come back and have to do something completely new and different made it so much more daunting. In this discussion, I would like to outline some of the main hindrances to people moving into automation and how we can mitigate against them to encourage more of our Testers to expand their skillset and hopefully make their jobs more interesting and enjoyable. |
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Carol Rossborough & Anne Orr
10.25am – Why being a Female Entrepreneur has never been more achievable for Women in Tech – @cprossborough – @anneorr About Carol & Anne Carol Rossborough is Co-Founder and CEO of ESTHER, a peer-to-peer network allowing people to give donations directly to people living in poverty. She is an emerging tech enthusiast, people lover and big thinker. She loves to hike the Mournes and makes an excellent cup of tea! Anne Orr is CEO and co-founder of Digital54 Ltd. Her tech start-up is building digital solutions to reduce the burden of compliance and governance in the Third Sector. Anne’s favourite Doctor Who was David Tenant but is now up to Season 10 and may be leaning towards Peter Capaldi. Why being a Female Entrepreneur has never been more achievable for Women in Tech What makes a good Founder? And why are women more than qualified?
Two founder stories:
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Claire Cromie
10.50am – Tech, Meet Tourism – @clairecromie About Claire Claire Cromie is Digital Project Manager at Tourism Northern Ireland. Her role is to provide digital leadership to the tourism industry via strategic projects, such as building an IoT-powered ‘tourism data hub’ and seed-funding programmes to stimulate the application of AI and AR in the tourism sector. Claire is new to the world of tech, following a media career which included editing BelfastTelegraph.co.uk. Her passion is for user-centric digital transformation, whether it is reinventing news platforms for readers or re-imagining the visitor experience for tourists. Tech, Meet Tourism Tourism is booming. New hotels are springing up on the skyline and jobs are being created. While most of Northern Ireland’s economy remains stagnant, tourism is a beacon of growth and commercial opportunity. But how do we remain competitive in a constantly-evolving global travel industry? How do we ensure sustainable growth which brings wealth to all of Northern Ireland and not just the popular hotspots? How do we tell Northern Ireland’s cultural and heritage stories in a way that engages younger audiences? And how do we ensure visitors enjoy seamless journeys, without having to download a dozen apps? Tourism has problems to solve. And together, Women Techmakers are going to come up with solutions. |
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Colleen Bradley
11.15am – From problem solver to leader – @colleenbradley About Colleen I was born a nerd, I was born a hard worker, I also happened to be born gay, I love all things technology, living in Belfast (the big smoke) with my partner, her daughter and my dog (AKA the boss). I will steal / borrow 2 quotes to let you know what I’m about: Charlie Chaplin: “A day without laughter is a day wasted.”, and Madeline Albright: “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women” From problem solver to leader A light hearted talk about how I became a leader (COO) in a young tech company that now has almost 60 employees. Starting back in the 1990s when I was at a secondary school in Creggan, Derry where many students left to join the factory. (Honestly, not dissimilar to an episode of Derry girls just without the ”wee English fella”) and include 5 things that I have learned and am still trying to believe and implement to be a leader. Touching on the imposter syndrome, (as COO I have no discernible skills, I no longer develop!) which I still feel most weeks, being your authentic self (as an out lesbian in the tech world in Derry), you can’t lead if you're hiding some things, and how it’s OK not to know the answer right away! Now that I’m the older person in the room, it would be nice to be able to hopefully pass on some of the things I’ve learnt in my tech career of almost 20 years, help some of the younger women and have a few laughs along the way. |
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Vicky Potts
11.50am – What I Wish I Knew Before Making A Game – @ninjapotts About Vicky Do you remember that wee game Petz? The PC game where you owned virtual cats and dogs. When I was 10, I found an online forum of like-minded young and creative gamers, where people would post their own custom mods - changing almost everything about the game, from the toys the pets had, to the colour of their fur. I became obsessed with learning how to do this - and with a hex editor I began modding too, not even knowing that’s what it was called. By 11 I’d made my first website ‘All about my Petz’ - and the rest followed pretty naturally. I graduated from from Queen’s University Belfast with a First Class Honours in Computer Science MEng in 2015. During the final year of my degree I obtained an NVQ in Business Development and co-founded IVEA labs with three colleagues. I am now co-founder of an independent games development studio called Whitepot Studios, which I set up with my partner in 2016. I am hugely passionate about using social media to reach out in new and interesting ways, and enjoy delivering talks and presentations about my experiences. I am still a techie at heart - I am experienced in front-end web design and development using Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, AngularJS, as well as C# and Java for larger systems. What I Wish I Knew Before Making A Game Congratulations! You’ve made a game! You’re 10% of the way there! There’s an entire production side to making and releasing a game that can get lost in the excitement of being a small team actually making something tangible for the first time. When we self-published our first game, we got hit from all sides by so many unknowns that nobody bothered to warn us about. So, consider this your warning about:
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Zoe Gadon-Thompson
12.05pm – What Even is a Dataset? – @gingerzoealex About Zoe Zoe recently started her first job as a software developer at Flax & Teal LTD making Open Source Software. She has nearly completed a foundation degree in Software Engineering, while trying to balance event organising and raising a toddler (the inhuman amount of tea definitely played a part in her success). She is also the outreach manager at Farset Labs and Code Co-Op co-organiser, and started a tech meetup that’s open to families and kids of all ages. What Even is a Dataset? Starting a new job is a daunting experience. Especially when it’s in a new subject area that you’re clueless about. It’s a situation we’ve all been in; and even after studying for years I’m sure a lot of us will question how much we know about the subject area. I started my first software developer job and was thrown into the weirdly interesting and frustrating world of CSVs and Python. But what is data, and what even is a dataset? How can it be used with Python to create something useful and awesome? How can natural language processing help with this? It turns out, you don’t need to be massively qualified to work with data, you just have to be willing to learn, make mistakes, and keep on trying - just like in any job! |
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Joan McAleer
12.30pm – Proofing your career for a year off – @joanmcaleer About Joan Just returned from her second maternity leave after having twins, she a has a diverse career spanning 14 years with experience in delivery of large scale financial enterprise systems, product development and integration software. She has recently started a new job as a software development manger for Bazaarvoice. She is very passionate about developing people’s careers especially women in tech. Proofing your career for a year off Once you start your career in IT taking a year off from it for whatever reason can have a massive impact on it, by taking a number of measures before during and after you can really minimise this impact. This talk will be largely focusing on maternity leaves since they are the most common, but a lot of the advice is applicable for someone who wants to go traveling for a year. |
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Claire Wilgar
1.55pm – CSS for the Modern Web – @clairedotw About Claire I’m Claire, a tech nerd with a particular interest in front-end/web development who enjoys being part of the tech community in Belfast. I work primarily on the UI/front-end of builds, with a focus on performance, responsiveness and usability. I have a particular interest in accessibility and attempt to implement accessibility standards in any builds I can along with sharing these requirements with the rest of the dev and design team wherever I am. I currently work as a software engineer for Bazaarvoice Belfast. CSS for the Modern Web Many people view CSS as complicated and confusing, or as overly basic and rarely changing. I hope to show people how modern CSS is powerful and constantly improving, while also taking away some of the fear surrounding it. In this talk I will start with an introduction to CSS and then walk through some useful and new features of CSS that can have a huge effect on web development and make it much less complex. I hope to show that some things can be done in CSS without the need for Javascript, and why this can be a benefit. For each feature I will provide a description, a working example, and a potential real-world use of it. |
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Lisa Stevenson
2.20pm – Applying Scrum to Supercharge Software Delivery – @lisaustevenson About Lisa Lisa is a Senior Manager at ShopKeep. An experienced agile coach who has guided, advised and helped teams collaborate and develop diverse innovative systems, providing recommendations and coaching on Agile methods and best practices. Specialising in leading technology projects to maximise the outcome and impact of product delivery, she has successfully run agile projects of varying size and complexity in companies across the world. Applying Scrum to Supercharge Software Delivery Learn how ShopKeep has succeeded in improving their product delivery including reducing the time to market of their iPad point-of-sale app from monthly to weekly. A talk for anyone who works in or with a software engineering team and seeks techniques that can improve the overall software development lifecycle. Learn more about the Scrum Master role. |
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Kathy Ayers
2.45pm – Getting Lost on My Own (*&%!) Path: Impostor Syndrome on the Factory Floor – @KateinWhitehead About Kathy Born in Wales, raised in the US, resident of Northern Ireland for the past 20 years. I first learned to programme working as an intern for NASA (FORTRAN!). I enjoyed the experience so much, I promptly went to university and studied political science. I’ve worked as a public policy lecturer, bookstore clerk, accounting assistant at a major film studio, policy officer for a political party and gave out lottery grants for almost 15 years. Then I ran away and joined the circus or rather, did a conversion course at QUB in software development and got hired as an analytics engineer in the data science division of a really big US insurance company. I really do love data, want to mathematically model human behavior, and just wish I was better at everything except maybe making cocktails. I am content with my margaritas. And the things I do with vodka, a martini class, and my cocktail shaker. Getting Lost on My Own (*&%!)Path: Impostor Syndrome on the Factory Floor Impostor syndrome is rampant in technology--the gap between what we could know and what we do know is always vast. Being a woman in tech means being a minority, particularly working on a DevOps team providing a crucial bridge between data science and enterprise. Events like Women in Tech are a great inspiration but what is it like to start a career facing these challenges? How do you navigate new hardware, new culture, new workplaces, new languages (R? Anyone?) while finding and building a career? This talk explores the questions of what challenges do women face and what are some of the tools we can use to meet them. The perspective comes from starting a career--going from university to that first role and working as a developer/engineer and uses this experience to highlight not only the pervasive and destructive ‘impostor syndrome’ but also the real-life steps taken to maintain sanity and grow a career. Softer skills, but still useful advice on how to learn to stop worrying, start believing in one’s own abilities, how to find allies, how to have a laugh and how to keep going when your tests fail for the seventh time in a morning. Find out why failing is a really effective way to learn, how to embrace an ‘every day is a learning day’ philosophy, and recognize the importance of the women and allies around you. It's the true life story of how tech is hard, tech is easy, and how it is the best fun I have had in decades. |
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Desy Kristianti
3.10pm – How to Give a Compelling Technical Talk – @dessskris About Desy Desy Kristianti is a Technology Consultant at Deloitte and a City Leader at Women Who Code (WWCode) Belfast. Three years ago, she disliked being the centre of attention and having to speak in public. However, her passion for sharing her knowledge overpowered these fears, she started going to public speaking practice and workshops, and recently founded The SPUDS Belfast which is a friendly impromptu public speaking group. Desy has now spoken at four conferences across the UK and Ireland, giving technical talks in rooms full of 100+ audiences. Her technique focuses on audience engagements and really understanding what they are looking for. In her day job, Desy has also given technical presentations to key senior clients and business managers with little technical backgrounds. How to Give a Compelling Technical Talk Knowing how to code is one thing, but showing someone else how to do it is another. Ever feel like you want to share your knowledge, but don’t know how to communicate it efficiently? Or want to challenge yourself to speak in front of an audience, but don’t feel confident enough? Come along to learn how to give a compelling technical talk, or see me try explaining it all in 10 minutes. This technique is suitable for everyone regardless of who you are and what level of experience you have, and focuses on conference talks but can also be applied at meetings or presentations. |
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Jaine Blayney
3.45pm – Data science and machine learning in stratified medicine – LinkedIn About Jaine Studied Maths at Somerville College, Oxford, Computing and Info Systems then Bioinformatics at Ulster University. Spent 15 years working with charities, including women’s centres and family centres, in advice and counselling. Moved onto training, first charity fundraising, then into professional IT qualifications for adult returners. Currently working at Queen’s University, Belfast as a Lecturer in Translational Bioinformatics. Involved in Athena SWAN and STEM Ambassador activities. Loves talking and programming/scripting (but not at same time). Big fan of statistical programming framework, R. I recently have won two national awards:@WITAwardsDublin (All-Ireland Women in Tech, Data Scientist) and @WATC_WeAreTech (All-UK WeAreTech TechWomen100). Netflix junkie: The Good Place and Grace and Frankie (I want to be Frankie when I grow up). Occasional wildlife/cat rescuer. And I make a fab Mac and Cheese. Data science and machine learning in stratified medicine Mathematics, statistics and computing are being used in biomedical research to uncover new biological insights from patient data. The field of bioinformatics is a broad church and can cover the prediction of the three-dimensional structure of proteins (drug discovery) through to the randomisation of patients to different treatments in a clinical trial of a new chemotherapy drug combination. Separating patients into different subgroups, based on the complex biological patterns found in tissue or blood samples, can help to speed up treatment response and patient recovery. Just as there is not a one-treatment fits all, different patient data may require the application of different statistical modelling or machine learning techniques. In this talk, within the context of cancer and inflammatory disease, I shall look at other domains, eg geology, for mathematical and computational tools that can help us to harness the power of existing patient data. I shall also consider the ethical side of analysing patient data and the potential of human error. |
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Sarah Addis
4.10pm – Release It! – @saddis01 About Sarah I initially started out studying Computer Science at Queen's. During my degree I did my Placement Year at Latens Systems in Stranmillis developing software for digital TV. It wasn’t until I actually got experience in the industry that I fell in love with development and I knew that's what I wanted to pursue for a career. I was lucky to get a place in a really good team exposing me to all different technologies in Full Stack Development. After University I went back to Latens for a year and then decided to move on and ended up at Rapid7 where I currently work. I focused on Backend Development and I’m currently working on Cloud Java Spring Boot Apps in a microservice architecture. Working at Rapid7 where each team really gets control of their own development process and owns the product they work on has really been exciting. You get to stand with your team at a whiteboard and be part of the whole process making that design a reality. We’ve a really great culture of being innovative to solve our problems, exposing you to all the latest technologies. Release It! Based on the book ‘Release It’ Design and Deploy Production Ready Software By Michael T Nygard. This talk applies if you are putting any kind of system into production and want to be able to sleep at night. Examine ways to architect, design and build software for the real world. Software delivers its value in production. The development project, testing, integration, and planning…everything before production is a prelude. Build systems that survive the real world, avoid downtime, implement continuous delivery and make cloud-native applications resilient. Failure is inevitable, so it must be accounted for and planned for. The goal is not to eliminate failure, but promote durability and quick recovery times. |
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Pauline Keys
4.25pm – Quality - The Price of Inaction – @PaulineKeys About Pauline I’m Pauline, an Engineering Manager who hasn’t lost her hankering for coding. I’m passionate about enabling teams to move fast in the journey of delivering software – while maintaining quality, high value and a happy team along the way. Serving my team is No. 1 priority! I dip in and out of various areas (process, product, technical, quality) depending on the team’s needs at the time. I’ve a curious nature and a sixth sense for potential trouble. Currently doing my thing at Bazaarvoice Belfast. Quality - The Price of Inaction Quality practices aren’t new, but we’ve all lost our way at some point in our quest for speedy delivery. Quality applies to more than just code. It applies to how we apply our processes and our drive for continuous improvement; how we elicit requirements and interact with our customers; how we treat folks in our teams, AND how we build software. I’ll challenge your mindset - whether you’re brown field, green field or need to move at the speed of light. The price of inaction is far greater in the long run… let’s get some enthusiasm back! |
Schedule
9.30am – Doors open & registration
10.00am – Welcome!
10.10am – Barriers to Automation? Let’s remove them – Kerrie Egan
10.25am – Why being a Female Entrepreneur has never been more achievable for Women in Tech – Carol Rossborough & Anne Orr
10.50am – Tech, Meet Tourism – Claire Cromie
11.15am – From problem solver to leader – Colleen Bradley
11.30am – Morning Break
11.50am – What I Wish I Knew Before Making A Game – Vicky Potts
12.05pm – What Even is a Dataset? – Zoe Gadon-Thompson
12.30pm – Proofing your career for a year off – Joan McAleer
12.50pm – Lunch Break
1.55pm – CSS for the Modern Web – Claire Wilgar
2.20pm – Applying Scrum to Supercharge Software Delivery – Lisa Stevenson
2.45pm – Getting Lost on My Own (*&%!) Path: Impostor Syndrome on the Factory Floor – Kathy Ayers
3.10pm – How to Give a Compelling Technical Talk – Desy Kristianti
3.25pm – Afternoon Break
3.45pm – Data science and machine learning in stratified medicine – Jaine Blayney
4.10pm – Release It! – Sarah Addis
4.25pm – Quality - The Price of Inaction – Pauline Keys
4.50pm – Thank you! (& close)
5.00pm – After party @ The Bot
9.30am – Doors open & registration
10.00am – Welcome!
10.10am – Barriers to Automation? Let’s remove them – Kerrie Egan
10.25am – Why being a Female Entrepreneur has never been more achievable for Women in Tech – Carol Rossborough & Anne Orr
10.50am – Tech, Meet Tourism – Claire Cromie
11.15am – From problem solver to leader – Colleen Bradley
11.30am – Morning Break
11.50am – What I Wish I Knew Before Making A Game – Vicky Potts
12.05pm – What Even is a Dataset? – Zoe Gadon-Thompson
12.30pm – Proofing your career for a year off – Joan McAleer
12.50pm – Lunch Break
1.55pm – CSS for the Modern Web – Claire Wilgar
2.20pm – Applying Scrum to Supercharge Software Delivery – Lisa Stevenson
2.45pm – Getting Lost on My Own (*&%!) Path: Impostor Syndrome on the Factory Floor – Kathy Ayers
3.10pm – How to Give a Compelling Technical Talk – Desy Kristianti
3.25pm – Afternoon Break
3.45pm – Data science and machine learning in stratified medicine – Jaine Blayney
4.10pm – Release It! – Sarah Addis
4.25pm – Quality - The Price of Inaction – Pauline Keys
4.50pm – Thank you! (& close)
5.00pm – After party @ The Bot