Microsoft //builder Conference 2016 + The Importance of CS & the Liberal Arts

The Conference

Hi friends! Welcome to my first Medium post. As many of you know, this summer I have the opportunity of interning at Microsoft as part of the Cloud and Enterprise Developer Division, known internally as “DevDiv.” Every year, DevDiv interns are invited to the //builder Conference, a day-long event filled with presentations on DevDiv technologies at Willows Lodge. In short, the conference was a ton of fun and a really enriching experience. Towards the end, I gave a lightning talk with another intern on the importance of pursuing liberal arts alongside computer science, or CS.

To start off the day, Brian Harry, the Corporate Vice President for the Visual Studio Team Services organization, gave the opening keynote on his experiences in the tech world and developer trends. Afterwards, I attended talks such as “iOS and Android Development in C# with Xamarin,” “Best of Visual Studio Code: Tips and Tricks,” and “Working on Open Source @ Microsoft” led by company employees (I’ve linked the speakers’ Twitter accounts, so feel free to check them out to learn more). I was exposed to several new tech topics and aspects of Microsoft products (s/o to all the open source); I learned so much in so little time. We took a break from all the new content with //builder Olympics, a set of six fun challenges I completed with members of my intern pod team (but unfortunately, we forgot to turn in our score card and were not counted in the competition for prizes… whoops).

The Talk

Next up were the intern lightning talks. My fellow intern Priyanka Jain and I signed up to give a talk on a whim, just a few hours before the time the talks were planned for. We scribbled down our thoughts on what we could talk about, and realized that our interests overlapped when it came to CS in conjunction with the liberal arts. Here’s what we drafted to tell interns at the event and others a part of DevDiv regarding the effects of combining CS and the liberal arts:

Disclaimer

All text following Priyanka’s name are her words, published with her permission; credit goes to her. Also, wordings are not exact in terms of what we wrote (since we wrote several drafts on paper/due to edits) and what we said up front, but are pretty close. And since this was only a five-minute lightning talk, it was meant to serve as more of a gateway for further discussion rather than an in-depth coverage of the topic.

Priyanka: Hi everyone. We’re talking about the interaction between CS and the liberal arts. Often times, STEM is considered separately from liberal arts. Growing up, I never got this. I’d always ask, what’s wrong with the two of them together? My mom majored in biochemistry and visual arts, and I wanted to study STEM and art as well. Did my mom use art as a doctor? She didn’t. But I wanted to use art, so I’ve spent my life so far looking for something in STEM that could go hand-in-hand with art. I found that when I fell in love with CS. I’m seeing that CS and the liberal arts work well together and build off of each other.

Me: So my background is a little different. Where I’m from, a lot of people are really focused on building technical products. In high school, I decided to take a lot of STEM classes and participate in STEM activities to hone my technical skills. Through hackathons I went to, I realized that integrating CS and the liberal arts would be beneficial. The ideation process for a music hackathon I went to would have been different if I had knowledge on music, as I could have created something that directly combined music and tech. The development process would have been enhanced if I had known even more about art and design to create useable interfaces. And the translation of my hack into a startup could have been possible if I had stronger economic insights. So in college, I’m seeking out ways to integrate the liberal arts in my studies.

Priyanka: I started seeing this integration of CS and the liberal arts in my art class, where I studied new media art. We both proposed and studied projects in this new art form. These works included a smart IoT house where a performance artist would live and explore the impact of tech on her. Another work responded to the popularity of data and used it to track an artist’s experiences and how she lost herself. I began to notice how tech was redefining the way artists conveyed their messages and things they were saying. This is what I want to explore as I grow as a computer scientist and an artist.

Me: We’re really interested in CS, liberal arts, and where the conjunction takes people. If you’re also interested, please come and talk to either one of us. Thank you (if you’re reading this and you’re interested, I’d love to continue the conversation).

Afterwards

Julia Liuson, the Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division, and John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and the .NET Framework, together gave the closing keynote on DevDiv strategy. Then, Julia ate dinner with some of the interns, so we got the chance to ask her questions about her career at Microsoft and vision for DevDiv. After our meal, she took pictures with us (in the gorgeous setting)!

At this point, the //builder Conference had come to an end. Many thanks to Microsoft for putting on such a great event for DevDiv interns!