Ahead of The Cloud Now Awards The Final Part of our Interview with Cornelia Davis, Director of Cloud Foundry Platform Engineering at Pivotal Labs.
In August our Co-Founder, Kédar Iyer, spoke to Cornelia Davis, Director of Platform Engineering at Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Cornelia is one of our advisors at GapJumpers and is recognized for her leadership in cloud and transformative technologies. Cornelia is a CloudNow 2015 Top Ten Women in Cloud honoree. The Cloud Now Awards are taking place on Thursday, September 24th.
At GapJumpers we like to move beyond talking about issues to driving strategic action that moves the needle on diversity in tech. For that reason we have broken the interview above into sections in order to start a discussion around the topics that Kédar covered with Cornelia. These topics are relevant to both experienced and emerging leaders in tech and we would love for all to benefit from the wisdom that Cornelia has shared.
In part one, Cornelia shared her thoughts on what keeps her awake at night and the importance that staying true to yourself plays when it comes to designing a fulfilling career. In part two she shared her thoughts on impostor syndrome, I Look Like an Engineer, and what the tech industry will be able to focus on once it has dealt with the issue of unconscious bias. In the third and final part Cornelia shares the advice that she would give not only to herself as a 21 year old but to all 21 year old women. We also get a sneak peak into her Cloud Now pitch.
Congratulations on being nominated to the Top 10 Women in Cloud Computing. I understand that there is also a five minute pitch that is part of the evening celebrating women in cloud. What is going through your mind as you prepare for your pitch for the judges?
The main thing that is going through my mind is that I have five minutes tops. The biggest conflict I am having when I think about that is how technical do I get? First of all I love, love, love to share Cloud Foundry with people and I love to try to help people at least see the existence of the chasm and the possibility that there’s greater things on the other side of the chasm. But I also love to talk tech, and that is who I am.
Five minutes might [not seem like a long time] but at last year’s Cloud Foundry Summit I did an Ignite talk where I actually went very deep talking about the technical architecture of Cloud Foundry about something that we call the four levels of HA, so it covered all of these high availability levels in the product. I did it as an ignite talk that advanced my slides every 20 seconds and I did it in five minutes and it was so much fun.
I want to try and find a way to talk tech and at the same time have people come away understanding a bit more about Cloud Foundry than they knew before. [For them to understand] what it really means to be a platform and to have a cloud architecture in an environment that is the cloud, that is constantly changing, and never static and always dynamic. So that is my big thing; how can I do technical and also deliver something to people who are not familiar with the product.
Looking back, we talked about your early career, your early studies and the things that you are passionate about today. From today’s vantage point, and with the benefit of hindsight, what advice would you give to your 21 year old self who wasn’t sure whether you were going to do electrical engineering or computer science at the time?
That is a very good question and something that we should all think about frequently. One of the things that we can do as women and as any other under represented groups is to not only give that advice to my 21 year old self but we should give that advice to the current 21 year old women who are at that juncture in their lives now. So this is advice that I do give to folks.
Just a few weeks ago we had a Girls Who Code group come into Pivotal Labs and it was such a wonderful opportunity to watch their faces light up and to hear them talk about the possibility of the career that stretches before them and the opportunities they have. It really is an honor to be able to do that.
The first thing I would say would be to circle back to where we started which is to stay true to yourself and to really listen to yourself. I am one of those people who loves Monday mornings. I love what I do and I can’t imagine spending 5/7ths of my life wishing it away and wishing for Friday and having a job that isn’t fulfilling. So being true to yourself is very important.
Perhaps even more important than that I would say don’t be constrained by boundaries that you might perceive. I think that from the time from when I was 21 to now, which is far beyond 21, there were certainly many, many times where I had an idea and I thought ‘well it’s not my place to present that idea’, or ‘somebody else owns that’, or ‘someone else has already figured it out.’ I think when I was younger I spent more time coloring between the lines if you will.
As I’ve gotten older, and I’m sure this isn’t unique to me, you start to care less about what other people think and what those boundaries might be, you gain confidence and you start to break out of those boundaries a bit.
I often say “I wish I knew then what I know now” so I think that would be my biggest piece of advice — Don’t be constrained go for it.
The last question is one that Peter Thiel uses all of the time to think about problems and to think about innovations. What is the one thing that you believe today that few others believe?
One of the things that I do often say to people is that I don’t think that we have even gotten close to the revolution that the Internet will bring. I think that having websites on line and being able to buy groceries over the Internet are going to absolutely dwarf what the Internet is going to enable. There’s no question in my mind.
I don’t know what those revolutionary things are going to be but I know that we are just in the infancy of exploiting a fully connected world.
My hope is that some of the unbelievable things that will come from having a connected world will impact some of the things that we idealistically talk about. For instance, global human rights. The fact that we can start to connect people to the internet who don’t have running water or who don’t have electricity. I don’t know what is going to come from that but there are things that are going to come from that that are absolutely amazing.
If we start educating people, and we start connecting people who don’t have access to education today, I can only imagine that is going to change the dynamics and impact international relations. I don’t know, is world peace possible?
I know that sounds very cliché but I just fundamentally know that e-commerce and push notifications on my phone, when my favorite team scores a touchdown, I just know that is the small stuff. It has changed our world but I know that it is the small stuff still.
We’ll be following the Cloud Now awards and really look forward to an evening of hearing from women who are leading the revolution in Cloud Computing technologies. Follow along @cloudnow_org and #Topwomenincloud @cdavisafc
