Epic Women in Tech — Yury Niño
I am a Site Reliability Engineer, SRE Technical Program Manager and Chaos Engineering Advocate. I love building software applications, reading blogs, writing articles, solving hard performance and resilience issues and teaching software concepts.
I have more than seven years of experience designing, implementing and managing software applications using agile methodologies. Also, I have more than two years of hands-on experience supporting, automating and optimizing mission-critical deployments. Also, I am a Professor of Software Engineering and Researcher.
How did you get into the tech field?
Since I can remember I wanted to be an engineer. I remember that I enjoyed assembling and disassembling stuff in my home. But probably my first interaction with tech topics was in high school, when my father bought me my first computer.
Throughout school, I greatly enjoyed math, science, and teaching others. My mother is a teacher in a primary school. This is probably a reason to enjoy teaching tech things. But my first attempt with technical things was when I had to choose a career to study in the University. For those days, Microsoft released a new version of Encarta and I wanted to know how it worked behind the scenes. I was obsessed with discovering how a box could show me the inside of the Louvre museum through an interactive video.
What are the main challenges in this field?
According to IBM’s Institute for Business Value 2018 Report, “Women, Leadership and the Priority Paradox”, women make up just 13% to 25% of engineering jobs and only 18% of leadership tech positions. I think that a big challenge for the governments, the universities and in general for the industry. We have to change these numbers because that inequity is leading to feeling isolated, power imbalances and toxic working environments.
I was talking about this in Techcrunh. https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/07/4-women-in-engineering-discuss-harassment-isolation-and-perseverence/
What are the things you’ve learned being a woman in tech?
Since I changed my role, from to be a software developer to be a site reliability engineer, I have learned a lot of technical things: I improved my skills to solve performance issues, provide resilience and reliability to applications, and how I can use chaos engineering to study human factors, safety on systems and lack of monitoring and observability.
However, I always knew being in STEM and supporting women was important, but I really found my passion for supporting others. Having a group of people with similar interests, women facing similar challenges, makes our own reality not so scary.
What advice would you give to women who would like to join the industry?
My recommendation is just getting started. It is challenging, I know, but if you take the decision and start the following steps will light your path.
In the SRE book there are three practices that are key principles of SRE, so I strongly recommend starting here:
- Define some objectives, but don’t allow that this takes away your sleep. Take the time that you need.
- Remove nocive practices that could be promoting blame.
- Remember “the best time to learn about fire is when you’re on fire” It is a beautiful quote from Jen Hammond, New Relic engineering manager
Who are your role models?
My mother, who is Primary School Teacher
Tammy Butow, who is SRE Chaos Principal at Gremlin
Ana Medina, who is SRE Chaos Principal at Gremlin
If you could go back in time to your first days in the industry, what would you do differently or tell yourself?
I would not do anything different. I think I am the result of many good things, but the most important of a lot of failures and errors, from which I have learnt.
If you are a founder or a member of a community for women in tech, can you introduce it?
It is my community https://www.ingenieriadelcaos.com/#/home
