Silicon Valley, circa 2019

Hosting Girl Geek X events in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 11+ years, I still love attending weekly Girl Geek Dinners to visit companies for dinner and learn from lightning talks delivered by women engineers & leaders. When you work at a small company, you don’t have many female leaders to look up to — and everyone needs role models in technology, business, leadership. You can also make friends and connections with fellow girl geeks at these inclusive events. Here are some faces from Xilinx:

Clockwise from left: Jennifer Wong, VP FPGA Product Development, speaking at Xilinx Girl Geek Dinner in 2019; watching demos, hearing lightning talks and being greeted at check-in with Xilinx girl geeks.

When you step outside of your comfort zone, you’ll be surprised how much you will learn and benefit from greeting the unknown. Many of us drove over an hour to meet at Xilinx headquarters in San Jose, a calm suburb (I placated my inner child with Taiwanese snacks in Cupertino on the trek to South Bay from Berkeley).

Some of us know the history of the Silicon Valley and how it relates to chips, but most of us were surprised to learn that a company like Xilinx consists of about half hardware engineers and about half software engineers in the thousands of employees at Xilinx. And in the 35+ years of growing the business, this chip company has blazed a path with innovation like FPGA and is home to many female executives and girl geeks! (more)

Xilinx, famous for inventing the field-programmable gate array (FPGA), creates programmable logic devices that power accelerated image classification — you know, for applications like self-driving car technology, or potentially spotting Taylor Swift’s next concert stalker.

Xilinx as a workplace has very strict security (as many companies do) because they are doing a lot of impressive work —the girl geeks were awed by the patent-lined hallways, demos, and the food & desserts were tasty!

We peered at many humming motherboards to see how accelerated image processing is applied in practical applications (self-driving cars!), and in listening carefully to the speakers, I learned more about the industry and innovations at hand — inspiring myself to bring that level of innovation to my own life and work.

More pictures from Xilinx Girl Geek Dinner are here. Video coming soon!

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Let us know your thoughts! You can email me at angie@girlgeek.io