Opening digital doorways: Women of Silicon Roundabout 2020 conference

A virtual lobby for the recent Women of Silicon Roundabout 2020 conference

I was lucky enough to attend the Women of Silicon Roundabout conference this year, which was part of the Women in Tech World Series of conferences. It was a virtual conference due to the pandemic, however, I was mesmerised by all of the wonderful speakers whilst attending the sessions, even if its online-only nature meant that I missed out on the networking opportunities of being somewhere in person and lots of freebies!

The day was divided into parallel sessions from various categories such as keynotes, tech-related sessions, diversity and inclusion, career focus, and others. I’d like to share my experience, with notes from my favourite sessions that I think could help many others, too.

Focusing in difficult times

The talks began by looking at what we can learn from the pandemic — how do we take full advantage of this virtual world and perform our jobs to our best potential? Without stretching ourselves and without compromising our deliverables? Here are the tips I learnt:

1. Be yourself. You need to be honest to yourself and others without pretending to be someone else.
2. Be human. Help others whenever we can, enjoy every moment, celebrate each little moment of your life.
3. Embrace online tools to the fullest. Do whatever we can to exploit our best potential by taking advantage of available online tools and resources.
4. Be accessible; available online whenever needed.
5. Social signaling. Socialising with like-minded people can help us nurture our professional life and it’s also good for our mental health.
6. Staying focused is very important to whatever task we perform. We all know context-switching is bad and kills our creativity. Focusing on tasks makes us more productive and empowers us to deliver quality products.

Here are some top tips on how to stay focused.

1. Create a morning routine.
2. Set clear boundaries and make sure you eat lunch away from your computer!
3. Create calendar notifications to remind you to take 5-minute breaks every 1.5 hours during the day.
4. Build device-free time into your schedule.
5. Prioritise your tasks and focus on one at a time.
6. Look after your mental health by being present and by talking about yourself and feelings.
7. Make sure you do proper exercise and get a good amount of sleep.

How “Data tech” drives the gaming industry? by Voodoo Gaming

After hearing these tips, I felt energised to attend the sessions. The first session I attended was from the Voodoo Gaming company. They explained about the importance of “Data Tech” and how it drives the gaming industry. They handle around 387GB of data per day analysed by engineers. These are the main pillars in their process:

• Define objectives
• Reduce bugs
• Identify bugs as soon as possible
• Understand user action and user behaviour

They demoed one of their games and explained why they introduce new features to keep users engaging in their games and attract more users.

The main motive was to optimise their game once it’s developed and rolled out to production — what can they do to increase user interest, and retain existing users by introducing more challenges? They decided to introduce a new feature and for that they performed the following:

1. Data checks in staging
2. Exploratory data analysis
3. Implement corrections

How did they identify bugs as soon as possible?

• Data checks on app updates
• Exploratory data analysis
• Set alerts on major Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in case one of them falls
• Implement corrections if required

How to understand user interaction by analysing data?
Voodoo carried out data sanity checks for user interactors by eliminating users with sessions of more than 24 hours, as they corrupt data. Once clean data was available, insights were made and it came out that conversion rate to the new feature was low, while repeated feature usage by engaged players was high.

They came up with the hypothesis that it could be because the new feature was not visible as it was appearing near a panel, but that when that new feature was used, it was liked by users. This hypothesis led them towards A/B testing, followed by real implementation of moving the new feature button away from the panel to make it more visible.

Technology as a force for good in a Global Pandemic by Jayne Opperman

The second session I’d like to tell you about was the above titled keynote session from Barclays.

It was a nice summary of how Barclays used technology, not only to survive, but to feel proud of the work that they did to help their customers. They overcame various challanges of managing customers in a building, migrating services to the cloud using an Amazon Web Services stack and empowering traditional customers to directly connect with banks.

Barclays allowed “Agent calls from home” and their platform was fully secured to carry out such working-from-home operations. They also took an agile approach for all teams in fields such as compliance, technology and others, all the while supporting 20,000 people working from home during a global pandemic! I liked this line: “Highly resilient business, digital is not about seamless integration but future-proof experience”. Collaboration was the key for them while everyone worked from home. The speaker also mentioned the importance of diversity and having more women, not only in leadership roles but also in other areas such as Product, Architecture etc. She said “Digital inclusion [was] essential”.

Why are Women leaving The Tech Sector? by Rahma Javed and Karina Govindji

This topic saw 3 key points identified by the speaker for women in tech:

• Lack of career growth
• Poor managers
• Non inclusive culture

The simple rule is that “If you don’t keep them happy, they will leave”.

How do we support ?

• Shared parental leave helps women coming back to work, who need a supporting environment especially because of other priorities.
• See more active role models as women.
• The tone in which role models share their stories encourages other women.

What’s keeping women in under-represented groups?

• Culture change happens more swiftly.
• Maternity leave.
• More encouragement.
• Story-telling.

Who Do You Think You Are? by Rebecca Little

The next useful session was dedicated to empowering women to create their own ‘brand’ and to be confident in building it. How does everyone ‘know’ about us? How does it all begin, as early as the age of 7?

Imposter syndrome is women’s silent killer. I have linked to a detailed article from one of our very own leaders, Louise Curtis, at The Telegraph. I really liked the following slide from the presentation and found a similar article on our Telegraph website.

The speaker also gave a few tips to help overcome Imposter Syndrome:

1: Identify your strengths and weaknesses, use the assessment tools available. Find out your skills, interests and values. Do the digital marketing. Build your brand and set up your goals.

2: Raise your profile by being bold, networking as much as possible, use social media to leverage your brand. Start blogs, opinions and podcasts.

3: Stand out; don’t do things which everyone else is doing.

4: Be yourself and you will see some huge successes.

Women in Leadership: Letters to my Younger Self, by Orla Dunne

During this keynote, the speaker told the story of her life and career, in which I found a few similarities to myself.

Having started her career in technology at Morgan Stanley, the speaker discussed her working from home and how she felt it was necessary to expand and scale up this approach.

She described herself as a problem solver and said that problem-solving remained her main motivation for work.

She believed that technology helping us during the pandemic, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, would empower us to face future challenges, while cloud services, 5G, and virtual and augmented reality would also play a part.

These were among the notes she would like to share with her younger self:

• Zoom in and do nothing in a straight line.
• A positive attitude will inspire.
• Don’t lock yourself, share knowledge so you’re ready for the next thing. (My favorite one.)
• Feedback is important and timely.
• How to judge yourself.
• The pressure was put on me by me only.
• We are very talented, and know your strength.
• Never underestimate the importance of the network. A network will make you more effective.
• Mistakes are the best teachers. It’s not about losing and winning but about winning and learning. Have fun, it should be like a hobby and we never count time spent on hobbies.
• Most importantly, secure a work-life balance.

Call-out points:

• Tell people about your interests.
• Managers are not mind readers so speak out and let them know.
• Leadership is all about followership.

Throwing out the rule book to terms and conditions imposed upon women by Tertia Labuschagne

This session looked at the terms and conditions imposed on women and some terms and conditions we can set for ourselves:

1. Prevent abuses.
2. Own your content — you are the owner of your content and define them.
3. Terminate accounts.
4. Limit liability — I am human, I may make mistakes and I don’t always need to be right, but I need to put efforts to resolve it and own it.
5. Set the governing law.

What are your T’s and C’s? They should help you:

• Find yourself
• Be yourself
• Be human

How to build a successful platform on cloud infrastructure, by Li Qun Taylor

After receiving so much career inspiration, I decided to attend a technology session on the above topic, in which the speaker talked about their journey of moving to a cloud platform.

Why use public clouds?

While it was shared infrastructure initially and security, resilience and other concerns existed, the current cloud providers have addressed those concerns. Cloud now also means enhanced monitoring capabilities, dynamic auto-scaling and managed services.

Considerations to make around cloud:

1. Data policies — which data should be public.
2. Cost of ownership — how much will it cost for licensing and support.
3. Legacy systems — might not be suitable for cloud.

The speaker highlighted the long journey that some companies can have in migrating to cloud, offering examples that demonstrated the challenges and approaches taken.

Among others, the example of Netflix’s migration to cloud was highlighted. Here, 6.8m customers were moved to a cloud-based platform seamlessly, albeit in 3 phases:

Phase 1a : Where do you start

1. Identify technical expertise and roles — ie. gaps.
2. Identify languages, infrastructure, SME

Phase 1b: stakeholders, controls and compliance.

1. Upskill stakeholders.
2. Engage compliance and controls.
3. Keep them in the team with successes and failures.

Phase 1c: Delivery Approach as a very small MVP

1. Avoid big bangs.
2. Iterate with phase.
3. Prove platform, tools and processes.

Phase 2: The Build approach.

Targeting Cloud-Native Principles (Kubernetes, docker, Terraform):

1. Autoscaling dynamically
2. Zero downtime deployments
3. Complete stack automation
4. On-demand environments
5. Containerization of microservices
6. Testing — Design for CI/CD
7. Security
8. Resilience

Phase 3: How to operate and improve.

1. End-to-end visibility
2. Options available from cloud provider
3. Costs — housekeeping in place.
4. Evergreening — keep developing and improving.
5. Technical skills — a broad range of skills. Hire hybrid skills.

Networking and security in the hybrid cloud era — Tech Talks by Priya Saxena and Saakshi Saxena

This was a tech session from Google engineers looking at hybrid cloud. Whilst highlighting the many benefits of cloud, they conceded that in some cases, there were some challenges when it came to migrating some systems to cloud today:

• Legacy hardware — some hardware and software is legacy, is doing a good job and is not easy to move. If you try to migrate it, apps might break.
• Poor network connectivity — cloud computers are somewhere else, so you have to have good connectivity to those machines.
• Data Restrictions — baking — regulations and compliances. Data movement between geography is not allowed. Might be one of the hindering factors to move to the cloud.

Hence the solution to these cases is a hybrid cloud:

• Hybrid cloud is the connection between cloud and on-premise.
• It involves lots of security and networking challenges.
• Data is on-premise and the app is running in the cloud. The connection itself is a real challenge:
• On-Premise connectivity — a way to connect to public
• Public Network challenges.
• Establishing a trust zone.
• Data Security — while data flows between on-premise and cloud, it can’t be interpreted by outside.

Solutions implemented include:

Hybrid Connectivity solution (having a dedicated internet connection as a comms channel between on-premise and cloud):

• Dedicated — setting up a secure link with a telephone provider. Expensive.
• Partner internet — using a partner for such a line.
• VPN — another way of implementing a security comms channel.

Network security solutions:

• Authentication
• Firewalls and IP whitelisting.
• DMZ — and zones for untrusted traffic

Data security solutions:

• Encryption at rest — data is encrypted
• Encryption in transit — packages of data should be encrypted.
• Security perimeters — anything outside of the perimeters are not allowed.

Middle-leadership — creating impact by Myra Fulton

This session covered the following areas, which the speaker considered crucial to good leadership:

1. Take time to reflect on yourself.
2. Observations — being mindful of your opinion about yourself and of others’ opinions of you. (This was a key thing for the speaker).
3. What makes you be your best self?
4. Find passion.
5. Regular recognition and feedback to measure. (Small thank yous and comments).
6. Build Relationships.
7. Strong Supporter. Maintain your support with trust.
8. Coach/Mentor. Be clear what you want out of your relationship.

As well deep-diving into each of these points, the speaker also had the following practical advice to offer leaders and future leaders:

Take control of yourself:

• Take a good look at yourself and understand yourself. Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!
• Think carefully about your goals and what it will take to attain them. Discuss these goals with your managers and drive them to completion.
• Don’t be afraid to delegate or have difficult conversations. What does not kill you makes you stronger.
• Acknowledge imposter syndrome.

Winning hearts and minds:

• Prepare your speeches. Articulate your arguments in 30 seconds, in 1 sentence, explaining why you want to do it from a business point-of-view and sharing compelling examples.

Projecting confidence:

1. Voice. Sound was very important to the speaker; variation in your voice keeps listeners interested and engaged. Never speed up; slow down and vary pace later. Articulate your words properly. Pump the volume out.
2. Good eye contact increases credibility.
3. In a virtual world, keep your gestures inside the camera frame
4. Pause after each point — just 1–2 seconds, or else it might look like you are having difficulty.
5. Make strong statements instead of asking questions.

Being Courageous:
You need to push forward and think bigger. Express yourself and don’t keep your thinking in mind. Stretch and move out of your comfort zone.

Connect:
Think of challenges and find out who can help you. You may have a coach, sponsor, mentor, etc. Who is on your board of directors? Identify someone who could help you with your goal.

Taking the next step:
Take a speaking class. Mentor, coach, and help other people. Make a commitment to do something different this week.

Rachana Mehta is a Senior Software Engineer at The Telegraph. You can follow her on Twitter at Rachna81185836.