Women Driven Development Conference 2020
Women Driven Development brings underrepresented people in tech together to learn new skills, meet leaders in their field and #TechItForward together!
We kicked off 2020 at Sky with our inaugural conference. Speakers included data scientists, engineers, product owners, and developers, ranging from juniors to tech leaders. Take a look at the full line-up here!
Attendees were treated to some real pearls of wisdom so we wanted to share just some of the gems we picked up on the day.
We kicked off with a panel discussion on different routes into tech. One takeaway was to start a ‘brag sheet’ ready for when review time comes around. Thanks to Aisha D’Souza, Fatimat Gbajabiamila, Kate Morris and Megan Stodel for sharing their career journeys.
Research Scientist Ira Ktena showed us the potential of graph representations in areas as diverse as neuroscience and social media.
In their tech talk debut, Céline Pyapaert gave us some great online resources to level up your hacking skills for free!
Next up Rahma Javed told us about inheriting a tech team or organisation. Her advice? Meet each new challenge with an open mind and don’t rely too much on previous successes.
Security pro Sonya Moisset shared this epic list of women in cybersecurity to follow and support! It’s being added to all the time.
WDD head of media Jean Jimbo inspired us with her story of moving from engineering to product management, and shared the reading list that helped her get there.
Rebecca Pope Ph.D outlined her research into AI in healthcare, and how augmenting artificial intelligence is preferable to completely replacing human decision making.
Next up was a focus on ‘soft’ skills with Natasha Sayce-Zelem. While communication and interpersonal skills are integral to any tech job, they can be the hardest to learn, and are often overlooked.
Katie Gamanji explained how Conde Nast uses a centralised, globally distributed platform to build and deploy systems that serve over 300 million users per month. You can read a write up from a different conference here.
Chimmy Kalu told us the difference between accessible and inclusive products and how considering all audiences ultimately makes more profitable products.
Last but not least, Becky Rush wowed us with her data visualisation work, explaining how it was built for audiences using different devices, scripts, languages, and internet speeds. Take a look!
Thank you to all our inspiring speakers for teaching us so much, plus our fabulous emcee Jerome Clarke for keeping us on track. And a big shout out to Sky for hosting and feeding us!
Women Driven Development events are open to all and we’d love to see you there, so whether you’re a tech veteran or just starting out in the industry, sign up for our email newsletter to hear about future events.
