Tag Archives: Women
Technology

Better code with inner source

By on Tuesday, October 22, 2019

I was a member of the Software track committee for GHC, which meant that by attending the conference in person, I was also responsible for chairing a session. Session chairs arrive in the room prior to the start of the presentation and ensure that the presenters have arrived, there are no technical difficulties with A/V equipment, the timer is set up and ready to go, and the session starts and ends on time. The session that I chaired was titled “Better Together: The Inner Source Journey.” Presenters Aliza Carpio and Rocio Montes shared the findings of Intuit’s case study detailing its lessons from embarking on an inner source journey.

By now, you’re probably asking yourself, “What is inner source?” In brief, it is leveraging open source software development practices within your organization. Having been on teams that develop with and without these software practices, I can personally attest to the value of institutionalizing them. Not everyone will want to adopt new ways of working, some will have to be dragged kicking and screaming. Every journey starts with a champion(s), Aliza and Rocio are those brave individuals in this story.

If you work for a company with a large number of developers aligned with different business units, who have competing priorities, and are dispersed geographically, you are painfully familiar with the silos this can create. The challenges Aliza outlined for Intuit were:

  • Code was owned (not stewarded) by teams and individuals, which led to bottlenecks and long wait times for code changes
  • The waiting impacted work/life balance and created a culture of heroics to meet deadlines
  • Repositories lacked documentation, or the documentation was only good enough to be used by the people who already owned the code
  • Varying standards made it difficult to on board new members

So how do you ensure people can work together across the globe and still produce quality software? Rocio discussed three simple criteria to start. Make sure that repositories are:

  • Discover-able – Can people find it?
  • Contribute-able – Once they have found it, can they incorporate their changes?
  • Compose-able – Are there processes in place to ensure that new changes are non breaking?

This means that people, process, and technology changes must be instituted.

Process:

  1. Make sure there is ONE set of unified guidelines, including
    1. A standard structure for repositories
    2. A minimum set of documents to detail contribution guidelines
    3. Rules of engagement — how do you engage the stewards of the repository?
    4. Templates for issues and pull requests that auto-populate with the expected information
  2. Use containers for local development — it minimizes the time to onboard new developers by fully encapsulating the working environment (packages, software versions, etc.)
  3. Continuous Integration/ Continuous Deployment (CICD) must be a part of the process
    1. Pull Request (PR) Builds give contributors and reviewers the opportunity to review tests and coverage to determine quality

People:

  1. See every PR as a mentorship opportunity!
  2. If it does not already exist, a “trusted committer” role, held by the group of developers who have the knowledge to do code reviews, and will be responsible for code mergers and reviewers , should be created
  3. Hold code review training to ensure that consistency and quality is maintained for each PR
  4. Make the trusted committer role a rotating on call so the burden is dispersed and not only one person is responsible — those who are frequent committers will eventually become trusted committers.
  5. Have service level agreements (SLAs) for PR reviews, merge and release; declare and define the timelines so external contributors know what to expect and can plan accordingly
  6. Scale efforts by identifying passionate advocates and leaders at each site (by location) to ensure there is someone physically present to champion the transition, and to assist with the technical implementation
  7. Identify repositories and teams that provide foundational capabilities to the organization, those that are a dependency for many other teams, and bring them to inner source first.
  8. Establish rewards and recognition — work with leaders to make the transition a part of each engineer’s goals

Technology:

While this was not explicitly mentioned during the session, I want to take the liberty of calling out the technology behind the inner source transition. These are observations based on the internal tools and processes in place at my company to support developers so that tooling does not become an encumbrance.

  • Secure the necessary support and funding to internally or externally host the tools to enable the inner source journey
  • Work with IT to identify the CICD pipeline, revision control, and ticketing systems you intend to use; make certain they are interoperable, and integrate them as an enterprise offering.
  • If Agile is part of your Software Development Lifecycle, add additional integrated tools to support the work methodology
  • Allow adoption of the tools to be independent — some teams may be more mature, so they can adopt the entire suite of tools, whereas others may need to start with just revision control.
  • Maintain training collateral for the suite of tools, but have a means of requesting assistance with on boarding
    • Regular office hours where people can dial in for live assistance
    • A means of submitting tickets or requesting help

Tools that I have used in this space are:

*Tool used by Intuit

Back to the session.

What steps do you have to take to start this journey at your company?

  1. Get support from leaders (Vice President, Director, Architect, etc.) and identify partnerships
    1. If possible make these connections in person
  2. Research and beautify the standards; the unified standards; guidelines, documentation, rules should be hosted in a repository as well so that they can be treated as code
  3. Identify teams who will be models for the transition to inner source and work with them to bring other teams along
  4. Conduct workshops to teach teams how to live in the culture

Preparing to be a champion

Moving to inner source is not just a technology adoption, it is a change management journey. To champion the transition, you will need to be able to articulate the return on investment and the business value. Aliza mentioned multiple resources to help prepare for making the case:

You must be a storyteller. Take the time to craft your message so you can be effective at being a catalyst for change!

Helping drive success

When people are new to inner source, it can be overwhelming. Intuit created a “good first issues” site that highlights filed issues from various repositories that are great introductory problems to solve for a newbie. Projects have their issues highlighted on the site by labeling their issues with the appropriate tags, and have well documented contribution guidelines. This also gives engineers an opportunity to gain new skills by working on new projects.

Creating a visible badge for taking the training, becoming a contributor, and championing inner source helps foster pride in the transition.

Creating pride in participation

The final result.

Intuit is one year into their journey and are already seeing the benefits. It is not enough to have anecdotal stories, you want to measure the value added by the transition to inner source, through measurement, analysis and presentation of the results.

Measure and analyze data

Now you’re ready to embark on your journey! Safe travels.

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Technology

Smart Contracts using blockchain

By on Wednesday, October 16, 2019

One of the emerging trends in computing that everyone talks about, but can seldom articulate, is blockchain. What is that, you ask? If you’re like me, and haven’t done a deep dive, you’ve likely heard of it because of bitcoin, a cryptocurrency (digital money). I found a graphic that provides a nice high level description:

High level blockchain explaination

Where do people use blockchain? Anywhere you need to establish a trust relationship between applications to complete a transaction.

Now that we have a (fragile) foundation, we can dive into the GHC workshop I attended on Ethereum: A blockchain protocol with a complete built-in programming language. The workshop was presented by Julia Chou and Jenny Lu of Coinbase. Over the course of the workshop, we created a simple smart contract as a decentralized app (Dapp).

Prior to walking through the Dapp creation, Julia provided some context for the emergence of smart contracts and the use cases for blockchain.

Web 3.0: a peer to peer (decentralized) web, without servers or authorities to manage the flow of information, instead of the traditional client:server model, every client is also a server. This architecture avoids a single point of failure. In Web 3.0, browsers and wallets are able to represent identity and assets, allowing authentication and payment without using a bank or identity service. While this cuts out intermediaries for transfer of property, it leaves a gap in the establishment of trust (we trust lawyers and banks, we don’t trust unknown users with whom we’ve never interacted) — which is where the technologies we’ve discussed come into play: all processing is done via smart contracts using blockchain as the data storage and protocol.

Web 2.0 vs Web 3.0

Solidity was the language used in the workshop for developing the Ethereum smart contract. It is influenced by Javascript and C++. It is statically typed, compiled into Ethereum virtual machine bytecode, and is Object-Oriented. Ethereum is Turing complete, so a program could run infinitely — at great expense. To avoid this there is a concept called gas, tracked by ether (the Ethereum cryptocurrency), you can set a maximum amount of gas to expend, and if you run out, the program stops executing and rolls back the transaction. That is a very condensed description of a complex concept, so if you want to read more about gas, click here.

Now we can get into the workshop…

The workshop itself was intended to be completed over the course of an hour, and was targeted at (I believe) intermediate developers. The instructions are available here:https://github.com/jp3hou/dapp-demo, if you want to try it for yourself. The presenter slides are also available in the linked GitHub repository.

To complete the workshop, I will say that if you didn’t have Linux OS CLI (Ubuntu specifically), GitHub, and programming experience, you would have struggled to complete the exercise, there were a lot of assumptions. Before you start, you will need an Ubuntu OS or Windows 10 + WSL and Ubuntu, Chrome or other Metamask supported browser, and your IDE of choice; alternatively, you can use the online Solidity IDE .

The application we deployed was a simplification of the popular CryptoKitties. The core components:

And the underlying technology we used to create the Dapp:

I won’t take the time to walk through each step from the workshop, but would encourage you to follow the instructions from the GitHub Demo. Once you’ve completed the various steps to generate the test accounts, set up Metamask, and launch the Dapp, you can click on a kat to purchase it!

Successful kat purchase!

Security Concerns:

Hopefully you know a little more now than you did before. I certainly came away with my curiosity piqued!

Resources:

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Technology

Living on the Edge

By on Tuesday, October 15, 2019

With the growing number of intelligent devices (and by “intelligent” I mean: An internet connected device running some form of software that collects and performs actions on data), bringing intelligence to the Edge has become a more pervasive topic of discussion. What is “the Edge?” Computing devices physically located at the point of use running software that is running locally instead of in the cloud. The cloud? Remotely hosted computing services such as storage (think: Google Drive) and infrastructure (virtual machines) — these services depend on a network connection. This sets the stage for the session: Developing Embedded Intelligence: Opportunities on the Edge. It was led by a panelist of experts in the field:

Brenda Zhuong of MathWorks (moderator), Miriam Leeser of Northeastern University, Micheala Blott of Xilinx Research, Mary Ann Maher of SoftMEMS LLC , and Yan Wan from the University of Texas at Arlington.

Panelists for the Embedded Intelligence session

The high level considerations that were illuminated by the panel of experts were:

  • Improving intelligence through data analytics
  • Gaining efficiency by taking advantage of the hardware capabilities
  • Reducing dependency on the (internet) network by hosting data and services where they will be used.

We then got into some real-world use cases that demonstrate the power of harnessing intelligence at the Edge.

Gain Efficiency in Embedded Intelligence; Michaela Blott

Reduce cost through custom arithmetic

Urban Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based airborne computing for future Internet of Things; Yan Wan

UAV-based Emergency Communication

Developing an Artificial Kidney; Mary Ann Maher

Artificial Kidney

Considerations…

  • Seed neural networks with data coming from the actual environment so you can determine when sensors are malfunctioning — not all data is good data.
  • Understand power constraints — battery life has been a limitation
  • With all of the data being collected, privacy becomes paramount — always encrypting data at rest and in transit.

Some best practices…

If you plan to develop in this space, or are already working on a project, there are methodologies you can put into practice that will improve your solution. Here are a few:

  • There is so much sensor data, it is not possible, nor would it be advisable, to send all of it back to the cloud, which means the capability to do some level of analysis at the edge and send only the relevant data to the cloud is
  • Take advantage of cloud computing to simulate sensor data to rapidly design but then deploy at the edge.
  • Tagging quality data so you can establish a confidence in the sensor data with corresponding visualization (graphical representation) is crucial.
  • IoT devices tend not to have as much computing power, leveraging distributed computing models to perform calculations
  • Implement redundancy of sensors and computational devices in mission critical systems

Where do we go from here?

Computer vision and artificial intelligence are changing the landscape of computing. We have to improve the accuracy of vision sensors so that the data is reliable. The cost of quality vision sensors is prohibitive at the moment, and before development can really take off, it must come down. Research into correctness proofs is needed to verify algorithms developed for mission critical Edge workloads. Safety, especially for use cases like autonomous driving, is not a 90% correctness solution — it’s okay if your cell phone drops its connection, it is deadly if your car stops in the middle of an intersection. Portable IoT devices like ultrasound and water testing can bring life-saving technology to network constrained environments, and have the potential to revolutionize medicine.

The panelists were asked to make predictions for the next three years in Edge Intelligence (If any of these things come to pass, you heard it here first!) Some of them being:

  • Speech recognition as a human computer interface will become much more prevalent
  • Facial recognition will be integrated into more technology
  • Deployments of sensors and devices in rural areas will help to eradicate diseases
  • More innovative hardware platforms for IoT use cases

Recommended reading:

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Technology

(IoT) Mirror, Mirror on the wall

By on Thursday, October 3, 2019

My Grace Hopper conference schedule this year was largely driven by my interest in learning as much as I can about all things Internet of Things (IoT), retail, and edge computing. Why? I’m glad you asked! I recently joined the Internet of Things Group (IOTG) as a Software Architect in Retail, Banking, Hospitality, and Education (RBHE) <– Intel loves acronyms. I wanted to take the opportunity to learn what emerging technologies can be applied in retail settings, and understand some of the challenges that are present. My background is data center and cloud infrastructure automation, so the retail space and managing a heterogeneous set of devices with varying network architecture requires a different, or at least modified, set of tools.

My first session was titled: Mirror, Mirror on the Dressing Room Wall, What Looks Good with This Dress? Presented by Allison Youngdahl and Sunil Shettigar, of Accenture, this presentation explored how brick-and-mortar stores can improve customer experience and give better data to retailers by leveraging IoT.

We have grown accustomed to a very individualized experience online, but in real life (IRL), walking into a retail location is one size fits all. E-commerce sites track our behavior, purchasing history, make recommendations, and often have free shipping and returns to seal the deal…but, once we receive the item in hand, we’re likely to return it nearly 80% of the time. Why? Just Google “online purchase fail,” and you’ll find pages of hilarious results:

Try before you buy. Even after carefully measuring, online purchase fails are rampant

We want to touch and feel an item, in fact, shoppers who try an item in a store are seven times more likely to purchase it, so the dressing room plays a vital role in sealing the deal. Fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff leveraged technology — interactive mirrors paired with RFID tags and a video wall, in her stores to drive triple digit sales growth. So what is the architecture behind such a successful solution? Allison and Sunil presented the solution Accenture Labs partnered with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) to build.

The Retail Interactions Platform allows retailers to:

  • Understand the customer journey as they move through the store
  • Track total number of visitors in the store
  • Track item interaction from a clothing rack
  • Determine when an item is taken to a dressing room
  • Understand how item interaction leads to a purchase at the point of sale

Underlying technology:

  • Estimote Sticker Beacons (Bluetooth proximity sensors for physical objects)
  • Business Analytics – Calculate the product engagement score
  • Video analytics – heatmaps for traffic during peak hours
  • RFID Tags
  • MAC sniffers – Raspberry Pi with a WiFi adapter
  • Data visualization dashboard hosted on Google Cloud Platform
  • RESTful APIs

Product tracking was accomplished using RFID tags to “see” how the product moves through the store. Data streams from the various sensors were aggregated using Google Cloud. To track the number and frequency of visitors, the MAC sniffer identifies the MAC address of cell phones probes, which have a unique identifier, and quantify how long the individual was in the store as well as the frequency of visits. An engagement score was determined by capturing the XYZ coordinates of the product from the Estimote beacon (was it picked up and handled? For how long?); all of this is available in a dashboard.

Retail Interactions Platform Architecture
Visitor counting with data visualization

So how does this relate to mirrors?

Dressing room ambiance — temperature, lighting, music, can change how you feel about an item of clothing. Hate harsh, unflattering lighting that accentuates all of your flaws? So do I! So how can you make dressing rooms more hospitable places? Using the platform, you now have the product location, and with additional IoT devices in the dressing room, retailers can modify the environment, and also get immediate customer feedback on a product (new size needed? A different color?) to better serve you:

Mirror, Mirror in the dressing room, give me better lighting

The final take away was that retailers should focus on customer education, entertainment, and community. As much as an e-commerce site is convenient, it can never compete with a great experience IRL.

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Technology

GHC 2019 Opening Keynotes

By on Wednesday, October 2, 2019

There is a comprehensive run down of the opening keynotes for Grace Hopper 2019 available via the #GHC19 Daily Download. What follows are my personal reflections on the opening keynotes of this, my third Grace Hopper Conference.

I first attended GHC in 2009 in Tucson, AZ at a conference hall that would not accommodate a single large session today. My coworker and I volunteered as Hoppers helping to pack swag bags for the attendees, which we were able to complete with around 20 other women in the course of a couple of hours.

Grace Hopper Conference 2009, Tucson, AZ

The difference between then and now is night and day. Long lines whose wait times rival those at Disney, sprawling session locations that will help you exceed your steps goal for the day three times over (my fitness tracker captured 22,135 steps), and 30 minute shuttle rides to and from the conference center. What has not changed is the awe, inspiration, and hope I feel walking into a room filled with women in technical roles. As I have progressed in my career, the number of rooms I find myself in where that is the case, has become fewer and further between.

The message communicated by every speaker this morning was that we must be advocates for one another, it is our responsibility to:

  1. Increase the visibility of other women
  2. Commit to help by getting involved
  3. Bring others with us

When all voices are not part of the conversation, the very technology we depend on to make the world a more open and inclusive place, can become rife with bias–through no fault or intention of the creators, a simple blind spot is enough. Though inadvertent, the end result is the same; solutions that are normalized on a standard that does not accurately represent the population.

The unique perspective that Ana Roca Castro brought to her career in technology, allowed her to contextualize her solutions for Genius Plaza through the lens of culturally relevant content. She inherently understood that we cannot aspire to be what we do not see. The history of colonization had removed many of the contributions made by the colonized people. By reincorporating their language and history, Ana helped young children and their parents to connect to what they thought did not include them; now, they could see themselves represented.

Dr. Natalya Bailey was told that in order to be more successful, she needed voice lessons to lower the register she spoke in to be taken seriously, change her leadership model to be more aggressive, and step aside as CEO. Fortunately, she opted not to follow that sage advice. She instead went on to raise over $25 Million in capital for Accion systems, using her high-pitched voice, and she is still CEO today. Natalya encouraged us to trust who we are, celebrate our differences, and own our strengths. By conforming to established norms, we would fall victim to the same blind spots that plague us today for fear of being seen as different — but we are there to speak for those not in the room; if not us, who?

Neural Net Innovator, Dr. Fei Fei Li was discouraged from pursuing her desire to create an image database that would serve as the foundation for machine learning in computer vision, she was told it could be career ending. She had never been made to feel so small. Three years later with the help of her graduate students, ImageNet, a database of 14 Million images (and growing), was born. Dr. Li told us that it is okay to feel small, in fact, feeling small compared to the vast Universe is what lead her to marvel at how the mind works and piqued interest in teaching machines to learn using images. What she also wanted us to know is that though we may feel small at times, together, we are big enough to accomplish anything.

Aicha Evans spoke mainly about her path to CEO at Zoox, but it was her opening quote that impacted me most:

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” – Marie Curie

Simply put: we fear what we do not understand. This made me think about the fear that comes with change. When we speak about making room at the table, that can make many feel afraid. There is a fear that bringing more voices to the conversation will drown out those already present; that inclusion for some, means exclusion for others — which couldn’t be further from the truth; exclusion excludes. Which brings me to the final speaker of the morning: Jhillika Kumar.

Jhillika’s unique perspective on inclusion came from the first hand experience of watching her autistic brother struggle to fully participate in life without the primary means to communicate that most of society uses; he had never spoken. In watching her brother interact with an iPad, Jhillika saw him come alive in ways he had never demonstrated, and she wondered — what would happen if we brought all of the unique perspectives of the roughly 14% of differently abled members of our society to tackle problems in technology? How many Temple Grandin’s might we be missing because we haven’t changed our thinking?

That point was driven home many years ago for me when attending a leadership program and a wheelchair bound man spoke about housing standards. He mentioned how counter heights, outlets, door widths, and many other items in a home that have to be retrofitted at great expense for someone in his condition, would have been easy to include in the standard for everyone with no impact to the majority — if his community had only been a part of the initial standards decision making process. It was eye opening. As cliched as it may sound, we are blind to what we cannot see.

I have heard it said that “I don’t see differences, I just see people,” but that is not accurate. As the speakers illustrated through their stories, we are all processing the many unique characteristics we see in people every day — in fact, we want to teach machines to do it. To the women (men, and non-binary) attendees of GHC, I want to say: I see your differences, and they are beautiful, they are valuable, they are important, so let’s bring them everywhere we go, and maybe together, we can change the world a little.

Grace Hopper 2019, Orlando, FL
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Writing

Ain’t I A Woman?

By on Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Thoughts on receiving an abnormal pap and waiting for biopsy results.

Sojourner, I feel your words.
is womanhood only in my womb?
Is femininity defined only by my ability to bring life?
lately, I’ve been thinking twice
what if my body is a tomb

if I am like infertile ground, unable to bear fruit,
ain’t I a woman?

If no seed will ever take root…
ain’t I a woman?

Suddenly I am aware of my 27 years
3 years from 30
My mind is trying to calm the fears
That only one heart will ever beat within me
That I will never have a biological copy

If I never suffer labor pains,
ain’t I a woman?

If no child will carry on my name,
ain’t I a woman?

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Music

a waste of time?

By on Friday, March 23, 2007

i have been neglecting my blog, but not without good reason. i try to write only when i feel that i have something remotely interesting to share, although that is debatable…

i am very late on this one, this song has been out for quite some time, but about a month ago, i heard wouldn’t get far. at first, i was taken aback by the lyrics. i thought “what an ignorant song to make, how much more will women take??” i watched a hip hop documentary that aired on PBS a couple of weeks (or was it months?) ago, and it broached the topic of mysogeny in hip hop. i remember thinking at the time that women should take more ownership of their image(s) and voice(s), which got me to thinking about “exploitation.”

there is no black and white here, the whole thing is one giant gray area. the industry demands sex, it sells. as long as the demand exists, so will the supply. it wouldn’t matter if one girl walked off of a video set refusing to appear scantily clad, there would be 100 more willing to take her place. how can men respect women if women don’t respect themselves? but why should men disrespect women, regardless of how they represent themselves? why is it ever acceptable that any man’s excuse for acting out of turn would be “you saw how she was dressed, she was asking for it.” and then there is the age old double standard: a promiscuous woman is viewed differently than a promiscuous man. i think in the end, it boils down to who has the power.

the person in the position to wield control over the outcome of someone elses “success” has the potential to exploit. yet, anyone who compromises themselves to get what they want, and then makes excuses for the reasons, is delusional. i don’t buy “i had no other choice.” it’s a needs versus wants, and we live in a society that values material things. a person needs food, shelter, and a means of income. what they don’t need is caviar, a mansion on the hills, and a multi-million dollar salary. some people want fame, fortune, and excess, and they will do whatever it takes to get a piece of the action.

i suppose when all is said and done, the game wrote a song that is blunt and truthful. as much as the women are indicted for using their femeninity to make it, men are equally as responsible. after all, if sex wasn’t currency with them, it wouldn’t be used as a form of payment.

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