 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in San Francisco at DockerCon 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer on a stunning day here in San Francisco. This event draws between 5,000 and 6,000 people in only its fifth year. They did a very good job during the general session this morning, John, of having some great female leaders on stage, and we're very pleased to welcome another female leader to theCUBE for the first time. Alex Chen, you are the director of technology at GACA. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here. So you're speaking here at DockerCon 2018. I want to get to that in a second, but tell us a little bit about GACA. What do you guys do? Yeah, so we're a global education design studio based in Tokyo and in New York, and what we do is we put on experimental education programs and build experimental education technology that aim to reclaim the magic of learning. So we put on summer camps, we have coding classes, music classes, and we build software for early learners. And my early learners, what age group are you talking about? So age three to five, what we build is beautiful story and art driven apps for kids age three to five to be able to spend time more thoughtfully on tablets because nowadays, you know, kids are always on tablets no matter what we do, and so what we want to do is create a world that they can be in in which parents feel like this is a good place for my child to spend time. They're learning, it's artful, it's thoughtfully built. Great, well Alex, you are also the founder of the Code Collective. The Code Cooperative, yes. Code Cooperative, I'm sorry. How did you get started with that, and can you tell us a little bit about that as well? Yes, so the Code Cooperative is my passion project and I started it in 2016, the day after the presidential elections actually, and it's an organization that teaches formerly incarcerated individuals computer literacy and coding so that they can build websites and technical solutions to the problems they've identified in the criminal justice system. Some examples of that might be? Yeah, so a story I'd love to tell is from the pilot class, I had one student who was a 65 year old man and he'd been in prison for over 20 years, and so at 65, he took our class and he learned HTML, CSS and JavaScript and built a website that aims to educate visitors about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the criminal justice system today. It was like an interactive quiz. Yeah, that was really cool. It was called The Criminal Injustice System. Nice, nice. What were some of the drivers that really led you to go, you know what, we've got a huge opportunity here to take some of these people who have had some, made some different choices and really sort of rehabilitate them in a way that's going to enable tech for good. What were some of the things that we just went, we've got to do this? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, I read the book, The New Jim Crow, which you may have heard of. It's an incredible book that really details a lot of the problems that exist today within the U.S. criminal justice system and I thought to myself, I want to learn more about the justice system and contribute positively to justice system reform, but I don't know anything about it. So what I should do is work with people who have been through the system, learn from them and empower them to highlight the issues that they see within the justice system. And that's something that I think is really important when it comes to building technology. Right now, the gatekeepers of tech are kind of a homogenous group and we tend to build tech solutions for the entire world, but actually the people who are best equipped to solve problems are those who have experienced them. And so that's why I decided to start the Code Cooperative. Nice, Alex, you're talking here, you've got an interesting titled session. Can you, let's, I'll make sure I get it right. Shaving my head made me a better programmer. I, if I can connect that to the rest of DockerCon maybe. I mean, Docker has been very good their whole history about developer experience, making things easier for people. And I think sometimes people don't realize not only when you make things easier, you actually can bring in new audiences, kids, prisoners, right, are able to use today's technology where they probably, 30, 40 years ago, they wouldn't have had access to it because it's easier, it's more powerful, it's more ubiquitous. But sometimes we get stuck in old tropes and so I'm curious, I'd love for you to kind of talk a little bit about your talk and kind of what you're going to be talking about here at the show. Sure, yes. So my talk is called shaving my head made me a better programmer and it's a little bit of a misleading title. But basically it's the story of my journey through the tech industry as a minority woman. So I studied computer science and I've been a software engineer for my entire career and yet I've encountered a lot of challenges because of my gender, because of, you know, how I present to the world and when I shaved my head a lot of those challenges kind of disappeared because I wasn't perceived as feminine anymore and so when I realized that tech isn't the meritocracy that I thought it was, I kind of started on this new quest to make tech as diverse and inclusive as possible so that people from all backgrounds, all genders can learn to code and write code happily and, you know, safely. And it's just the story of how that happened and the lessons I've learned and some tips on how to make organizations more inclusive because that's the bulk of my work now. So you were a CS major in New York? Yeah. So were you always interested in STEM as a kid or was it something that you got into when you were in college? What was that sort of age that you found it really exciting and said no matter what, if there's very few women here, I love this, I want to do this? That's a great question. So I am originally from France actually and when I was growing up there was really little like, you know, computer science education in schools but I really wanted to be an astronaut when I got to college so I joined the engineering program at my school and I'd never coded at that point but one of the requirements was an intro to programming class in Python so I took it and I fell in love with it immediately and I was like I'm majoring in computer science, this is so cool, this is the coolest thing I've ever done and then as I entered the computer science world I realized like, oh, there's not that many women here and actually like I'm treated very differently so I fell in love with it and then because I love it so much I just kind of powered through. Your passion is very palpable so at any point did you feel sort of out of place going I'm one of the only females here or did you say, I don't care, I like this? Yeah, it's both, I mean you feel out of place when there's very few of you of people who look like you in the room even if you don't want to feel out of place even if you try to pretend that's not the case you can't help but feel that and when I was starting out and throughout my career people didn't necessarily want to work with me didn't believe I was a good programmer even though I was at the top of all my classes and so even though I tried to make the most out of my experience I couldn't really escape the stigma attached to my gender in this field. Alex, we're an interesting part of our culture now I suppose, especially online. On one hand social media has elevated a lot of folks' voices that would not have been heard otherwise because of gatekeepers, on the other hand we have our current online discourse which is kind of not very pleasant sometimes. So I am interested both kind of how you're navigating that online and then maybe as a follow up then as you work with companies how you're working with them and what you're telling them but I mean in terms of online I love Twitter and yet it frustrates me Facebook as well, et cetera. How do you navigate that online yourself? That's a great question. Honestly I have been kind of rich reading from social media I haven't really experienced too many negative interactions on social media because I not really a big presence there. I did kind of have a really bad experience once during a Grace Hopper conference. I tweeted something during the male Ally panel of like 2015 or something and that got picked up by some Gamergate writers and then like a lot of people started tweeting negative things at me but that's kind of the extent of my negative experiences online. I do think that social, as you say social media has allowed for uplifting of voices that were previously unheard has allowed for activism to organize. There's so many positive things that come from social media and also it has a really nefarious effect on people and I think that something needs to change in terms of how these companies build their software. It needs to be safer for all people and also needs to be built more ethically less trying to manipulate our psyches. You know? That's I think super important. I think luckily, I mean at least that's a conversation now right Lisa that at least Facebook and I mean I think eventually as a society will I hope we'll get through this and figure this out but I don't feel like we're particularly literate with social at this point. But I did want to ask about your work with companies as you're talking with, you said you do talk with some companies about diversity and things like that. Is there any either signs that folks are getting it right or things that you start off with as you're working with different, if someone asks, you know, how do we become a more diverse workforce? Yeah, that's a good question. I can't really point to any companies that I say are doing amazing. There are some companies where I know folks are very happy. Slack is one of them. You know, Thoughtbot is another one of them. I'll say Gakko. But a few tips that I generally give organizations is that you need to work to understand the problem. Why is there a lack of diversity in tech? Why is your team not diverse? Then you need to measure your data. You can't make a positive change if you don't know how much you're changing, right? So gather diversity data on your team not just in terms of who's there but who's in a leadership role. Who gets promoted, who gets fired? Who's a manager? And then you need to commit. Like that's I think the place where a lot of people struggle is, you know, there's a lot of candidates who fit this kind of homogeneous image of what a programmer is. And so it can be easy sometimes to just be like, well, we need to hire someone right now. So let's just hire this person. But in order to actually make a change, you need to commit and you need to say, I'm not going to compromise on the goals that we've set. You're absolutely right. That commitment word is exactly what's needed to drive that accountability and hold organizations up to that. I was just at VMware a couple of weeks ago in Palo Alto at the Women Transforming Technology event. And we had a whole day of all talking with females in tech, which I always love to do. And theCUBE is very passionate about supporting that. But cultural, the cultural change is imperative. You know, we talk about digital transformation at every event and there's the CIO that says, hey, we have to change the culture here to transform digitally, but also to start moving those numbers from what? Less than 25% of tech roles are held by women. The culture has to change. It seems like you're in a position potentially to actually influence the culture at these companies that you talk to about opening their eyes to commit. Does that excite you from within? Yes, yeah, I do talk to a lot of organizations about this, but I think the work that I do that might actually tip the scale is basically the education programs that I run in New York. All of my classrooms are reflected diversity of New York, both in terms of student and teacher body. So like all of my students learn in an environment that is extremely diverse. They learn from teachers who look like them and I wish I learned to code in that way. And another important thing that we teach our students is how to code as an ethical endeavor. So we teach our students to measure the ethical ramifications of their decisions when they build software so that hopefully, the technologists of tomorrow, the CTOs of tomorrow, they build code in a way that is best for humanity. They build code with empathy. We're going back to your day job. You're working with kids. We talked about getting through social media, cultural change. It's going to depend on the next generation. So Alex, are the kids all right? Are they going to save us? The kids are pretty all right. I mean, so my classroom is basically coding meets social entrepreneurship. So all of our kids build an app that solves a problem they've identified in their communities and these kids are just coming up with the most beautiful solutions, like more brilliant than like any adult that I've met. I feel good about the future. Well it's key to get those different perspectives and when you were saying, they're having the opportunity to code and create apps that are relevant to them. That's where you could really ignite that passion. Exactly, that's so important. It is important because when you're passionate about something, and we saw that on stage today with a lot of the Docker folks and Microsoft and McKesson, when you're passionate about something and really making a change, you can feel it. So it's good to hear that we're going in the right direction, but also you know, we're in this age there and you talked about ethics where it's essential, because technology, we see a lot of examples of where tech is not used for good. And there's you know, world leaders are getting some of the leaders of tech companies together saying, I'm challenging you, make tech for good because we're seeing too much of the negative right now. How does that influence, you know, whether it's the breaches at Equifax or there was a breach recently at MyHeritage so the DNA testing companies to Cambridge Analytica how do you see that the kids, the young kids respond to that going, that's a really poor use of tech. Are they aware of that? I think some kids are, and in our classroom we spend some time talking about, we have discussions about ethics of software. So that's something that's very important to us. But largely, most classrooms in the United States know. I mean, computer science education is not a standard in most classrooms in the US, in New York State only 1% of high schoolers actually have access to any kind of computer science education. And so most kids, you know, they might hear tidbits from like the TV or social media or something but they're not necessarily informed enough to make one, good decisions as consumers and two, good decisions as potential technologists. So that's something that we're trying to spread and that I hope other folks are also trying to work on. Another thing that I think is shocking is when we were at the Women Transforming Technology event just a few weeks ago at VMware in Palo Alto, they just announced with Stanford, Stanford's investing $15 million into their gender research, VMware and Stanford wanting to look at what are the barriers for women in tech and minorities in tech and starting to dissolve some of those barriers. One of the things that they actually had in their press release of announcing this big $15 million investment from VMware in Stanford is a McKinsey report that said 20%, or sorry, enterprise organizations that have females in management positions, probably executive management positions, didn't specify positions, are 20% more profitable. And I just, you just think, the numbers are saying when you have more thought diversity you're actually going to be a more profitable organization but I think to your point earlier Alex there has to be a commitment and there has to be a group within an organization that stands accountable. Absolutely. So we are thankful for you, donating some of your time today to talk to us about what you're doing. It's good to hear that the next generation, John, I think they got our backs. All right, that's good. And Alex, have a great time with your very provocative session this afternoon. We thank you so much for your time and it's really cool to hear how you're using your passion for tech for good. Thank you so much, it was great to be here. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer from San Francisco at DockerCon 2018. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest.