 Live from Houston, Texas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Houston, Texas for their exclusive coverage of Anita Borg's Women in Tech Celebration. Grace Hopper Celebration Women in Computing. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE's Look at Ankles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm joined with Jeff Frick, my co-host, and Natalia Rodriguez, software developer, indicative also on the trustee board of trustees of Anita Borg. So welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, I'm happy to be here. So you're now no longer a student but you just graduated, congratulations. Thanks. And you've been doing some great stuff. What are you working on? So right now, I'm working on three things concurrently. So I'm the board member, like you said. And last week I was at Apple headquarters of Hispanic Heritage Month launching Technologicas. That's like a side thing for my real job, which is being a software developer at a data analysis startup. So talk about, you just graduated, talk about your journey through school. You know, there's a lot of conversation about there's not enough women in the classes. You know, how did you get involved in computer science? How did you, you know, kind of stick with it? What are some of the challenges you had to overcome to get to graduation day in May? Yeah. My trajectory isn't straight and clear. I was a journalism major. I was editor-in-chief. You're a journalism major. Well, no, I ended up being a CS major. Right, right, but you started. For the first two years, yeah. I was like a journalism major. I was editor-in-chief of the magazine. I interned for Fast Company. And while at Fast Company, I really enjoyed writing about tech. And I had taken CS1 and CS2 and my professors had both been female and like pulled me to the side and been like, hey, you're getting good grades. You should consider this. So it was a mix of being at Fast Company and writing about tech and having really good professors encouraged me. So then I ended up switching gears during your year and I squeezed it into two years and then graduated. And what was the moment that you said, hey, you know, I could do this? Because that's just a typical experience that we hear from women in school where it's like, yeah, the male-dominated computer science. I'm a computer science major, but I'm a lot, it was in the 80s back then. But you had a natural inclination. Was there a moment? Did you ever think about CS as a major seriously? And what was that moment where you, was it the motivation from the professors? What was that moment you had the tipping point? I think it was in a moment. It was a combination of them, right? So I had the class with the professors. She encouraged me. But while at Fast Company, I met Becky Stern over at Adafruit. She does wearable tech. She's amazing. And you should check out her YouTube channel. She does like a wearable Wednesday and she hacks clothes on an Arduino every week and it's amazing. But that being said, I saw her tinkering with a plush game controller and I wrote a story about it and I was like, I could do this. Like I could do this full time. Like I am sold. But- You got hooked. Yeah, I got hooked. Yeah, so it was where you kind of had your interest. You just got excited by that. I'm a big advocate for that avenue as an introduction for young girls. I think doing tangible technology can be a huge door to that girl's end. So play, almost like a playful experience. Don't do it for the discipline of it. You know, it's like eating spinach. If you eat spinach, you'll be strong, right? I love maker, I love the maker movement, yeah. What's the coolest thing in maker movement you like right now? Ooh, IoT is huge, right? So I saw somebody build a rat cage with an Arduino to like trap a rat in their house because they want it to be humanitarian about the way they trap rats. So it would alarm them when a rat went into the cage and then they could let it out in the wild. And it would trigger automatically and then catch the rat. Yeah. So now you found your passion in wearables, so what are you working on now that you got a real job? Yeah, so my passion is in both wearables and data visualization. Okay. And at Indicative, what we do is we, our data analysis company for Enterprise, and we have different tools that are data visualization tools for the information on the website of the customer journey. So off Monday, when I go back to work, I'll be working on D3, which is one of the main libraries in JavaScript for coding data visualizations. What's the biggest thing that you're seeing here for the folks that aren't here? We're seeing a lot of tweets like, I wish I was there, there's a fear of missing out vibe going on in the community. I'm sure you're probably hearing the same thing. What is that, what's going on here for the folks that aren't here? Share your perspective of the day's events here, the floor, the sessions, the vibe, content. So I think one of my main messages to anybody who hears about Grace Hopper is that it's also a technical conference. There's a bunch of different tracks for whatever topic you're interested in tech. It's one of those very diverse conferences where we have like a security track, a data visualization track, we have an IoT track. And so on the floor right now, you'll be meeting as a girl here, you'll be meeting up to friends, but you'll also be meeting the speakers, right? So you'll go to these different tracks of whatever you're interested in. And then afterwards, you get to talk to the speakers and there's like this, like a quality approach, anyone you want to feel about the conference. Like nobody is above anybody, everybody's here to meet each other. And they're sharing a lot of information. Yeah, right. So like Megan Smith, she's on the floor and you can just go up to her, the CTO of the United States. Susan Vujiki, she's on the floor, you can just go up to her and talk to her. It's amazing. Have you had a chance to talk to them? Well, I'm on the board. So last year I got to talk to Megan Smith and it wasn't because I was on the board. It was actually just because I was walking around, she was there. So how many years have you been coming to Grace Hopper? It's my second year. It's only growing. It's 4,000 more than last year and projected numbers are the same for next year. It's exciting. And then talk about, again, it's unique. I love the diversity of age ranges that are involved with Anita Board and Grace Hopper. So you're on the board. You said there's two student board members. What's it like being on the board? You know, what kind of energy do you guys get to bring from that perspective? There's 40 board members all together. Talk a little bit about Anita Board as an organization and then what you see from your board seat. Yeah. So ABI about seven years ago decided that there was a need for a younger voice on the board. Everybody on the board, the majority of them are pretty executive and high level. And they were like, you know, 30% of our conference attendees are students. We should probably have somebody sitting at the table with that perspective. So then they were like, we're going to have a student seat. And then recently we just added a mid-career seat. So it's not just executives. We have Hillary Mason, who spoke on Monday, who's like a young entrepreneur who started her own startup, who is also now on the board, right? So getting that diversity, not just in race, but in age is very crucial. We want to be putting on the best conference that's exclusive to everybody. And the only way you can achieve that is by having everybody be represented at the board What's your advice to other students out there? You know, my daughter's a freshman in college. She's my oldest daughter. I got another freshman in high school. My observation, I'm a dad of a daughter, DOD, we were calling it, is that they don't necessarily want to jump into computer science, but they have a hacker mindset, kind of a similar experience you had where they're gravitated towards tech. They're just smart, they're science driven. They get, well, biology's safe. There's almost that vibe of, no, no, I don't want to be labeled like a computer scientist per se. That's my observation. But yet they have natural tendencies, like as you were observing your career. So what's your advice to girls out there who are like, you know, what to do? How to think about? What's the mindset? What not to be afraid of? What to be, what to avoid? What to be afraid of? What to watch out for? And what to be mindful for? Right. So my first inclination is that you can't make a judgment about what CSS is until you try it. So in order to try it, you have to be a little bit interested in it. And I think finding an intersection of whatever your daughter's interested in, if, I don't know, is she interested in making stuff with her own hands, knitting, or if she's interested in like being really hip about the journalism she reads, or it could be anything really. Technology is everywhere. Every industry needs it. So whatever she's interested in, start with that. Just be like, all right, so you like watching YouTube videos, why don't we make a project to analyze how people are watching it? Trying it is, I think that first step of just trying coding, debunked any mix. Start with interest, the interest is. And technology, there will be technology there, right? There's always technology behind every interested opportunity. Yeah, so their first project should be in something they're interested in. And did you guys get to see the Plenary Hour of Code? No. So Code.org has Hour of Code. Literally, they just have to put in one hour and it's super accessible. And then I think that'll demystify a lot of the misconceptions they have about the field. Yeah, that's great. Well, thanks so much for sharing your insight. What's on your plan for the next couple of weeks and months, now that you're out in the real world, graduating, graduate agents, tell us about your plans. Technologicas has been taking a lot of my time. I'll give a shout out, technologicas.org. And that's the video campaign to promote us in our diversity. And I was at DC last week. I was at San Francisco last week teaching young girls their program. So I'll be doing that for the next two months, kind of just launching the campaign and spreading the word about it. And the campaign mission is very simple. It's, we want to create role models and we want to make the information accessible to the parents. Where do people go to get more information on the campaign? Technologicas.org. Technologicas.org, excellent. Thank you. Thanks so much. It's theCUBE live here on the floor at Houston, Texas for the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. Thank you.