 Yeah, so I think I'm ready to start. You guys are? OK, cool. Yeah, so I'm Elizabeth Wainer. I work at BuzzFeed, which the main office BuzzFeed is in New York. But I'm based in one of the smaller offices in Minneapolis. And yeah, our office is all tech, except we have three contract workers making video now. So we're trying out some video making in Minneapolis. So that's exciting. But otherwise, we have a big web team. We have iOS. And we have Android. And that's it. So often when I leave the office, there's people outside. Oh, you write things for BuzzFeed? Not what you're thinking. And they're disappointed. But it's still really cool. But yeah, before I worked at BuzzFeed, I was an astronomer. And I was a physics professor. And yeah, so I made the switch. And I'm going to talk about how I did that. And I don't know if people were here for the last two talks, but they were building a theme here today, I think. So yeah, so what I used to do, I did my degree in astronomy. I did research on interacting galaxies. Involved some code. Involved using telescopes, a lot of other stuff. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. And what I do now is work at BuzzFeed. So I kind of swim in the soup bowl of lulls, which is fun. And in some ways, it's different. It's very different. In other ways, it's not that different, because both of them are a lot of sitting and writing code. So just a little overview. I'll just tell you a little bit about myself. Talk about the switch, like me making the switch and resources I used. Highlight a few other resources that are available. And give some general tips and advice. And also, because a lot of you here are in tech right now and probably aren't making a switch, that ways that you could maybe, ideas I have of how to support other people who are making a similar transition. So yeah, I have my PhD in astronomy. And then I traveled a lot when I got that. I did two post-docs, one in Canada, one in the Netherlands. And then I went to Philadelphia to do a visiting assistant professorship. And then I actually joined the tenure track for three years, which is what brought me to Minneapolis. I'm from Ohio originally. So yeah, it involved a lot of travel, which was part of the fun. This is one of the telescopes I used a lot. There's a one meter telescope down in Kipke, Arizona. And we'd go down and sit in the cold and the mountaintop, and hopefully collect some data. Took a lot of students with me down over the years to train them, which is a lot of fun. Even got some of them writing Python code toward the end. So yeah, this is probably one of the better parts of the job, getting to see sunsets like this. And then after the sunset, collecting data on objects like this. Yeah, so this is an interacting galaxy pair, which is the main thing I worked on. And in a lot of ways, it was like archeology, because you can't really watch a galaxy interact. It takes millions of years, if not longer. And so in order to learn about galaxy interactions, you have to just look at them in different stages and try to figure out what's going on. And you can see things like stars that got flung over here, over here. And you can try to calculate the gravitational forces that went into that and realize, oh, maybe this is what happened. For example, this is Centaurus A. It's one of our cool supermassive galaxies in a nearby cluster. And it's got this weird dust cloud thing, which means it probably ate a neighbor in galaxy at some point. I think actually it's eaten a lot of them. And then otherwise, it's a very smooth elliptical. This bright light is not a single star, but is actually like millions and millions of stars that are diffuse. And so the part that I did was if we, and this next image is not mine, I cannot take credit for it, but the type of work that I did is looking at the really faint thing. So you can actually use software to fit the profile of the light. And you can subtract it from the image. And when you do that, you can see there's a whole nother set of structure that is revealed. And so this galaxy actually, while this looks like maybe it ate a disc galaxy, these ripples probably come from a small galaxy dropping in, almost as if a pebble into a pond and forming ripples. So there's a lot you can learn. This is a galaxy that I worked on, sometimes called the bow and arrow galaxy, or the archer galaxy. And just kind of shrink that down a little bit. And when we looked at the faint outer areas of it, I found, so here's the inner bow and arrow, and this is some outer debris. We found that there's more debris out here, there's debris here, and there's a big loop over here. And so that was one of the projects I worked on early on and I went and revisited it later with a student. We got even deeper, better imaging. And we got to analyze that. It was very interesting. You can learn time scales, like when we think this thing collided and how we think it progressed. So that was the kind of stuff I did. And a lot of the code I wrote early on was an IDL. Has anyone ever used IDL? Yeah, a little bit, yeah. Yeah, it does a lot of cool things. And then, you know, my spouse is in tech, so he would try to get me to switch over from time to time to use a different programming language. And he'd be like, yeah, you should try, you know, Ruby, it's great. And I'd be like, how does it handle arrays? Like, let's talk about this. Because I have, you know, huge arrays of stars and I need to calculate them. And with IDL, you can kind of throw arrays around very easily. And it was only Python that actually met my standards for switching eventually, so. So toward the end of my time in astronomy, I got one of my students working in Python. I started learning it myself. And it's really great. There's a lot of resources out there. There's NumPy or NumPy, depending on how you feel like saying that. And then there's AstroPy, which is evolving a lot. And there's a lot of great resources. So my student Maria wrote all this awesome code to take in these images, move them around, stack them, do a lot of statistics. So Python was really handy for that. And in my mind, I kind of had an idea that maybe I was gonna be making a career transition. And so some of them, the motivation to learn Python instead of continuing to work in IDL, came from there. So you might be thinking, well, astronomy sounds pretty cool. And so is coding, obviously. But if you're in one cool area, why would you wanna necessarily leave? I had, there were a lot of motivations. Yeah. After a while, you start to realize like your whole subsistence relies on writing more grant proposals. That gets really old, really fast. And then you also, as you make your way through and gain more rank, you get asked to read other people's grant proposals. It's even less fun. It's not good. And then teaching is a lot of fun. You have some great moments with students, not gonna knock it. But then there's things like grading homeworks. Yeah. So, and you look into a future of grading them over and over again. And I was at a university that didn't have resources for having graders. So that might have made a difference. But ultimately the real problem is that like any environment, the academic environment can be really toxic. And I think in fact, academia is a little more prone to it than others because there's so much of a like a apprenticeship model. So the student is very much in a way at the mercy of the professor and the junior faculty is very much at the mercy of the senior faculty members. And it's not specific to one place. It's just kind of built into the way it is. You always need that letter of recommendation to get the next job, to get postdoc, to get tenure, whatever. And so some people are great in that environment. Other people are like, hey, I'm king of this castle now and it's great. So yeah, so I just found myself in a place that was not very compatible with me. And I kind of spent my first two years trying to convince myself that everything was fine. And that stopped working. You can see toward the end, I'm sure you guys have seen the fine, this is fine dog before. But yeah, you can see his face starts melting sort of like that. So then my last year on the tenure track, I was like, I need to get out of here. Can't do this anymore. And the table flipping began. Yeah, so I started realizing, going into my third year, I was like, I need a plan. I can't just, you know, I have a kid and yeah, my spouse works, I'm lucky. I have some support, but you know, there's still student loans we're paying off. It's not like a, it's not an easy thing to make a change. So yeah, so I realized I needed to make a plan and I started working on the weekends toward that plan. And one thing I realized when I would have a lot of days that were frustrating in my previous job were that the days that I spent trying to get some piece of code to work to do what I wanted it to do were the best days. And so I was like, you know, maybe I should just do that. That sounds like a great idea. So yeah, I wasn't sure at all how to do this. I was like, looking back on it now, it seems kind of like, oh, I did this and then I did this and then I did this. But like at the time it was like, I have no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea how to do this. I have no idea who to talk to. This is, it felt really hard. So one of the first things I lucked into, this someone in Minneapolis in our community ran an unleashed breakfast series and it was like a one time thing that never happened again as far as I can tell. And it was just four weeks where they had breakfast and then a couple hours of chatting and they talked about things like, yeah, figuring out your own confidence and your worth, but also like re-examining. One of the things that I think really helped me was we spent some time trying to examine what our values were and trying to figure out how to prioritize what they were. And so we had some people talk about the different pillars of what keeps them rooted and we spent time thinking about ourselves. And I really, they had us make a list and I was like, nowhere on this list does academia appear. This was kind of an insight for me. Like I guess I'm ready to go. Yeah, so that was really helpful. I don't know how to duplicate that, but I would say just like keep an eye out open for something, especially if it's short, it's kind of low commitment. I wasn't sure if it was gonna be cheesy or if it was gonna be great. It turned out to be great, so that was good. But you can try things and see how they go. So then making the switch, there were a lot of resources that I personally used and I kind of started here at the American Astronomical Society and ended up here at BuzzFeed. These were some of the main ones that were useful to me along the way. So the first one was in the winter of my last year, I signed up for a Python workshop at the American Astronomical Society. It was really great. It was oriented towards scientists. They kind of met us at our universe where we were. Astronomers love TC Shell, for example, and I don't know anyone else who uses it. Maybe there's people out there? Any love for TC Shell? No? Yeah, yes, okay. Oh, okay, yeah, there you go. So yeah, so that was kind of neat. They're like, here, we'll help you get Python running in your TC Shell. So that was really a comfortable way to kind of get a good introduction. And that was run by Software Carpentry. And they go around and I think you can actually book them to an event. So if you're a company and you want to get more people into Python, that might be an option. So then I had a bit of Python under my belt and I realized, okay, I need more. So I took this online course from Coursera, the Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python. Has anyone taken that one? Nice, a few people. Yeah, I think they've since broken it up into a few smaller courses, but I found it worked really well for me because it was an online course that had peer grading and it had deadlines. So I find like I really need some external deadlines in order to just keep myself on task. So that was great. Yeah, you had to get it in by a certain time to get your peer grade and you had to do the peer grading or you got docked points on your assignment. So it was really good. And I made Asteroids game. I'm sure you guys did too, great. Yeah, and I felt like I really started to learn Python in a web environment, which was a bit different than doing it in a science context. Another resource that I leaned heavily on was Girl Develop It. The Minneapolis chapter is fantastic. I do think there's a chapter here. I don't know much about it, but it probably is also fantastic. And I took the intro in intermediate HTML and CSS and then I also took both courses of the intermediate JavaScript. And so that again kind of like nudged me more in a web direction. I found it really valuable to learn in a woman-only environment. I think for our JavaScript class, like literally the only guy was the guy who came and set up the projector and then left. And it's just there's less stereotype threat that you're subjected to by yourself. I guess stereotype threat is something you do to yourself. And it's also just feels easier to ask what you feel like might be a dumb question. Yeah, I found it helpful. And then I met some people that I'm still connected with in tech that I see at conferences and things and say hi to and we ask each other for help. We have a network. And so it's great, but it was scary at first. I didn't know anybody in the room. You know, you show up, you're like, I don't know. I don't even know anything about this. It's like, I haven't done HTML since 1996. I made like a crappy webpage in college, you know. It's changed a little since then. The other thing, Minneapolis has a group called MiniStar and they run what they call MiniDemo, which is, I think once a quarter, they have a demo night for people. If you've built something cool, they limit you to seven minutes and no PowerPoints allowed, just a demo. So it can be kind of fun. And then they hold a one day conference called MiniBar. And I went when I was still an astronomer and I just kind of felt like I was lurking. You know, I was like all these tech people around me and I didn't feel like I was one of them. But it was still really valuable to me to be there, to see how people talk about these things, see what kind of talks people give. Yeah, lurking can be useful, especially if you can feel a little shy sometimes like I do. Get the lay of the land before you speak out. And then meetup, I still use, obviously everyone still uses Stack Overflow. Who doesn't, right? And then MiniStar. So these are still pretty big ones. And then just recently, I started volunteering with Girl Develop it to give back. So we are, BuzzFeed is hosting a monthly meetup. So they're trying to get, it's all technical talks. It's just pitched at a more comfortable level for people who are beginners. And so far we've had two and they've been pretty well attended. So fingers crossed we can hold on to that. Yeah, so then other resources I found helpful you might like. Coding Bat, I really liked that one for Python because it really, I felt like it lived up to the analogy of batting practice. It's like, I know the syntax, I've read the docs, but now I'm just gonna practice over and over again and make sure I can like do those if statements and do those for loops and do that without having to think about it. I really just can internalize it in a way. So it wasn't about learning at the beginning, it was about really like, yeah, my fingers know it too now. There's Code Academy, I've read lots of documentation. I'm sure you guys all have as well. Relying on other women in tech and other mentors, they don't have to be women. There are some, I've had some great mentors along the way who are guys. But it really helps also just sometimes talk to another woman cause they share the experience in a way that the guys don't. No offense guys. So, and then Facebook groups I found really helpful. Staying in touch with my old career, there's a group, Astronomy Alumni, and it's not people who wanna keep doing astronomy, it's more just like, oh hey, where did we all go from here? And how can we help new people get there? It's a pretty new group, so I'm more on the mentor side than the mentee, but your field or if you're advising someone, their field might have something similar. And then there was an equity and inclusion group in astrophysics on Facebook, and that was a huge resource, and just trying to understand a lot of the issues surrounding women and people of color and technology. Because in astrophysics and technology is very similar. Like a lot of very male, white dominated kind of environment. And so someone I met through that one is also in tech now, and she and I are working on trying to build a tech one. We'll probably use Slack instead of Facebook, so watch this space I guess. Making the switch to technology and writing code for the web led me to encounter a number of differences that I just, I didn't even know to expect when I made that switch. One of them was just, I had no concept of frameworks whatsoever. Writing programs for astronomy, just like we just write it, it just follows the path of the research, everything is linear. Frameworks would be, I would just be like, I'd be sitting with someone at BuzzFeed, they'd be going over a section, and they're like, yeah, they're like, this file does this. And I'm like, that file has like 15 lines and how in the world is it doing all of this stuff? And then I realized at some point like, it's in the frameworks. It's all in the frameworks. So we use a lot of backbone on my team in the front end with JavaScript. And we used to use Django, now we use Tornado on the back end. And so I've learned, okay, yeah, if I ever have that question of like, how does it know what to do here? It's probably using a framework of some kind. So that was just something I don't think anyone in the web world thought to have to explain and I didn't know that I didn't know it, so it was a little weird. And the whole async thing, you don't want any async stuff in astronomy. Like you need to calculate those luminosities before you can calculate the magnitudes and that's just not gonna work any other way. So the whole idea of async stuff and then even once I got the kind of idea of it, trying to apply it and figuring out the IO loop and when race conditions, that was a word I'd never heard, doing scientific programming, I never had to care about that. Now I think about it all the time. Is this call gonna come back? Is this, do I need to make a promise here? What's going? And then there were words that just flat out were used differently. In my mind, a database migration would be taking data from one base database to another database. And the idea that it was actually saying, no, no, for the same database, change how we want the data to be in there, like it took me, I think I had to ask that question like 10 times. Like, so what is it doing? It's not that, in a way it's not that hard, but it was just not something that I could easily, I had to unlearn my other expectation before I could learn the new one. Yeah, I didn't know what end points were. People were like, yeah, yeah, this hits the end point. And I'm like, is that like, you know, I'm picturing this like giant cliff, you know? It's like, I have no idea what that even means. And then this one was a lot, I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out how do they talk to each other? How do they even know about each other? The front and the back ends, like I don't, you just say, save it. And then, you know, some magic happens and then, you know, and so I spent a lot of time pouring over the parts of the code that make those connections because that was an enigma to me as well. And I also think I asked what is an API, like at least a dozen times. I just, I feel like I know now what an API is, but I don't know if I can explain. Well, anyway, I could, but it would be lengthy. But yeah, it just, it's like, but which part is actually the API? Is it the, no, you can have non-JSON ones? Okay, let's, you know. Anyway, so it was difficult. And especially at the beginning, I really sat there and stand up and I felt like I have no idea what anyone is saying. This is all in Greek. And so that was one mark of progress. It was like, oh yeah, I had to stand up and I understood what they were talking about. So it's good. I found also some differences in culture. Going, the first one is more about going from a non-toxic environment to a non-toxic environment. I found I could finish my sentences again. That was really weird. Like people would actually get quiet when I talked. Like I had learned to blurt. Cause I realized, you know, in my previous position, I had about five seconds before I'd be interrupted by one of our male senior faculty people. So I literally had our project manager at some point was like, Elizabeth, stop interrupting yourself. And I was like, that's not what I thought you were gonna say. You're not gonna say something else. People actually work together and they're not like super competitive and throwing each other into the bus. That's amazing. And I'm sure I'm not naive enough to think that like all of technology is like this. I know I'm aware that I landed in a pretty lucky spot. But now that I know that one exists, I don't think I'd want to settle for one that is worse. So there's that. At BuzzFeed, especially on our web team, I can say that helping your teammate is much more high priority than getting your own work done. This is something I've started like asking questions that poke at that in interviews. So something we kind of try to screen for, like are you motivated to help other people? And then the quick pace of decisions just floored me. For example, like our team went from releasing editions after every two weeks sprint to continuous deployment. And they made that decision after like 10 minutes of like standing around and weighing the consequences and who do we need to talk to and site and front, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, wow, and I could do, you know, that would have been like committee meeting after committee meeting. And six months later, maybe they'd have a recommendation and then, and I was just like, I don't remember going home that night and talking to my husband and being like, they just decided and they just, it's just gonna do it. And he's like, yeah, that's how it works. Like, oh, okay, I didn't know that. I thought so much less frustrating. Buzzfeed particularly is very low on hierarchy. We do have hierarchy for people who make the decisions. We have project manager, project manager, wait, no, product and tech lead. And you know, we have different levels, but there's really an idea built into the culture that is really ingrained, that a good idea can come from anywhere. At our last global all hands, the CEO was even encouraging interns. Like, if you have an idea, share it, and then he said, and if your intern has an idea, listen to it, you know, it's a, it really feels like, it feels like you can make it a suggestion and either they will take in the suggestion or you will understand why they're not gonna go with that, which to me feels pretty good. And another benefit was, I felt like going into tech, I could unify my different identities. Whereas in academia, there's this like really rigid kind of conservative idea of how a professor should behave and, you know, they probably don't read fanfic or whatever, so it's just sort of like, oh, I better hide my fanfic pages from them. But now it's just sort of like, this is just me, and I feel like I can bring my whole self to work, and that's really cool. So, tips to keep in mind. If you or someone you know are doing this, post, I recommend posting what you have to GitHub, even if it's not really super related. I have a repo and I don't have a lot up there, but I have my astro research up there, and so I really just wanted to give people an idea that I had been doing something, even if it's not something that is of total interest to them. And so I tried to add documentation on top of everything that would just explain what it was, and yeah, I even called out like, code is written and adapted as needed over your long analysis of systems. Therefore, code is not optimized for efficiency, like please don't judge me. This is really not, it's really not efficient, but it got the job done. One thing I found helpful that I recommend to anybody is just be really aggressive about trying to find resources, ask people for help, don't worry about bothering them, well maybe worry a little, but if they tell you it's okay, believe them, and let them help you. Go to meetups, it can be really hard, I think Ohioans were a little more friendly, I don't know, Minnesota is very like just more shy, so I feel like I had to go to four or five meetups before I even really started talking to people. I don't know how, I don't know, maybe you find it more open here. But anyway, they're very nice once they open up, just takes a while in Minnesota. So yeah, you can find them by topic, by organization, I'm sure you guys know a lot of stuff. If you're not getting any code reviews, ask for them. See if there's a way you can find senior people to review your code if you're new and trying to improve in the field. That was something I kind of took for granted at BuzzFeed, and then I gave a talk on why we should hire junior developers and mentor them, and I found out that most people in the room were not getting code review ever. So anyway, you can ask for that. And if there's a junior person, maybe try to offer to them. And as Kenneth said in the previous talk, being encouraging, being positive, but also offering constructive feedback is also a good thing. And then just find out what works for teaching yourself. Some people really, like me, really need external deadlines to stay on task. Other people may find that too rigid, they want more flexibility and when and where they can do their learning. Just figure out what works for you and don't worry or think about what should fit you. Just go with what actually does. It takes, to make any career change in any direction, I think it takes some risk. It takes some effort. I had to do a lot of reading and a lot of practicing and I felt like I was drinking from the fire hose. I think an earlier speaker used that term and I was like, yes, that is exactly what I felt like for about three months, I would say. And then there were a lot of days where I was like that, but you just need to not give up. I think it's really important to have a support network. If you don't have one, find one, build one, make one. Whether it's in person or online, I have friends in some online communities, I've never met them, but I feel like we're besties. And we help each other. So yeah, try to build these up, get people on board. One tip I like is if there are people in your life who would be supportive of you and there are people who may not be as supportive, don't talk to the people who aren't gonna be supportive of you. Just don't talk about this with them. Don't talk about making a big change if they're not gonna say yes. I feel like, the biggest example for me was I met my husband when I, well, no, we met earlier, but we had our first date because I asked him out to homecoming dance and I knew that my best friend at the time was like not, she didn't think I should ask him out. She thought he was gonna say no, and I was gonna get heartbroken and she just didn't think I should put myself out there on a limb. So when I was like, I'm thinking about really doing it, I went to someone else. I didn't talk to my best friend about it, I talked to someone else about it who I knew would say go for it, you know. And it worked out, you know. So I'm married 15 years this August, so. But yeah, so it's the same with career changes, like find the people who will support you and rely on them and then just ignore them. They may think they have your best interests in heart, they don't want you to get heartbroken, but they may not be right. Yeah, so in that vein, a lot of us here in this room are already in tech, including myself now, yay. How we can support other people to bring more people into tech. And we need to bring more people into tech, right? It's one of the best-paying, still growing jobs. It's good work, it's fun work, it's interesting work. We need more people. We need to bring in more women. We need to bring in more people of color. We need to not only bring them in, we need to retain them and support them. And so how can we do this? I guess the other connection there is when we hire senior developers, we're drawing from the pool of who was a developer 10 or 15 years ago, which is a lot more white male than people who are trying to get into tech now. And so another reason to try to hire junior people or help support people coming into tech is that we can improve the diversity and make it a more equitable environment. Yeah, so supporting new people may also mean supporting more women and people of color. So one thing we can do as a company is offer if you're a business or advocate for if you're at a business but not in charge of the business. Internships, paid internships. And technology fellowships. Now the technology fellowship is actually how I came to be at BuzzFeed. There was definitely luck involved. I met the person who hired me at a barbecue. So I would say if you wanna get a job in tech, definitely go to barbecues. It's really helpful. Work for me, should work for anyone. Yeah, and we were just talking and there were kids running around and he's like, what do you do? And I was like, well, I'm in astronomy right now but I'm trying to move over into tech. And he's like, what have you done? And it's like, I didn't even realize it but it was like a job interview. And I was like, well, I did this, I did this. Then he was like, you should come by the office and meet people. And yeah, and that one person is responsible for hiring, not anymore but at one point he was responsible for hiring all the women in the office. And I think it wasn't that he was specifically trying to target women. He was, that sounded terrible. That sounded terrible. He's like the nicest guy in the universe. I think it was just that he had a more open mind to like how to find people. He's like, oh, you're an astronomer, that's really cool. I think you would be a great programmer. And another one was brought over from robotics. He's like, oh, that's really cool. You have a degree in robotics. Like, you'll make an awesome developer. And so it wasn't, it was just the coincidence of being more open minded. If you're more open to hiring from people not just from CS degrees, then you can actually really broaden your recruiting. And it's really worked. So yeah, I guess that leads into my next thing. So yeah, it turns out that former astrophysicist and lumberjacks I learned today. And social workers, one of our, we hired our intern from last summer. She was a social worker before and she also has, I think, a degree in theater. She's an awesome developer. And we're hiring someone right now who did international politics. She's our summer intern. I hope we can hire her long term, but I don't know. I have no specific knowledge of that, but we're rooting, we're still in the intern season. But yeah, so it turns out like, you really, a CS degree is one way into this career, but it's not the only way and it's not, it doesn't even mean that you're gonna be the best developer in the office. You can be a really great developer coming from different backgrounds. And I met at a girl development event, I met a poet once. And she was interesting. She was telling me that the programming languages were in some ways like the patterns of it like really reminiscent to her of poetry. And I thought that was pretty cool. So other ways to be supportive. Mentorship, implement or participate in a mentorship program, help new people figure out. There's kind of a culture as well in tech that people coming from different fields may not know. There were a lot of times when I was just like, what is happening right now? Like we're all grabbing our computers and we're going over there and like I don't even know. Like it's a meeting, but why do we need our computers? Like I remember asking. There just were a lot of things I felt like very awkward about. Mentor proactively like check up on new people, seeing if they're doing okay, take them out to coffee or whatever. Yeah. And then I would also encourage just having patience if you have someone new who's making a transition. I feel like it can take a few months or maybe even six months to start hitting your stride. And then, and I've seen this in the past with some other people we've hired. Like it can take a little while and then they hit their stride and then they're amazing. So yeah, just takes a little time. And then this benefits everybody, cultivating a culture of curiosity and learning. I always feel like anyone in tech who's acting like they know everything and they don't even need to ask questions is pretty much talking BS, right? You should always be learning. You should always be pushing yourself. If you're not feeling confused from time to time, you're letting yourself stagnate a bit. Ask questions yourself as an example. Let people see that a senior developer can ask these types of questions, right? And then just be really encouraging and positive when people do ask questions. Yeah, some of this is just how to create an environment where new people will want to come and stay. Foster a culture where admitting mistakes is safe and yeah, I don't recommend tolerating assholes because as bad as it may be for people in the near orbit of them, like the people with the least power are the ones who are gonna suffer the worst. So even if you can kind of put up with it, think about what it might be doing for your chances to recruit a new people. And then kind of mentioned this as well, letting go of coder chivalrous, like them versus Emacs arguments because they can be exclusive and divisive. And you make new people feel like, oh, they're just not ever gonna be as good because they didn't code in them ages ago, right? So it's, we should not be trying to create barriers. We should be trying to break them down. And then I would just say like showing work-life balance. It's really hard to make a career transition. And a lot of people making transitions like myself have families or other responsibilities that one of the things when I was in academia, someone said to me, it was that you should really be in the office every night and every weekend. And I was like, I have an 18 month old, that's just not gonna happen. Like I guess I'm done here. I don't know what to say. And it wasn't that I wasn't enthusiastic and it wasn't that I didn't have a lot of energy and love to give to the field. It was just like I couldn't do it, right? So one of the things I've noticed, my colleagues at Buzzfeed, the male colleagues will sit around and talk about their kids and they'll sit around and talk about like, oh my God, this, they talk about it more like guys do. Like, oh, this diaper didn't hold. This was pretty epic, you know. This is like, but they still talk about their kids and things like diapers all the time. And it's pretty awesome. Cause I don't, I feel like I can talk about my kid and again be like a whole person without having to have that identify me as, oh, well that's the mom over there. So it really makes it feel like a comfortable, safe place that I want to stay, for example. Yeah. And then to conclude, I would just say, if you've done a career transition, kudos, high five to you. If you're thinking about it or you've decided to take the plunge, good luck and you can do it. And that's it. That's my end of my talk. Questions? I have to leave you a few minutes. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So the question was, what skills do I feel that I could take from academia that translated over? I would say, I feel like a lot more than I expected. The ability to write, to organize, to do proposal. Our groups are big on like Google Docs, you know, like, oh, we wanna lay out this engineering plan. How we're gonna, what's the view for how we're gonna develop this piece of the software, this, and so organizing that and writing it out. It's not totally unlike grant proposals, but it's much better because it's much more finite. And so that skill feels like, okay, I can lay out, explain why we're gonna do this, why we wanna do it. Like I have that background of being able to argue for what I want or what I think we should do. And to also take in feedback of like, okay, well, this idea is better, so maybe we'll do that instead. That's cool, I'm not offended. And I think organizing my work, and I almost feel like, I feel like I have project management skills that I haven't tried out in a business environment, but I feel like are very helpful for like I'm managing our summer intern. I'm one of the two people in charge of kind of guiding her experience this summer. So I feel like that's been really helpful. I feel like I've helped communicate to my team, like how to interview a bit better based on having interviewed a lot in academia. Like I did a postdocs and different jobs and there's so many interviews. And so, yeah, those are just a few I can think of, but it prepared me better than I expected, I guess. Yeah. The team I work with is pretty large for Buzzfeed. We have, let's see, I think there's five developers. No, and then we have two contract developers. So five full-time, two contract, and a team lead and two product managers. So I think there's something like 11 or 12 of us when we're all in the same space. And that's one of the bigger teams as far as like everyone in a room for stand-up. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so when I was really starting to plan leaving academia, I read a lot of quit-lit. I don't know if anyone's heard that term. Like they're for some reason more than almost any other industry when academics leave, they feel they need to write really lengthy and emotional blog posts about it all. And there's a whole ton of them out there. And one of the ones that really stuck with me I read somewhere was that in order to stop doing academia, you have to just actually stop doing academia. Because, and that sounds a little glib at first, but I think it's really true. There's always one more course they want you to get into or just could you finish just one more thing or just one more committee work and at some point you just have to say, no, I'm done. The thing that was hardest for me was leaving some students who hadn't graduated yet. But waiting until they graduated and not taking on new students until then was just not feasible. So I took my students out to coffee and we talked about it and I talked to them about who else they might work with, what other projects they could do. I made sure they had access to my data as long as they wanted it. And I'm still writing letters of recommendation for them. For me, those were the most important things. As far as teaching, I think that was my department's problem. At some point, you have to cultivate an environment that supports people if you want to make sure you never are left in a lurch for the fall semester. I don't know what to say. But they did have some notice. They had the whole summer to figure it out and we have adjuncts, so I suppose I think they managed it. Yeah. But that was the other thing though is when I was in academia, I sat down, I was really stressed one day and I made it to-do list and it had like 80 things on it. And not all of them were small things. Some of them were like forge connections with this other department, build a new program there. And it's like, not only was that frustrating for me but I see now that that's a really inefficient management. And so, I should never have been placed in that situation in the first place. So you can't possibly do all those things. So, my managers now would never do that. If I have three things I'm working on that's kind of a lot right now. So, yeah. Oh yeah, so it's a code repository and it helps with version management. So for example, the project that my team is working on, we keep the main version of the software there. We can pull down on our own computers a copy, make changes and then we have to commit those changes and GitHub handles both reconciling those changes with the changes maybe someone else has made. And it handles versions. So like every once in a while, even the senior developers roll something out and deploy something and then stuff breaks. And then they're like, ah, we have to go back. So GitHub manages like, this is what your code looked like before that commit came in. And you can just say, okay, deploy that one and it's unbroken now. So yeah, so it's really helpful in that way. But the kind of the side story to GitHub is like people use it to see if you've contributed to the open source community. They'll use it almost like a, they'll just check out your GitHub profile and see what's there. So if you've done coding or things that you think might be sharing, worth sharing, it's sometimes good to just put them up there. So I think maybe one more question. If there is one. All right, cool. Thank you guys for coming.