 Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here. We are on the ground at Pier 48 in San Francisco, and we're at the Top Coder Open 2014, an interesting event that we've been going for 14 years, getting a bunch of people in, trying to solve hard problems, a hackathon, codathon, whatever you want to call. But while we're here, really, is about the girls and stem panel that they had earlier today, they were excited to get the panelists on. They had about 200 high school girls in, from I would guess, about a dozen high schools from the peninsula, San Francisco, San Jose, the East Bay, and really getting mentors and real women from the industry to talk to them and answer their questions. They have some pretty funny industry questions. So we're joined here by Lea McGowan here. Right, and you are at Salesforce, master technical trainer. So welcome. Yeah, welcome. Thank you for having me. So what did you think about the enthusiasm from the girls? I was really excited. I get really excited to see girls get excited and engaged about technology, because I think that's so important for our future developer technologists. Now for the technologists, you talked about dance, I think more than you talked about technology, which I thought is really cool, because you're obviously passionate about it, and you really tied it back to passion, and you even finished with, you still want to dance on Broadway. So I, you know, I thought that was really great and well received by the girls. I think what I, my goal was to break the stereotype that technology meant, you know, I'm a gamer programmer, or I'm some sort of, just sort of geeky programmer, but really in that, don't put people in a box. You can be a technologist and still enjoy other things, such as dance or shoe shopping, or whatever it is that you enjoy. That's right, shoes up too. That's right, shoes are important. I like it. But here, when you get a job in technology, it gives you the money to afford these extra activities, such as, you know, maybe it is a dance thing, or maybe it is a shoe thing, but really you don't have to be one thing only. Right, right. So I think that was my goal in trying to bring up that I originally was a dance major before I became a computer science major. Right. So. Well, you know, it's interesting. We interviewed Maria Clave at the Grace Harper Celebration of Women in Computing, and she talked about role models for girls and said, you know, Zuckerberg is just not the guy. You know, that is just not the guy that girls are going to look up to to follow. So it's really important to have real women up there talking about their journey. I totally agree. And there's so many real women out there. And I think it's so important for those women to reach out and make themselves accessible to these young girls, whether it's being part of panels like this or going to schools. Like I just spoke to somebody about going and talking to their school afterward, which I'm more than happy. I think it is our, we need to, that is our duty to make sure we touch these young girls and let them know, hey, we're real people. And you know, we are someone that, you know, you might want to look at and say, oh, I can do that because such and such did that. Right, right. And it was really interesting to hear the questions because I think it showed the confidence and the comfort in the girls to ask the questions they were really thinking like, what do you wear? Right. I thought that was a really insightful question and the panel did a great job because you guys are kind of all over the map. That's right. I told, and I'm old school and I told them you cannot come in day one in flip-flops, right? You have to earn your dev cred before you, you know, get the latitude for, you know, wearing t-shirts in shorts. So let's dig into the dev cred thing because that came up a number of times as well. What is dev cred? What do you tell girls about dev cred? How do they get more dev cred? Well, dev cred is a term I came up with years ago when I felt like, when I come into a class to teach because I'm an instructor, my class is predominantly all men and they're looking at me thinking, well, what does she really know? And I had to prove my dev credibility, my developer credibility, sort of like street cred, but dev cred. And part of that is because I used to be a developer. So I know the difference between object-oriented programming languages and procedural-based languages. I know these things, and it builds developer credibility. So you can have dev cred, whether you're a man, woman, you know, black, white, green, it doesn't matter. When you have that dev cred, it carries you for a long way. Now, the other thing you spoke about, which I thought was great, is really the power of code. And not so much the power specifically what the code does, but the power to actually touch so many people in so many ways with a piece of code that you've developed. Absolutely. I was in Haiti last week with an organization that's still working with families that were displaced from the earthquake because we were looking and testing an app what goes into those temporary camps to relocate these families from these camps to actual residents. So while in Haiti, we saw how they collected the data so we could see how that's imported into the system. And so here you're having technology that is actually changing people's lives. Right, right. So give a little shout out to Salesforce. You know, we're at Dreamforce. It was a big, huge push with Len Voidovich and the team of, I think, three million meals they raised. You've obviously spent time in Haiti. Talk about a company and companies that really enable employees not just to give money out of their check every month, but to actually do real work to help whatever the charity is of their choosing. Absolutely. It's the one, one, one methodology and the fact that they not only encourage but they give us the platform to do it and they reward us for doing it. So it's a great company that makes you think at a different level. How can I contribute? I want to contribute and be able to use my skills and talent to impact the world in a positive way and they give you that platform to do that. All right, so Leigh, I'm going to give you the last word before we sign out. So I noticed in your bio you're involved in a bunch of organizations, not just today's panel. So I'll let you go ahead and give a plug to some of the organizations and groups that you're involved with that you think are really powerful in this cause. Two of the ones that I come to mind, Black Girls Code, Kimberly Bryant and I would also say Girls Who Code. Girls Who Code and I'm sure they can find those easily online. That's right. That's right. All right, well thank you for stopping by. Thank you. Thanks for donating your time. It's a great cause. Jeff Rick here. We're on the ground at Pier 48 at the top Coder Open 2014. You're watching The Cube.