 Alright, let's get started. First, some housekeeping rules. If you have not figured out where the toilet is, there's a treasure hunt. So if you can't figure out too bad. But because I'm nice, I'm going to tell you that you just follow the glass panel. Do not go out of the glass doors. Follow the glass panels and keep following it. You should be able to see the signs to the restroom. Okay? So another housekeeping. There's a lost and found umbrella. If it's yours, raise your hand. So I'm going to throw it to you. If not, come and look for one of the people in a Tech Ladies t-shirt and we'll try to give it back to you. Alright! My name is Elisha and I'm the founder of Tech Ladies and today I'm so happy to see all of you here. Taking time out in the evening to join us today. If you have no idea where you are, you're at a Tech Ladies Boot Camp 3 graduation party plus birthday bash. I promise you this is the only event with an overly long title. Our titles are usually pretty short. So this is here. Here is what we're going to do today. So I hope all of you are nice and full. Hopefully not in a food coma stage yet. We're going to hear a lot of talking. I'll start talking first and then there will be some presentations done by the Tech Ladies Boot Camp graduate. We'll end off with a panel discussion before we have some secret gifts and then we'll close for the day. So first of all, I'd like to thank all of our sponsors for helping us keep this event free and amazing, right? I mean you had good food, you had swag. So I'd like to just give them a shout out. So first of all, thank you Google developers for sponsoring the place. Neuroplanner, Terry, General Assembly who's giving us a 50% discount. Check your Goody back for the discount code. So they run a lot of classes, technical and also some finance and yeah, it's pretty cool. Check it out and we also, one of our sponsors is Amazon AWS and on-demand cloud computing platform. They're giving us $3,000 credit. Again, super awesome. And Nail Deck, a company that aims to create a world where anyone and everyone can celebrate their individual uniqueness through colors. They're giving us the $8 discount and men can also put on nail polish too, just saying. Express yourself with colors. So our bronze sponsor on the right is Live Love Luna. It's an eco-friendly business based in Singapore. Specializing in reusable menstrual products, menstrual cups, reusable cloth pads, period underwear and sea sponge tampons. They aim to be the leading information in Asia for people who menstruate. It's really super cool how our sponsor, our school sponsor is very tech ladies. Amazing. So our super sponsor is ThoughtWorks. It's a global technology company. And they are running a new program, a three month programming, coaching and mentoring program for individuals who want to learn technical skills and get a job in the tech industry. So through this program, you will get specialized personalized coaching from seasoned technologists. And they also have partners who help you get a job after the program. So applications close. Oh, okay. Why don't you stand up so that you know? Look for one of the few men. I think I'm sure you just look for men who dress in white, you will get one of the ThoughtWorkers. So applications close on the 15th of January is really soon, so do apply ASAP. Okay, last but certainly not least because it's our largest sponsor. It's our gold sponsor, Zendesk, a cloud based customer service software and support ticketing system. So a bunch of them are here as well. If you work at Zendesk, why don't you just raise your hand, make a little bit sound. Oh, that's a lot. All women great. So now I'm going to welcome Loh Shing to address the crowd. Clap la. Hi everyone. Welcome to the event. My name is Loh Shing. I'm from Zendesk, your accidental gold sponsor for the night. I didn't know that I actually didn't know they were the gold sponsor. When I was approached by the organizer and say, you know, with a little bit of money for dinner, could Zendesk sponsor the dinner? And I thought, well, I have to eat too, right? So I said, yeah, okay, we'll sponsor the dinner. And then I just came here and realized that because we sponsored the dinner, we became the gold sponsor. And unfortunately, you know, you're forced to have three captive minutes to be with me. So I thought maybe I'll take the chance to just introduce to you about Zendesk. Probably some of you probably already use, you know, you might be our customers and I'm on your payroll. But if you're not, just allow me to give you a quick introductions about Zendesk. And let's start with Zendesk Singapore. Zendesk Singapore, some of you probably know, started by Zopim. Three young guys, you know, in 2005 after the NOC program, they did nothing spectacular. Totally wasted the government money and decided to come and sell everything that they had on Craig's list and decided to come home to Singapore. And the problem is selling on Craig's list is you have to wait for emails to come in. And they thought, well, you know, it would be nice to have the way to do instant messaging over the web. And they thought, wow, this is a brilliant idea. So they came back, they pitched the vaporware, you know, to an investor, say, all right, you know, show me the prototype, since the idea sounds interesting. And one of the founders spent a couple of months working day and night and worked out the prototype. It was not funded, you know, the investor was not interested. So what happened subsequently is they picked up the iGen fund with 50,000. They thought, you know, this is still a very cool idea. I'm not sure this is a word-changing idea. So by the time they raised the fund, they realized that the live chat is actually a pretty mature industry. There's like, you know, if you do a search for live chat, there's a lot of them. And they didn't know, they didn't know at all, but they've done so far. So that's how it was started, completely clueless, completely not the way to build a business. Absolutely not the way that you will do your next startup. But eventually, at the same time, 2007, three guys in Copenhagen, they started with just working, they were all working on IT support. And if you want IT support, you know how terrible the ticketing system is. So it's, oh, this is terrible and we can do something better. And they started building Zendesk as a better IT support system. But by today, Zendesk has gone beyond that. We're really a company that helps you to understand your customer better. It goes beyond just ticketing. We have chat, we have analytics. We have voice for voice call communications. So now we are complete CRM solutions. You know, that's about 10 years. And I think one thing that stood out when I joined is open and I met the people in Zendesk. I think one is a very special, but a company is we're extremely product focused company. For a lot of enterprise software, a lot of business will choose to build for the managers who has the purchasing power with feature list. And one thing that's unique about us is we're always very focused on building software for people who use the software. So I think there's, if you ask me what's most unique about Zendesk and Zopim, there will be one. Number two is the accidental success of a Singapore success story. People were just filled by passion in technology, has a big dream and completely clueless. So for those of you who are preparing to step into tech, come and definitely we'll see you guys around. Thank you. Thank you very much, Losheng, for addressing the crowd. Is Zendesk hiring? All the time. All the time. So if anyone's looking for opportunity, you know who to look for. All right. I'm going to take the next few minutes to share with you more about what tech ladies is. But before that, I want to share with you more about why I started tech ladies. So I am not a software engineer. I was a little bit odd. So I am a psychology graduate. So I did psychology in school. And my technical skills back then was only in PowerPoint and also PIN, which is, I could create something super cool too, I think. But I really learned how to code when I was building my own tech startup and I couldn't find a tech co-founder. That's when I started to learn programming. And through this journey, there's a few insights that I gained. So the ability to code to me is a superpower. And I think it's amazing. So a lot of problems that I face can be solved with technology. And when I can code, I simply think of a tool that can solve my own problem and build it myself. Super power. But then when I look around me and I started to wonder, programming is really interesting, but where are the women? I think one could write a 10-page manifesto on the biological differences between men and women and how it relates to tech. Burn, for those who are already in the industry. But I do think that there is a shame that women choose not to enter the industry because they think it's not for them because they are women. And that is why I created a community-led initiative called Tech Ladies for women to connect, learn, and advance as engineers. So by community-led, I mean four things. The first thing is we are not a real thing, actually. We're not a registered company. We're not a non-profit. Second, we are all just volunteers with our full-time jobs. And that means third thing, we do need a lot of sponsors and volunteers, so please come and talk to me if you have some skills you want to share. And the last thing is pretty, I would say, my favorite point because we are not a legal entity. We don't have a sound brand guide. My slides will have a lot of cats. I spend way too much time doing this instead of my real job. So at Tech Ladies, we believe that technology is for everyone. The industry is male-dominated. So we want to provide a platform, a place where women can come and learn how to code. Having said that, we are not anti-men. We are four women, we are not anti-men. In fact, a lot of our coaches and mentors are male. So if you have a volunteer as a coach, as a bootcamp coach or a workshop coach, can you stand up? Hey, why you're so shy? So please join me and give them a round of applause, especially for the men. Okay, can sit down now. So whether you're someone who is exploring the industry, or someone who is learning how to code, or someone who is already in the industry, we do have different programs that you can join. And I'm going to take the next few minutes to share with you what we do at Tech Ladies, other than feeding you good food. So we have six programs under three pillars, community, education, and opportunity. If you, like me, can't really remember what we do, just remember CEO. Pretty smart, isn't it? No? Thank you. I'm going to start by sharing what we do under the community pillar. So through a community, we just want to give women a place to come together and hang out. So under this sort of pillar, we have Go, which is really us sharing about other tech events that we see, and trying to find like-minded peers to go together. So I remember sharing a hackathon for women. And a lot of people were commenting on the post saying wondering if they were good enough, technical enough to join the hackathon. And what happened was that a lot of women started to encourage one another, and they started forming teams to go together to the hackathons together. For many of them, this is the first hackathon there have been. So I'm pretty excited to see more stories like that. For it, basically, it's just us getting together because we love tech and we love food. So moving on to the education pillar. So we do have two programs. I'll start with the tech-lady study, which really is what it says. This is a self-reliant study group where we'll just meet every week at a cafe and learn how to code. There will be one or two mentors helping to answer any questions that we have. The second is the coding weekend. Again, it is what it says. Probably pretty terrible at naming. So a coding weekend is a two-day workshop over a weekend teaching women how to code with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and CSS HTML. So this photo was actually one of the... It's the first coding weekend workshop that we held that's initiated and organized by one of the bootcamp graduates. Her name is Sing Tian. So she put it together and we taught 80 women in Kuala Lumpur how to code over the weekend. And under the opportunity pillar is Tech Talks. Again, it is what it is. So this is an initiative started by another bootcamp grad, Kate. So through Tech Talks, we want to let women beginners to share technical topics of whatever they are learning. This helps women build their confidence in terms of public speaking and also show other people that programming can be for them. Since a lot of our community has also been asking us what are the different roles in the tech industry, we also started this other initiative, Office Visits. The first Office Visits was organized by Ling over there. Probably a bit shy to say hi. Let's all say hi, Ling. Hi, Ling! She's going to die of embarrassment now. So in this series of events, we go to different tech companies to hear from their female employees. In this case, it was at ThoughtWorks, one of our silver sponsors. And in this photo, this photo actually happened after the main event ended. So a lot of people were just asking questions and it was an informal second panel discussion. Are you that guy? I'm on the right side. Yeah, yeah, this guy on the t-shirt? On the right side. Oh, that one! Okay. Cool. Small world. Thanks for coming again. So, and the last thing, the last program is probably all of you should know because you're part of this series of event that's Tech Ladies Bootcamp. More cats. Maybe I should just give a price for, you know, how many cats have we shown in my slide. So the Tech Ladies Bootcamp is a 12- is a part-time accelerated learning program where we take women with beginner skills, train them to become professional programmers. And we teach them by having industry experts guide this woman to create products for nonprofit organizations. So, so far we have 29 graduates out of the three bootcamps. And these are women from completely non-technical bootcamps. There's a gymnast teacher, there are people from their previously asked orders, finance, marketing, logistics. These are completely non-technical backgrounds. So far through three bootcamps, we have helped eight women find technical jobs. So, I think that's good. And through this program, we have helped nine organizations who have done, and we have done a film submission app, a adoption app, a class management app, and a donor management app. So on top of technical, technical is great. We also help women to stand out in an industry by writing articles on them and pushing them to do talks and embarrassing them at events like Ling. So, I want to quickly share a story of two ladies. They may look alike. I assure you they are different people and you don't have to be wearing black specks and put your hair on the right side in order to succeed in the industry. Same. So Clara has been struggling to learn reels on her own for close to a year before she found out about tech ladies bootcamp and she joined. So before that, she was actually a fashion businesswoman and her coach was impressed with her so much so that he gave her an internship and she was converted into a junior software role after the internship ended. And Shing Tien, I think I've mentioned her name a few times now, so she was kicked out of a master's program and she was really down after that. But through programming, she found her light and through the bootcamp, she was hired by the startup and today she works as a startup in Malaysia. She's spoken at Red Dot Ruby Conference in front of the creator of the Ruby programming language. She has also organized a workshop in Malaysia, the one that we did. So it's pretty amazing to see how people give back to the community and pay it forward. And what's more amazing is that they paid forward after receiving so much help for their coaches who are volunteers. It's like a gift that keeps giving. So let's talk a little bit more about our latest bootcamp, our third iteration of our Tech Ladies Bootcamp. So this is thought by six coaches who are industry experts, people who have given talks at conferences, organized workshops, and have volunteered close to 100 hours through the bootcamp. So let's give them a round of applause to thank them for their time. Thank you so much. So these coaches have taught six ladies who helped to code for two organizations. So these ladies, they come from, again, a variety of backgrounds, including pets, finance, logistics, and logistics industry. Again, you don't have to be holding an animal in photos to join the bootcamp. It just so happened that it's always a trend somehow. So these ladies all have one common goal, to learn how to code while contributing back to the community. And I hope you're as excited as I am to hear what they've built through the program. So now I'd like to invite the team Tech Ladies, the team who has built an app for us. So welcome, Team Tech Ladies.