Notes

Kathyleen Beveridge

• Born in Vietnam 1980
• Lived in the Bay Area
• Studied undergrad at Santa Clara
• Studied in Spain and got finance degree
• Career
  • Finance degree -> investment banker as first job
  • Disliked job -> switched to tech
    • Worked at HP
      • create technology that makes life better for everyone everywhere
    • Worked at Qualcomm
      • Inventing the tech the world loves
      • impacts billions of people each day
    • All of these companies are doing something to benefit the world
• Loves to work with people
• Currently Senior Director of Marketing at Thermo Fisher

Kris Porter

• Software Engineer, SRE, DevOps
• Studied at UCLA
• Switched back to CS after 8 years and graduated grad school
• At the time no company was hiring
• Got a job at a startup
  • email marketing and software deployment
  • went under, only 2 people left
• Worked at Twitter
• Self-taught Python
• Has plans to work with MystenLabs
• Qualcomm
  • someone used machine learning to predict what repo won’t get downloads
• Continuous learning is something good to have
• Twitter used to use all RESTApi until 2 years ago
• Senior directors come up with how technology can solve requirements after listening to them
• Coding is a way of thinking: how to dissect a problem, critical think, problem solving

Reflection

This event made me realize how Computer Science can teach skills that will be needed. Kathyleen mentioned that although she works in a finance department, Computer Science taught her skills such as Critical Thinking which also led to her being successful as a problem solver. Continuous Learning was a skill that Kris said was important to have and I agree with that. Continuous learning is what is needed for someone to become successful, the better one is at learning, the faster they will be able to improve and become successful. Programming is a skill that is not just needed in Computer Science but a lot of other areas so computer science also help people not in CS become success in this aspect as well. I have realized that coding helps create a new way of thinking that first dissects a problem, then think how to solve it. This has been helpful in a lot of other areas in the my life so I have experienced Kris’s claim.