On May 8th, 2017, at precisely 11:41 am, I walked on stage at the San Francisco CTO Summit to give a talk. At $995 for the session, and with over 200 attendees, the event is billed as senior engineering leaders from startups (75%+ are CTO/VP’s/Dir Eng) with previous presenters being the CTOs/VP’s of Stripe, Coinbase, MongoDB, Zenefits, Warby Parker, Squarespace, Shopify, Birchbox, Tumblr, CustomInk. As I took my place on the stage, I looked out at the crowd and posed the question, who identifies as an African American. No
Today marks my one year anniversary working at Product Hunt. These are five things I’ve learned that I hope will help you grow in your career. Going from full-time founder to side hustler doesn’t mean you’ve failed —in fact, it could help your business When Emily and Ryan first started talking to me about joining the community team they both agreed that Hustle Crew could remain a priority in my life. Ryan explicitly said he wanted to increase the number of women makers in the Product Hunt community and that Hustle Crew
I was recently invited to Oxford University’s Internet Institute to speak to masters, MBA and MPA students about my book Dream Big. Hustle Hard., sharing advice on how to succeed in tech’s competitive landscape in spite of the well-publicised obstacles around inclusion. Unlike the students in the room — a diverse group of men and women spanning many ages, ethnicities, and disciplines — when I graduated from university the invisible barriers that hinder career progression were not known to me. Nor were they being discussed in public forums like newspapers
“I love tech, but I’m not a techie” is a phrase I’ve heard from countless people, particularly women, since starting Hustle Crew in 2016. I shake my head every time because even though I have worked in tech for almost a decade at giants like Amazon and Groupon, I never once wrote a line of code in any of those roles. What does it mean to be techie anyway? I found myself in summer 2016 unemployed with no next move planned. I quit my job in a London based startup
As a content strategist/UX writer at Google, my responsibilities were very much similar to a technical writer for a regulatory agency. The land of job titles is quite a tricky one in this field. The audiences, team members, content type, and products can be completely different, but I still go through a particular process for creating and publishing content. Even though each day is different, I’ll walk you through what I typically do for an upcoming product launch. Keep in mind, I could be jumping in between each step because I
Welcome to intern life! Whether you are experiencing your first internship, your second or third the encouragement is the same, stay on your toes, expect good things, be flexible and learn as much as you can. The formula is completely different from team to team WITHIN the company. You are going to have to learn that for yourself. If this is your first time at a new company I am sure you are excited this summer. But heads up, almost no one knows how to host an intern exactly right.
A far from an exhaustive look at Latina investors making strides in tech, but here are a few faces I thought warranted a signal boost. Jomayra Herrera Follow here: @jomayra_herrera Post-graduation from Stanford, and after a stint at a large edtech startup, Jomayra Herrera joined the Emerson Collective, a social enterprise started by Laurene Powell Jobs to dramatically transform the U. S. education landscape. Herrera identifies promising entrepreneurs committed to closing opportunity gaps, and driving the diligence process. Lisa Cuesta Follow here: @lisacuesta Lisa Cuesta is a principal at NextGen Venture Partners, a
Volunteering has been something I’ve been doing since I was in high school. I volunteered in spaces that truly resonated with me, my passions, and personal mission. I am a proud volunteer for Girl Develop It’s Boston Chapter, and I try to engage with the communities locally to provide opportunities to get more girls and women exposed to technology and the diverse array of career opportunities within it. Outside of my markup language skills in HTML5 & CSS3, my technical skills consist of Python and JavaScript (and both of their
In the first installment of this series, we talked about strategies for learning to code when you’re starting out. Now we’ll move on to a topic that has been the source of blood, sweat, tears, and flipped tables for many a developer… Debugging, also known as the “why the $#!%* isn’t this working?” phenomenon. Stuck on a Coding Problem? It’s impossible to describe just how demoralizing it can be to try and fail at bug fixing. If you haven’t yet, at some point, you will feel like a prize idiot despite
Coding is damn hard. When you’re just starting out, coding is hard as hell. There’s just a lot of stuff to learn in web development. Front-end or back-end? React, Angular, Ruby, .NET? AJAX, JSON, SQL, MySQL, noSQL?? You may feel at times that you’re drowning in technobabble. Thanks Data, that helps a lot. The good news is, you can get good at coding. The bad news is, you are not going to master it in 12 weeks. Sorry if you’ve been told otherwise. Now, you can certainly pick up some of the
