Tell the audience a bit about yourself? I’m Kendell Byrd. I’m a recent graduate of Swarthmore College where I studied computer science and economics. Throughout my college career which I just finished, I did several internships in tech. I started off my freshman year doing CODE2040 which is one of the best scholarships in the world. In the summer of 2014 I worked at Jawbone as a software engineer intern and season after that, I worked at JP Morgan as a technology analyst, and then in summer 2016, I interned
Tell us a bit yourself and what you do? My name is Kevin Stewart, and I’m VP of Engineering at Heptio. Heptio is a company that was started by two former Googlers who were co-founders of the Kubernetes project as well as co-creators of Google Compute Engine. Heptio is looking to modernize IT by bringing Cloud Native technologies (like Kubernetes) to enterprises. As we are a startup, my primary role is to build the engineering organization and ship our open source projects and products. We are currently hiring for multiple
What made you decide to work in tech? Working in tech happened pretty organically, and was born from several interests I had as a child. Science fiction and video games were popular family pastimes and cultivated my interest in technology early on. My grandmother was the first in the family to get a computer, and whenever we visited, I would lock myself in her bedroom to draw characters in Microsoft Paint based on the stories I wrote in WordPerfect. Once I left New York City and went away to school,
Be the hero you always needed. This morning, I started thinking about my dad. He was never really there for us, but when he was “there”, it felt like we were a chore. This memory came to me: When I began designing and learning Photoshop, my dad made me create a flyer for a nightclub he worked at. I was just barely a teenager, and it was fun working on real projects — so I did the flyer without a second thought. It came out pretty good. The thing is,
What made you decide to work in the tech industry? Initially, I was pursuing a career in accounting. I declared it my major at college. After an accounting internship, I decided it was not for me, but I had done it for so long I couldn’t see myself doing anything else. So, I decided to do a second internship, with the hope of getting a full-time offer. It didn’t happen. I was devastated at the time and had no idea what I was going to do next. I was counting
What made you decide to work in tech? Problem-solving. Specifically, problem-solving with little costs for exploration. I was really attracted to solving problems with code. I loved that code could be changed to explore new ideas and improve on existing ones with the only real costs being my time and energy. What was an obstacle you faced and how did you overcome that obstacle? Transitioning to management, though I saw and see that as a challenge more than an obstacle. At the time I was a peer of the teammates
What made you decide to work in tech? My two older brothers introduced me to engineering. They’re both engineers and I grew up watching, and eventually joining, them take apart household appliances. When I got to high school, I had a series of amazing teachers who helped a group of us start a FIRST Robotics Competition team and who introduced me to programming. I decided to go into the tech industry because I love putting things together and this was a place where it was possible to create something tangible
What made you decide to work in tech? I think at the base of it, was my brother in law [who is a good deal older than me, maybe like 11 years older]. Growing up I followed in his footsteps, so whatever he was doing I wanted to do (laughs). He studied electrical engineering and so in the summers I would work on tech hardware problems with him, and that got me excited about technology, and when I was in the ninth or tenth grade I took a class in
