>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas,
It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017.
Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation,
and theCUBE's ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back and we're live here in Austin, Texas.
theCUBE's exclusive coverage of CloudNativeCon and KubeCon,
which stands for Kubernetes Conference, the not Cube,
C-U-B-E, that's us.
I'm John Furrier here with Matt Broberg,
co-host in here for Stu Miniman, podcaster himself
And we also have a special podcaster here on theCUBE,
Edaena Salinas, who's the host of The Women in Tech Show
@techwomenshow on Twitter, also a software engineer
at Microsoft.
Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> This is kind of like a podcast, we're like live though,
we're streaming.
>> Oh, okay.
>> Love your sweater, that's a binary tree holiday tree.
>> Binary Christmas tree.
>> So perfect.
>> I'm going to do a quick sort quickly, no I'm only kidding.
So question for you, you've got a great program,
you've got a desk over there,
you're doing some interviews here,
great to see you here doing The Women in Tech.
We've done a lot of women in tech interviews on theCUBE,
love to showcase women programming, women developers,
women in stem, great that you do it so congratulations.
So tell us what's the vibe like, are you people excited
to do podcasting, is it all women, do you interview men,
so tell us a little bit about the show.
>> That's a good question.
The motivation of the show is to have
technical women talk about what they're working on,
the products they're building or business strategy,
instead of what does it feel like to be a woman in tech,
or the only woman in the meeting room.
Those conversations are valid, but I think we've heard
a lot of those, and the community can benefit
if they're just listening to what they're working on.
>> It's great to get the education out there.
So I have a question for you, I'd love to ask this.
But I never really had a, talk about software engineering
on theCUBE, what's the style difference in coding,
do that's talked about, are women, do they code differently?
Is it, probably neater, cleaner, is there biases
in coding in that come into, because.
>> I'm not aware of (laughs) difference like that,
but, you could find that out if you run a script
on the GitHub projects but, I don't think it affects.
>> People don't, they don't talk about that, do they?
>> They don't talk about that, and I certainly haven't
experienced anything like that,
and I learn from my coworkers and they learn from me.
>> Now what are you working on at Microsoft?
>> I am at Microsoft Research earlier this year,
so what I work on is adding AI features
to our existing products, like Outlook
and Dynamics, so yeah.
>> And I want to switch gears and talk
about the podcast a little bit.
So, I'm curious what was your inspiration to start it,
and had you done podcasts before or did it just feel right,
like this is the time to do something?
>> I hadn't done a podcast before,
but I had listened to a lot of shows.
And the initial motivation of this is, at Microsoft
where I work, they have this Meet Our Leader series,
where they bring men and women in a leadership position.
The audience is mostly women,
and I was tuning in there by Skype,
and there's 200 people listening to them
plus people in the room, and they're asking questions
about what's our business strategy or technical questions,
so I'm like, women want to know about these things,
and then in addition to that I noticed some women,
technical women, they list on their website,
I love giving talks, just not the diversity talk
or the lady panel, I've given it several times,
I just want to talk about cloud computing
or the things that I work on.
And then I looked if someone was doing this already,
a show like this.
I didn't find it, so I started it,
and it helped that I listened to other shows.
>> I mean I find when I talk to a lot of my women friends
that are technical, sometimes CTOs and higher,
and even down in programming, they don't want to,
they just want to talk about what they're working on.
They don't want to be the, that woman in tech on the panel,
I've had a friend said to me privately over the weekend
at a party, I don't, am sick and tired of being called
and them saying, I need a woman on a panel.
>> Yeah.
>> I mean, it's kind of like a backlash,
but they also feel obligated to do it.
>> Yeah.
There's kind of a new culture developing.
Talk about that, and what that kind of conversation's
like in your world.
>> Well what I've heard, for example Sheryl Sandberg
I think has said, there, we will reach a point someday
where we won't be called a female CEO or a woman engineer,
it would just be engineer.
So, that's our goal, to just lose that label at someday,
right now, the show has the label because I'm raising
awareness of having them talk about technical topics.
As more people hear about them, it's just going to
be natural and normal like, sure I learned from Nicole
about Kubernetes, and then men are also listening
to the show, which I think benefits a lot the community.
>> I have two daughters, one's in high school,
one's in college, one's at Cal, and they're techies,
they're science, they like science, not coding yet.
Their mom doesn't want them to be like me and code,
but, so they're, but they're--
>> Just give them the choice
>> I said hey, do you do Cube interviews,
it's also an option.
But in their culture, when I ask them about this,
they're like, we don't think about it.
So there's a, at their level, they're all in school together
and it's interesting, I think a time is coming now
where the awareness is putting
the old guard pressures away,
there's still some bad behavior, no doubt about it,
I see it everyday and it's being called out, thank god,
but now it's just like, you're a person in tech.
>> Exactly.
>> So I think respect is the number one, respect
for the individual is something that we always preach,
independent of who the person is, male, female, whatever.
>> Yeah, exactly, and we will reach that point soon,
I hope so, where we lose the label.
>> So you're 77 episodes in, I'm also a listener,
I learned a ton from it, you have brilliant people
on every week.
I really admire you for that because I know how hard
it is to produce a podcast.
What are some of the things you didn't know
before starting a podcast that like, oh wow,
that takes more energy than it looked like at the time.
>> That's a good point, yes.
The very first few interviews that I did,
I didn't take into account how the guest would respond.
So I prepared the questions in advance, and then I would
think, this is going to be a two-minute answer,
but the person just ended up saying yes,
no, or sure, that's a big problem,
and I was counting on it to be more,
so I needed to prepare in that aspect
and what helps is just, if they've already given talks,
just look them up on YouTube or find all their interviews
they've done, just to get a sense of how they talk.
There's also people that tend to give super long answers,
and you need to prepare for that,
how you're going to handle it.
>> I noticed you had someone from Bitnami
came by recently, was that Erica?
>> Erica Brescia came on the show a few months ago,
the COO of Bitnami, and in that episode we focused a lot
on entrepreneurship, she came out of YC, so sort of
building Bitnami to where it is, and today I interviewed
the engineering manager of Bitnami, and she talked about
Kube apps and all this security aspects.
>> What are some of the innovations you're seeing
in your interviews?
Can you highlight some examples recently that jump out
at you, that are, lot of innovation coming
from these ladies, what are some of things
that they've done?
Shine the light on some of the awesome highlights
from your guests.
>> One of my favorite ones is Rachel Thomas,
she works at Fast.ai, what she works on
is bias in machine learning.
Machine learning is about learning from your data,
but I've heard, this woman at a conference bring it up,
like, if I'm a minority, I'm a minority in the data.
So you need to take that into account.
So there's a lot of people working in the space.
That was a really cool project
I think. >> Data driven analysis.
>> Yeah, but sort of, considering that bias that can be
in that data, and make sure your data is better.
So for example, it's a known fact that there's a lot of men
in the technology field, so if you're going to get job
recommendations, if a person like me, Mexican,
I studied computer science but if I'm a minority in the
dataset, maybe I'm not going to get the recommendation.
I'm not saying that how it works,
but that could potentially
be an issue. >> It's a statistical fact.
>> Yeah, but if you don't take that into account
in your system, maybe women are not getting
job recommendations, of openings.
>> That's a good point.
>> So, it brings up--
>> That's a really powerful observation, right,
and I was curious, as a software engineer,
software engineering is your craft
and podcasting is your hobby, how has podcasting
influenced your software engineering skills?
Because ultimately that's the path
you're going down career-wise.
>> Well a big part of software engineering is about talking
to your team and going to meetings, talking about solutions.
Podcasting has help me a lot, improve my soft skills.
For a period of time I was editing my own shows.
One thing that I noticed is when I was talking to my guests,
I'm listening to my recording, when I would say an idea,
I would tend to lower my voice.
So I noticed that, and then I said to myself,
I'm probably doing this in the meetings at work,
and then, I work--
>> What an amazing insight, right, like now you're seeing
how you're presenting yourself in front of other people
in technical ways and then you get
to bring that into your work.
>> Yeah, whenever I would say an idea I would just be like,
what happens if we do this instead?
That was like I have to-- >> That's a great example of
self-awareness, right, I mean,
everyone should do that, listen to their,
look at their actions.
>> Yes, so it helps with the soft skills.
And it also helps if you're working in a certain area
of software engineering, and you want to find out more
about it, you can decide to do more shows on that
and just share that with the community
that women are working on this.
>> It's great to see you have some Cube alumni
like Erica on, we interviewed her on theCUBE
at Google Next a few years ago.
Share some coordinates, when does the show go out,
when do you record it, does it ship on a regular cadence,
share a little information.
>> The show is released weekly.
I publish Monday evenings, but I share it on social media
on Tuesday mornings, so if you're subscribed,
you would get it Monday evenings.
>> Good for the week, running, on the bike, in the car.
>> It's 30 minutes.
>> Any video podcasting coming?
>> I don't have any video, no.
>> Lot more editing required, trust me on that one.
Cool. What's the most exciting thing that
you're working on right now?
You have the podcast, which is a super cool hobby,
great to get those voices out there, so congratulations.
But at work, what are you working on?
>> Yes, well like I mentioned earlier, I work on a team
it's a team under Microsoft Research, a lot of it,
we don't know what people working on there, but,
my team works closely with product teams.
So we're adding AI features to Outlook and Dynamics CRM.
Just to increase the productivity aspect, in this sense.
>> So you're bringing applied R and D to the product groups,
mostly AI?
>> Yes, yeah.
>> What's the coolest thing in AI that you like?
>> Oh wow, well I really like recommendation systems
and things like that.
>> All right, well thanks for coming on theCUBE,
really appreciate it, The Tech Women podcast here,
they got a booth over there.
Doing great interviews, here's at theCUBE
we're doing our share.
Two days, the second day of live wall to wall coverage.
Be right back with more live coverage, in Austin Texas.
You here the music, this is the big D, Texas
here in Austin Texas.
More live coverage, that's Dallas, we're in Austin.
Be right back with more live coverage
after this short break.
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