Join LinkedIn and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners on May 30 at LinkedIn’s HQ in Mountain View for a LinkedIn Girl Geek Dinner!

How did some women just know that they were going to be engineers? How can we support young girls in their STEM careers and mentor them through failures and success? What are some common misconceptions and worries about becoming a Girl Geek?

Join LinkedIn engineering leaders for a night of girl geek talk, delicious food & drinks, and meet women from around the Bay Area that are changing the world. We can’t wait to meet you all and share our journey!

Agenda for the LinkedIn Girl Geek Dinner:

6:00pm – 7:00pm : Registration, Networking, Dinner & Open Bar
7:00pm – 8:00pm : Panel Discussion
8:00pm – 9:00pm : Networking & Dessert

Twitter hash tag for the event: #linkedinggd

Twitter handles for the hosts: @BayAreaGGD @LinkedIn

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LinkedIn Girl Geek Panel Bios

Host: Florina Xhabija

(Manager, Technical Brand, Culture, and Innovation Programs at LinkedIn)

Florina Xhabija heads Engineering Brand at LinkedIn, where she focuses on programs like Hackdays, InCubator, Women in Technology, Cultural events, etc. She has been at LinkedIn for 4.5 years, where she spent two years as a developer and two years as a product manager. Her pet passion is to create a culture of women engineers that will become the leaders of tomorrow through mentorship and sponsorship. She also sits on the LinkedIn for Good Foundation Board. Florina graduated with a HBSc from University of Toronto in Computer Science & Psychology. She plays volleyball, makes a mean quiche, and loves spending time with her husband and many nerdy friends. Follow her on Twitter at @flojee.

Sarah Clatterbuck

(Senior Web Developer Lead)

Sarah Clatterbuck joined LinkedIn in 2012. She currently leads the company’s web development organization in Team Money across seven product development teams, as well as leading the accessibility Web Development Task Force. Throughout her career, Sarah has worked on several high-traffic Web properties while progressing in leadership ranks. Prior to joining LinkedIn, she was a senior front-end engineer and engineering manager at Yahoo!, where she led development for the Universal Header platform and user experience. Sarah also held previous roles at Packeteer, Apple, and two startups. She received her MLIS from San Jose State University in Library and Information Science, specializing in Information Architecture and Systems Design. Follow her on Twitter at @girodchatterbox.

Yael Garten

(Senior Data Scientist at LinkedIn, Team Lead for Mobile data analytics)

Yael Garten is a Senior Data Scientist at LinkedIn, where she leads the mobile data analytics team that focuses on understanding and increasing Mobile engagement of LinkedIn’s 200 million members. Yael’s team is focused on converting LinkedIn’s rich data into actionable product and business insights that optimize the LinkedIn mobile experience and create powerful data-driven products that help members be productive and successful. Her team also focuses on understanding the impact of mobile usage on the rich LinkedIn ecosystem.

Before joining LinkedIn, Yael was at Stanford University, where she completed her PhD in Biomedical Informatics, focusing on information extraction via natural language processing to understand how human genetic variations impacts drug response. Yael advises biomedical companies on informatics methodologies to transform high throughput data into insights. She has a PhD from Stanford University School of Medicine, and MSc from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. When Yael is not busy changing the world, she can be found playing with her two children. Follow her at @yaelgarten.

Neha Narkhede

(Principal Software Engineer)

Neha Narkhede is a Staff Software Engineer and Lead in the Distributed Data Systems team at LinkedIn, working on Apache Kafka. She is one of the initial authors of Apache Kafka and is serving as a PMC member in the Apache Software Foundation. In the past she’s worked on search systems in large scale databases and has been an active contributor to several projects LinkedIn has open sourced. Neha loves hiking in Big Basin and exploring the world with her husband. Follow her on Twitter at @narkhede.

Join Hackbright Academy and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners on May 9 in downtown San Francisco for a Hackbright Girl Geek Dinner! Don’t miss the night of talks by women engineers, good food, great people, games, networking, schwag and more!

Hackbright Academy students will be demoing their final projects, and there will be a geeky photo booth!

Agenda for the Hackbright Girl Geek Dinner:

6:00pm – 7:00pm : Registration, Networking & Dinner
7:00pm – 7:40pm : Introduction & Tech Talks
7:40pm – 8:00pm : Hackbright Student Panel & Spring 2013 Class Introductions
8:00pm – 9:00pm : More Networking & Student Demos

Twitter hash tag for the event: #hackbrightggd

Twitter handles for the hosts: @BayAreaGGD @Hackbright

  FREE RSVPs for Hackbright Girl Geek Dinner will start on Friday, May 3 @ 10AM PST!  

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Hackbright Girl Geek Speaker Bios

Speaker: Liz Howard (Director of Operations & Instructor, Hackbright Academy)

Liz learned to write databases before she learned to write essays. Her parents were both software engineers, and programming is in her blood. After leaving school to work on one of the first EMR programs in the country with her father, she did contract software development until she was old enough to leave home. She had a brief sojourn into Kindergarden teaching, but ultimately couldn’t leave programming. After that, she tooled around building software and leading teams for a number of large corporations, and ended up rewriting most of the fraud prevention systems for 8 of the top 10 banks in the country. Currently, Liz leads and teaches for the San Francisco chapter of Girl Develop It!, a worldwide organization aimed at helping women get into programming. She’s teaching, developing curriculum, working on community, operations and strategy at Hackbright Academy. Follow her on Twitter at @lizthedeveloper.

“Mentorship: Or why we should all be more like my brother.”

This is a talk on being mentored, being a mentor, and how to find those people who are going to help you get to the next stage of your life/career.

Speaker: Kate Heddleston (Mentor, Hackbright Academy)

Kate is a web applications developer in the Bay Area. She’s been using Python and Django since graduating college two years ago. Kate studied Human Computer Interaction (yes, the fuzzy CS degree) for her MS at Stanford but did her undergrad degree in Communication (even fuzzier). She enjoys using open-source tools to build web applications, and especially likes building product features that interface with the user. As Kate started building side projects, she has been learning more about the world of open-source infrastructure tools that exist to make everyone’s lives easier. She believes that open-source technologies are the foundation of our modern tech-driven world and that automation is one of the core values that technology offers us. Thus, open-source automation tools are some of her favorite things in the world, just below puppies and just above shoe shopping. Follow her on Twitter at @heddle317.

“Drinking from the firehose”

This is a talk on getting my start as a new engineer, and how I learned to love data.

Mercedes Coyle (Alum, Hackbright Academy)

Data wrangling was not initially something Mercedes set out to do, but there were some clear signs that it was a field that would be a good fit for her as a new engineer. Now a few months into a new career as a Software Engineer, she’ll share some insight on starting out as a new engineer, tips for getting up to speed on a new language and codebase, and discovering what devops culture is really like. Mercedes is a Hackbright Alum from the 2.0 class, and now Software Engineer at Real Gravity. She discovered a love for code after a meandering and circuitous exploration through art and web design, and after diving deep into python and server side code, found an appreciation for back end development and data. Follow her on twitter at @benzobot.

“A Day in the Life of a Hackbright Student”

This is a talk on being a student at Hackbright Academy, learning to code and building your personal project – and all the things in between.

Katherine Wu (Student, Hackbright Academy)

Katherine hails from New Jersey, land of the Jersey Shore and Bruce Springsteen both. She graduated summa cum laude from Boston College with a B.S. in Biology and then joined Google. Currently, she is a product specialist on the DoubleClick for Publishers enterprise product suite. Working closely with Sales, Services, Eng, and PM to improve our product in a scalable manner, she prioritizes feature development and manage feature releases. One feature she recently released was a tool that eliminated ~200 support tickets quarterly. Outside of work, she enjoys learning to create things from scratch (cooking, knitting, sewing) and it dawned on her that she wanted to have such capabilities at work as well, instead of only relying on persuading others to build features or tools. Katherine chose her Hackbright project based on using something totally new to her (working with hardware) that would have obvious practical applications. Follow her on Twitter at @kwugirl.

Q&A Panel with Hackbright Students!

Melanie Warrick (Student, Hackbright Academy)

Melanie is currently studying software engineering (Python focus) in Hackbright Academy’s compact, full-time program. Her interests are in software engineering, data analytics and machine learning. She has comprehensive and international consulting experience at Accenture, Slalom and Alvarez & Marsal. Melanie’s background includes experience improving efficiency and enhancing customer experience ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, spanning diverse industries (retail, pharmaceutical, finance, healthcare, non-profit, entertainment, high-tech, utility and transportation). Her expertise lies in project management, business analytics, social business software and e-commerce. Melanie holds an MBA from George Washington University. Follow her on Twitter at @nyghtowl.

Kelley Robinson (Student, Hackbright Academy)

Kelley moved to New York after graduating from the University of Michigan and began working in Derivative Operations for Goldman Sachs. She found herself drawn to the technical sides of the projects she managed, driving a desire to learn more about the tech industry where the fast-paced dynamics of the business had already piqued her interest. She realized that the engineering jobs appealed more to her than the operations jobs, and began to search for resources to teach herself to program. Fortunately, Hackbright Academy quickly came on her radar and the rest is history. When she is not coding, her interests include the media’s obsession with Generation Y, bad puns and baking. Follow her on Twitter at @KelleyRobinson.

Christina Liu (Student, Hackbright Academy)

Christina is a web developer by day and a circus nerd by night. (Yes, she actually ran off and joined a circus once!) On the weekends, you can find her at the archery range or in a robotics lab baby-sitting 3d printers, laser cutters and writing code. She has even sometimes been known to help build giant industrial art. She chose this road of CS because she am passionate about puzzles and problem solving. As a former accountant, a career where building amazing things and solving new problems daily is exciting to Christina! Follow her on Twitter at @aerialdomo.

Kathryn King (Student, Hackbright Academy)

Kathryn is a currently student at Hackbright Academy. Follow her on Twitter at @coderkat01.

Gulnara Mirzakarimova (Student, Hackbright Academy)

Gulnara spent the last four years working in a bank on a commercial credit side. She was instrumental in growing the bank but soon realized that she didn’t feel satisfaction on the job. They say that most people are either “right-side” brained or “left-side” brained, but Gulnara feels she utilizes both extensively (though her physical balance is out of whack). Since 2011, Gulnara has been actively involved in growing the Washington, DC tech ecosystem through the DCNightowls group, and facilitating the information flow by interviewing startups, investors and mentors. This is when she realized that she could be one of the creators, and knew that she would have enormous satisfaction in being able to create products people love. Gulnara started learning how to code on her own and after confirming her assumption that she did enjoy programming, she left her career and moved to San Francisco to join Hackbright Academy. Follow her on Twitter at @Gulnara.

Ebay Inc. hosts Girl Geek Dinner on Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at 2161 North First Street 

We have a fun filled evening planned at the ebay campus. To facilitate networking, we will have booths set up where our girl geeks will demo their work, talk about their ebay experience, and share their own stories. We also have series of technical speakers, wonderful raffle prizes, games, food and drinks. 

Event Hashtag: #ebayggd

Ebay Girl Geek Dinner Agenda:

 5:30 – 7:00  Arrive, network, booth, games, hors d’oeuvres, & drinks

 7:00 – 8:00  Speakers

 8:00 – 8:30  Desserts and networking

 8:30 – 9:00  Raffle prizes 

Speakers for the event

Raji Arasu, CTO, StubHub

Keynote Speaker

As the CTO, Raji is responsible for both Product and Engineering functions for the core Stub Hub business.  Raji’s strategic vision and extensive background in the eCommerce and payments business will help create the technology foundation that will enable many delightful products for StubHub fans.

Prior to her role at StubHub, Raji was VP of Engineering at MarketPlaces and led multiple organizations over the years. She was responsible for both site experience and web services for seller applications, buyer experience, transactions and payments.

Before joining ebay, Raji led technology teams at several companies, including marchFIRST and Oracle.

Karina Guillot, Senior UI Engineer, StubHub

Talk topic: Bringing a unified user experience throughout different platforms

Karina is a Senior UI Engineer at StubHub, where she is currently working on new and exciting interfaces. Prior to StubHub, she worked on developing UIs for several Yahoo! products, and as a designer and developer for Mumbo, a startup acquired by LinkedIn. She is passionate about creating interactive products and prototypes, and is known to dream in CSS3 and JavaScript from time to time.

Erin Moore, Senior Product Manager, ebay

Talk topic: Fashion and Technology

Erin Moore has been at ebay for two years and heads up the vertical mobile apps of Fashion and Motors for ebay mobile.  Prior to ebay, Erin joined a small startup called Yahoo! and remained there for 13 years, contributing and leading several products from Personals to Travel to Yahoo! For Good.  She is a product leader in a technical world and contributes her success to strong interpersonal and communication skills, as well as a passion for the consumer.  She has a Masters in Environmental Management and somehow finds time to also manage her brood of two young boys. 

Connie Yang, Senior Member of Technical Staff, PayPal

Talk topic: Why are scalability and performance such an integral part of software development

Connie Yang is a seasoned systems developer/architect for building complex platform and infrastructure.  At ebay/PayPal, Connie has worked on a number of key projects with a keen sense on performance, reliability and scalability.  In 2012, Connie led a team that developed an easy-to-use, cloud hosted, asynchronous messaging system with selectable QoS, and message filtering capability.  Prior to 2012, Connie was the technical lead for a web application framework, and worked on IaaS and PaaS of ebay cloud.  Currently, Connie is building the infrastructure to support PayPal’s next generation ad server that’s highly scalableable and well performed.

About ebay Women in Technology (eWIT)
Ebay Women in Technology is a volunteer-led professional organization that supports women in technology throughout ebay Inc. eWIT’s mission is to advance the unique interests of women in technology and help make ebay a great place to work.