Last October, I was fortunate to join the DevRel Team at JFrog. When I stepped into the “Sunnyvale Swamp,” I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of diversity I saw immediately upon walking through the front door. I work with people of all nationalities from all over the globe and I was very happy to see a significant number of women working in all roles from marketing to engineering to sales to executive leadership. Our products are universal and so is our workforce. So why am I writing this post? International Women’s Day is Sunday, March 9 and I want to highlight just a few of the women on JFrog’s DevRel team that are making magic happen every day for our team and the tech community at large.
First up is our first female devrel, Kat Cosgrove. You may recognize Kat, our human cyborg, when you see her because she has an amazing two-foot-long bright orange mohawk, or from her Peaky Blinders inspired wardrobe for the Devops Speakeasy. But that is just surface-level recognition – let’s get down to business. Kat was recruited to our team from our IoT department. She was instrumental in building out a proof of concept that demonstrated OTA updates for cars with minimal to no interruption for the driver (no need to go to a service center)! For more info about the demo check out this article (Kat’s driving the car while pushing code – we don’t recommend this approach ).
Now that we have her full time in DevRel she is focusing on community driven (no pun intended) activities like talking about DevOps and the related tooling helping to make the topic more approachable to developers that are new to the industry or to engineering. Did I mention she’s an engineer? Kat’s passion for making tech understandable to those just starting out is demonstrated in how she approaches community. She is compiling a bunch of material focused on intro-level tutorials and demos, “…because I think sometimes, we get so wrapped up in our abstractions that we forget what it’s like to not know how this stuff really works under the hood.” Check out her latest post on Easy Automatic Vulnerability Detection.
When she’s not speaking at conferences, writing blog posts, creating demos, you can find her at her alma mater Code Fellows (mentoring and tutoring), volunteering at local non-profits helping underrepresented minorities in tech, playing video games and watching e-sports. Cheers to you Kat! We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.
Next up we have some international flair with our Japan DevRel Ayana Yokota. Ayana joined the team in January. Ayana is a backend engineer with a focus on Java. As a new Frog Ayana will work on enhancing our outreach to Japanese developers. While she builds up her JFrog technical portfolio let me tell you a little bit about our female lead on the other side of the Pacific.
I first met Ayana in 2018 at JOnsen, an international unconference that brings Java luminaries from around the world to Japan. Ayana leads the Japan Women’s Java Group; whose mission is to expand the circle of female engineers and increase the number of people who are tech experts that share back to the community. In just two years we have seen the participation in the event grow and Ayana is now one of the main organizers of JOnsen. Her commitment to community is evident in her work to strengthen the relationships between developers in Japan by recruiting highly technical and notable speakers to both JOnsen and JJUG CCC. Want to know what Ayana thinks about community?… check out her 60 Second Groundbreaker Developer story at JJUG CCC 2019 Spring in Tokyo.
And last but by no means least we have the newest addition to the team, Melissa McKay. Melissa will be hard at work blogging and speaking at conferences but on an informal note, she is our inhouse unconference guru having attended and helped disorganize JCrete, JOnsen, JSpirit, JAlba, LavaOne (now UnVoxxed Hawaii) and now she is about to journey to Crested Butte for Winter Tech Forum. It’s not all fun and disorganization for Melissa, she is a co-organizer of the Devoxx4Kids Denver Meetup and has worked in software development for 20 years!
Melissa’s career has taken her all over the technological landscape and we couldn’t be more thankful to have a DevRel with both front-end and back-end experience coding in (but not limited to) C++, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, shell scripting, and more. “I love building things that makes developer and customer lives easier. I’m always looking for ways to improve processes, reliability and the overall quality of solutions.”
This post is not an attempt to humble brag about the amazing women I get to work with daily, it is a total brag. These three women are a technical force that have made learning, and contributing part of their day-to-day jobs and after-hours free time. Each one is working towards and strengthening women in tech and taking strides to be thought leaders in the field. Sharing is caring and I am so fortunate to share Kat, Ayana, and Melissa with JFrog and with all of you. Happy International Women’s Day… or as I like to think about it, Every Day at JFrog.
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