Mary Grygleski is a Senior Developer Advocate at IBM with the Liberty/Websphere team, focusing on Liberty, Microprofile, Jakarta EE, Java, Open Source, Cloud, and Distributed Systems. She transitioned from Unix/C to Java around 2000 and has never looked back since then. She considers herself as a polyglot and loves to continue learning new and better ways to solve real-life problems. She is an active tech community builder outside of her day job, and currently the president of the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG), as well as a co-organizer for several IBM-sponsored meetup groups in the Greater Chicago area.
In your work with technology, what is the task, situation, setup when you’re the happiest and in the flow?
I am the happiest when I feel that I am trusted, with my manager essentially entrusting me to decide on how to do my work. I was a software engineer for over 20 years for different companies, before becoming a developer advocate in 2018. There were a few occasions in which I was given a project to finish, and was given the freedom to choose the libraries and frameworks to get my work done. Obviously I did not just go blindly with my assignment, and I sought approval and advice from those who were more experienced than I was. Overall it gave me great satisfaction when I felt trusted to get the job done.
What was the most positive thing you realized, or that just happened to you, during the pandemic?
Strange as it may seem, there are some positive things that have happened - or are still happening, to me during the pandemic. The fact that the meetups that I am hosting for the Chicago JUG are all digital, we are now having new members joining from not just Chicago, but from all over the world! Even though our meetup times are very late for some of these new friends who are based in, for example, Europe and India, we post the recordings on our YouTube channel, so I think everyone is benefitting from that as well.
Which person, in tech or anywhere, gives you the most inspiration?
There are more than just one person, but now that I am being asked, I have to mention Venkat Subramaniam being one of the most inspirational for me. He is amazingly knowledgeable and articulate, but more importantly, he is so humble too. I remember the first time meeting him in person about 5 years ago, when I was the meeting director at CJUG and scheduled him for a meetup, I picked him up at the hotel in the Chicago suburb where he was giving a few workshops that week, and then we took the commuter train into the city where the meetup venue was. I have to say that it was one of the most memorable train rides that I ever had! He and I struck up some fantastic conversations, not just technical stuff but life itself! I myself could not even believe that I was riding the train with a tech legend! I learned a lot from him, and to this day, I feel that my advocacy work has been influenced by how he carries himself - being very genuine and sincere in what I do as speaker, that I am out to share the knowledge and not a bit about myself.
Should we stay online, go all-in for in-person, or do a hybrid setup next year? Which one do you personally prefer?
This is a tough question! While I would love that you go for an all in-person conference next year, the fact that the pandemic is still posing a high risk, it would not be good that any event should expose people to the risk. So I’d say let’s play it by ear, and perhaps a hybrid setup would be more realistic and should, hopefully, give SBTB the flexibility of going either way depending on the situation.
We are happy to invite you to the 9th conference Scale By the Bay!
Format: Online
Dates: 28th-29th of October 2021
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Watch the videos from the previous years for inspiration ;)
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