Women in IT Panel Discussion at TechDays SF

About Show #317

While at TechDays SF, Richard moderated a panel on Women in IT. The panelists include Jennelle Crothers, Jessica DeVita, Christa Anderson and CA Callahan. The panel discussed the role of community in engaging more women into IT, finding peer support, and dealing with the various challenges of being a part of a still male-dominated industry. There are a number of questions posed by the audience and the conversation ultimately ends up focusing on getting kids involved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) at an earlier age.

Jennelle Crothers is a Cloud Solution Architect for Microsoft who has been using Azure since its inception. Sometimes keeping up with the constant changes in cloud technology makes her long for the days of boxed software and two-year refresh cycles. Recently she has been focusing on helping businesses navigate moving to Azure while balancing the challenges of security, access, modernization, and adoption of DevOps. When not redeploying infrastructure, she spends time with her family and friends in the SF Bay Area.

Jessica DeVita, formerly a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, now at Chef . She started at Chef as a pre-sales solutions architect and now works in post sales, helping customers adopt Chef Tooling and devops practices at some of the largest enterprises including Disney, Intuit and more.

A long-time desktop virtualization expert and former Terminal Services MVP who joined the Remote Desktop Services product group in order to fix things—and did—Christa is now on the Partner and Customer Ecosystem team on at Microsoft, working with technical community for Windows Server and System Center to ensure that their feedback is heard in planning. She is an amateur photographer and makes a mean loaf of sourdough bread.

CA Callahan is the author of Mastering Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Mastering Windows SharePoint Services 3.0as well as being a well known SharePoint trainer and speaker. A former Microsoft SharePoint MVP, and a recognized expert on SharePoint Services and Foundation, she often volunteers to support the SharePoint hands-on labs at TechEd and the SharePoint Conference, speaking at SharePoint Saturdays and user groups around the nation, as well as frequently doing free webcasts for her online user group. You can follow her on twitter @callahan, or join her SharePoint Foundation Facebook group at www.facebook.com/groups/callahanSPF.

About Show #317

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