Women Techmakers IWD India Summit
#IWDIndia2021
This year I attended Google’s IWD India Summit, it was a great experience. Google’s IWD Event Series brings together and recognizes Women in technology through speakers, workshops, and the opportunity to connect with fellow industry professionals. The major goal is to empower women in technology by creating affirming and uplifting spaces — in-person and virtually.
On March 2021, Women in technology from across India joined together in celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD) through Women Techmaker’s IWD India Summit, a two-day-long virtual event series designed to honor moments of resiliency, accomplishment, and forward momentum of Women in tech. This virtual celebration featured technical talks, explorations into the intersections of technology and culture, professional development workshops, health and wellness sessions, and stories from Women centering their work on equity and inclusion.
On the first day of the event i.e. 20th March, the panel of speakers and members introduced themselves and made the audience comfortable with healthy discussions. The initial session regarding the product development lifecycle conducted by Lavanya Arora. The talk is a candid primer on a career in Product Management and busts some common myths around it. Through some insightful case studies, she touched upon what it takes to build great products. One of the most effective talks for me was “the Power of a Good Portfolio”, where we got to know the importance of showcasing our work in a unique way with an interactive interface.
The following day was full of informative technical sessions. We learned about APIs, an API is a way of communication between two or more applications, we got to know about first and third-party APIs and how we can leverage such pre-made ready-to-use interfaces for building apps. Further, Ms Bhuvana Kundumani gave an overview on building and training a custom deep-learning NER model with Tensorflow and deploying it as a REST API.
Webinar on Data Science, helped me to envision it in a rather different way. In a rapidly expanding field like data science, with data everywhere, it’s easy to merely focus on technical skills: coding, data types, algorithms. It’s quintessential to make data consumable for the business, explore promising tools and skills towards creating human-centered data science and speculate future directions for data analytics and visualizations. This talk showed us how data helps businesses solve problems worth millions and have tangible outcomes, a roadmap to visualizations, and best practices of storytelling with data!
As we know, one of the most important aspects of a programmer or a professional is to convey their feelings and expressions in the form of words. Every engineer is also a writer, but you don’t need to be an engineer to write, with this vision the kickoff of the webinar “Learn to Write, Write to Learn ”, took place. The workshop guided and demystified some common misconceptions around content writing. Teaching whom to write for and what to write for them by understanding what our audience might like to read. They gave motivation and tips to conquer in writing along with how we can turn writing into a career.
Overall, it was an ineffable experience to endeavor through this weekend journey in celebrating womanhood and enhancing technical knowledge to develop and contribute to society.
