Brief Introduction

This is a summary of the experiences the speakers at the panel went through in note format along with a paragraph at the end to sum up what I learned.

Speakers

  • Kathyleen Beveridge
    • Born in Vietnam, came to US in 1980
    • Eventually moved to San Diego in 2004
    • Studied finance at SCU and USC (with an MBA)
    • Worked as a stock broker
    • Soon decided to switch careers to high tech
      • Currently works at Thermo Fisher
    • HP - makes technology improving life for everyone everywhere
    • Qualcomm - makes technology that’s loved by the world
    • Thermo Fisher - gives customers the ability to make the world safer and cleaner
      • She likes working at places that helps people
  • High Tech
    • Service helps other people
    • Huge impact on world
      • A billion impacted by Qualcomm every day
    • Over 125,000 employees at Thermo Fisher
      • 42 billion dollars of revenue
    • Can take an idea and actually make it into reality
  • Kris Porter
    • Works as software engineer, SRE, and DevOps
    • Took first comp sci course at UCLA
      • Failed first time, retook it and eventually became career
    • Did research (embedded network sensors)
      • Learned Linux
    • 2010 - Startup email marketing operation
      • Started DevOps
    • Worked for NBC Universal
    • Moved to San Diego
    • Forced Mr. Mortensen to hire him
    • Started working at Twitter around 2 years ago
    • Projects
      • Media streaming infrastructure
      • Infrastructure analytics
      • Twitter projects
      • New DataCenter deployment

Conclusion

This panel helped me learn that actually making ideas into reality within the tech industry require massive amounts of work and different components for each individual company. Everyone has their own, unique part to play: some people will be directly coding while others will be managing those people. The sheer amount of work put into these kinds of projects has also made me realize how important the tech industry is to our world today: without their hard work to improve society we wouldn’t be living lives as nice as ours currently. It’s easy to think that anyone could just write a lot of code on their own and turn their idea into something tangible that will help others, but that just isn’t realistic. I think our CSA class lets us work in a much more realistic environment. Instead of programming everything ourselves on smaller, less useful projects that don’t do much, we have tables that can program together to make a bigger, useful project that can benefit us. It actually sets us up for the real world of computer science.