About the Speakers

Kathyleen Beveridge is a Director of Marketing and she got her undergrad at Santa Clara and a bachelors in finance there as well. And she lives by the quote Maya Angelou “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive”. In her presentation she emphasized how all companies want to use technology for the greater good of the people and do something the world wants, citing Qualcomm, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and HP Inc. as examples.

Kris Porter is a Software Engineer SRE DevOps and he went to UCLA for electrical engineering with a focus on communications. He’s done many things such as work for centers for Embedded Network Sensors and Networked Info Mechanical systems (NIMs). Not to mention he has a lot of experience since he’s worked in many places like Systems Engineer at Startup (GPM), NBC Universal (streaming media infrastructure in the 2012 olympics), Intro to DevOps at Qualcomm, Twitter (new datacenter deployment and migrating home timeline to graphql). And he is going to work at Mysten Labs. In his presentation he emphasized how he values continuous learning. And he shared things he’s learned like CCNA training, Machine Learning and Deep Learning (Qualcomm), Python (Udemy) and things he wants to learn like blockchains, AWS, and google cloud stuff.

QnA

  • Agile Methodology is different for each company and they all have different versions of it for their own purpos. Qualcomm uses roadmaps since there are many people working on project together and this allows for organization amoung many people. While Thermo Fisher Scientific uses short sprints to be able to do long projects.
  • When Kris Porter was learning Machine Learning in Qualcomm he learned how to use python libraries and other machine learning frameworks, NDS system, and how to use info (if people are downloading things) to archive and delete repositories since they cost money.
  • Machine learning in Thermo Fisher Scientific is used to predict where demand for products will be before products are made.
  • Skills that are considered the most important in the industry are:

Continuous learning (continue to get better at your skill) and don’t be super concerned about things you read on the news, and there’s only risk if you’re not learning.

Being adaptive (best people are like this, listen to requirements and translates it to how tech can solve requirement)

  • Some of the biggest challenges they have faced include semiconductor industries going through acquisitions and interviews since it’s series of timed random test where you have to solve a problem in 30-45 mins
  • Having coding skills allows for a different way of thinking that increased critical thinking and problem solving skills a question that Kathyleen Beveridge likes to ask is “You’re in a room with no electronics you only have pen and paper how many cars did the US sell last year. And the main thing she wants to see is the way the person solves the problem and comes to a conclusion.