Women in IT

This month we celebrate International Women's Day, an important opportunity to celebrate women's achievements while calling for greater gender equality.

We are delighted to be joined by a growing list of fantastic speakers who will talk about their journey in IT, where they started, what they currently do, and what lessons they have learnt along the way.

Please come along to learn more about what we can all do to help #breakthebias and become a more welcoming and inclusive community

Confirmed speakers include:

Farrah Campbell
After 10 years of working in healthcare management, a serendipitous 20-minute car ride with Kara Swisher inspired Farrah to make the jump into technology. She has worked at multiple startups in many different capacities, eventually working her way to being a Sr. Product Marketing Manager at AWS focused on Modern Applications. She is known for not only her ability to get things done but her track-record of accomplishing lofty goals in creative, dynamic ways with an infectious smile. Her passion lies in influencing outcomes and driving projects with multiple stakeholders, priorities, and personalities towards a common goal. She will be the first to tell you how much she loves the chaos and challenges that tech provides. Farrah has shaped a unique story and career that supports her passion for fostering genuine, vibrant communities. She aims to re-define the experience of “providing a service” with a no bs attitude and lots of compassion.

Kristi Perreault
Kristi is a Senior Software Engineer at Liberty Mutual Insurance, where her focus is serverless development and enablement. She has over 4 years of industry experience, holds an M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering, and is very passionate about promoting women in technology. Outside of work and the serverless tech space, Kristi can be found in the mountains of Colorado hiking, mountain biking, skiing, golfing, or doing just about anything else outdoors

Eleanor Deal
Eleanor is a Tech Lead at the Office for National Statistics, with a passion for building inclusive and sustainable teams. Her career to date has focussed on improving public services through open data and growing the Go community in South Wales - founding the Cardiff Go meetup. In her spare time, Eleanor loves to take pictures of architecture around the world and definitely not just her cats

Sharon Mitchell
Sharon works as an AWS DevOps Engineer for Version 1, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. She made her initial switch to an IT career from an Accounting background, first by studying for her BSc Computer Science as a mature undergraduate, before starting as a Software Developer in 2003. She is passionate about lifelong learning, diverse communities in Tech and STEM Ambassador outreach. Her career break to care for 2 disabled family members saw her help setup and run Code Clubs across South Wales schools and libraries, deliver workshops at Swansea Hackspace and create an interesting personal portfolio of IoT/Wearable micro-controlled devices. In 2020, after attaining her Master’s degree in Advanced Computer Science, Sharon’s career entered the Cloud computing space.

Praneeta Prakash
Praneeta grew up in sunny Bangalore, India where it is quite on trend for kids to get enrolled into Computer Science courses. She was in her third year, participating in a coding competition when she fell in love with the feel of building something, and working together as a team. She soon decided to pursue graduate degree and moved to the United States. After 10 years as a developer (4 of them at AWS), she recently moved to Product Management role and is learning the Business side of tech. She currently works with Serverless developer tools, and owns SAM and SAM CLI.