Talk Night

Women and femme coders will talk about more advanced topics in programming. We'll have two lightning talks and one longer talk (30 minutes).

The agenda for the evening:

7:00 pm - Start: get yourself a drink and a snack

7:30 pm - Community Announcements

7:40 pm - Making Video Games as Self-Expression, by Linsey Raymaekers

8:00 - 8:10 - Short break

8:10 pm - Toward Smart Privacy - Combination of Blockchain Technology and Zero Knowledge Proofs protocol, by Gazelle Zaheer

8:30 pm - Be Nice or Go Home: Building your tech team culture, by Lindsey Bleimes

About the speakers

Linsey Raymaekers studied Human-Computer Interaction in Belgium and is currently an intern in game programming at Honig Studios here in Berlin. She started making video games as a hobby through game jams and One Game A Month, and spent a year exploring the independent game development scene across Europe while finishing her studies. After several years of writing poetry and playing music as emotional outlets and forms of self-expression, she is now interested in how game development can be pursued for similar motivations.

Gazelle Zaheer is a master student at Technical University of Berlin, studying Computer Science faculty in Software Engineering filed. As software engineer her main interest is development of secure systems considering user’s privacy as well. Her study areas are software security, enterprise computing technologies like cloud computing and blockchain technology, and machine learning methods for recommender systems and autonomous agents. Beside these activities in Berlin ;) , in her country, Afghanistan, she is a junior teaching assistant at Computer Science faculty of Herat University. She also try to help afghan females to join technology community via Code To Inspire program, it is first coding school for afghan females in Afghanistan. What she really enjoy in this school is teaching school girls (there are also faculty female students) to develop websites and give them feeling of being independent since they can develop a website as a freelancer and get money anytime they need.

Talk descriptions

Making Video Games as Self-Expression The idea of self-expression through the creation of artifacts in traditional media is familiar to most people. Examples are poetry, paintings, drawings, music, and so on. As consumers, we tend to seek these out to feel connected with our peers or to process and validate our personal experiences. The creation of video games as such artifacts is starting to be practised and recognised by an increasing number of people. This talk focuses on examples of such games, and draws comparisons with other media (especially poetry) as well as on their development process from a creator's perspective.

Toward Smart Privacy - Combination of Blockchain Technology and Zero Knowledge Proofs protocol. While all developers are trying to develop a well functioned or better say a perfect system for their users, they also put equal effort on security considerations of their system during development process. Therefore, there always have been efforts in securing a system from developers perspectives, ensuring user that his/her data are secure within our system which is called Data Security (ensuring confidentiality, availability and integrity of their data). But what about ensuring user about his/her data privacy (ensuring appropriate use of their data)? In many online applications, due to wide range of content to be offered to user, systems provide a personalized selection of relevant items to users by relying on detailed personal data on the preferences of users. For example, using personal profiles to help social network users meet new friends. Such systems are useful, however the privacy risks associated to gathering and processing personal data are often underestimated or ignored. Many users are not sufficiently aware if and how much of their data is collected, if such data is sold to third parties, or how securely it is stored and for how long. There are solutions for mentioned problem which currently technologies related to Blockchain are using methods to not only secure user’s data but also ensure user’s data privacy by integrating protocols like Zero Knowledge Proofs (zkSNARKs technology). Zero Knowledge Proofs is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true, without conveying any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true. It is just like you know a secret but you will prove it without revealing that secret. Beside briefly explaining two mentioned technologies I will also shortly explain an example of Zero Knowledge Proofs implementation by zCash and Ethereum’s Smart Contracts.

Be Nice or Go Home: Building your tech team culture. How to build a good team culture in a cross functional environment.

About the host:

Wayfair is the leading e-commerce company in the world selling home goods. Founded in 2002, we started our significant investment phase in Europe 3 years ago, and are doubling in size every year. As such we are looking for people we can see progressing through the business. We currently have 70 Engineers over 5 main divisions here in Berlin, and plan to grow to 200 over the next two years, adding to our Global Engineering Team of 1200. We work predominantly with PHP7, MS SQL, and ReactJS, as well as other technologies like Storm and Kafka in our Transportation and WMS teams for example.

We’re solving a wide range of problems with millions of customers, millions of products, billions in revenue per year, high-availability, product recommendation and discovery, integration with different carriers, routing, managing our own warehouses, AR/VR and more. We are listed on the NYSE so in addition to offering unbeatable base salaries you will receive highly valuable shares in the business. We also offer all of the benefits that you would expect from a top Berlin Tech company including free snacks, wellness weeks, subsidized gym membership, travel and more.