Tech Talks & Social Night

Join Women Who Code at Toast for a fun and casual night with some great tech talks, followed by time for networking and socializing with other women in the Boston tech scene.

Also, our host, Toast, will be giving a small gift to the first 50 attendees!

Schedule

6:00 - 6:30 pm: Registration + Mingle
6:30 - 7:30 pm: Talks
7:30 - 8:30 pm: Networking

Speaker: Lorena Pantano Rubino
Topic: Revive and Restore: woolly-mammoth story

Breakthrough advances in genomic biotechnology are presenting the possibility of bringing back long-extinct species — or at least “proxy” species with traits and ecological functions similar to the extinct originals. The Woolly Mammoth has emerged as a leading candidate for this work. It can be attempted because a close relative of the mammoths still lives–the Asian elephant. Thanks to the similarity of their genomes, the genes of woolly mammoth traits can be edited into the Asian elephant genome, and the combination brought to life as an elephant cousin, once again adapted for the conditions of the far north.

The Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team headed by George Church (the Church Lab) is working to identify cold climate adapted alleles of the mammoth genome and edit them into living elephant cells. I am in charge of detecting the difference between the current elephants species and the mammoth to use CRIPS technology to modify the Asian elephant with the mammoth changes and bring back this species to real life. I will talk about the bioinformatics challenges that this sci-fi project offers, and how to best solve it.

Links:

· http://reviverestore.org/projects/woolly-mammoth/

· https://github.com/chapmanb/bcbio-nextgen

· https://lpantano.github.io (https://lpantano.github.io/)

Speaker: Ashley Hedberg
Topic: Title: Refactoring at Scale

You have a class Foo in a file foo.h. You want to rename it to Bar and move it to bar.h. Oh, and a quarter of a billion lines of code depends on Foo. What could possibly go wrong?! The Abseil (https://abseil.io/) team at Google has spent several quarters doing exactly this. I'll talk about the things we've done well as well as the things we've done...well, not so well.

Speaker: Padmaja Suren
Topic: Career Advice: Pathways to enter or advance in a Data Career

Database Analyst, Data Analyst, Data Scientist and Data Engineer - has you head stopped spinning at all! What do these job title mean? How are they different from one another? I am currently working with data, which title better fits what I can do? This talk will help you parse through these fluid Job Titles and equally amorphous Job Descriptions. At the end of the talk audience will walk away with a solid understanding of the different types of data jobs and where these fit in with regards to the data initiatives of a company or enterprise.

We do still have room for a fourth talk due to a last minute opening, so if you're interested in giving a lightning talk feel free to reach out to Rachel Minto via meetup or slack.

Food will be provided!

WWCode is a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers.

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If you'd like to give a lightning talk (or longer talk!) at a future event, please fill out this form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdPo8oBe1BHOWeRy5CxWVhIH4nMTuXVRdIFiXxgng4VVyg4bg/viewform#start=invite). If you'd like to speak but don't have a topic in mind, let us know and we can help you brainstorm. The talk doesn't have to be technical and the only requirement is that others should be able to learn something from it. The talks will be short (6-8 minutes + a couple of minutes for Q&A) so shouldn't require a lot of preparation.