DEV Community: Nick Trogh

Celebrate diversity in tech - FTW Conf, March 8

Nick Trogh — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 08:27:04 +0000

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, March 8, individuals from companies and communities like Microsoft, Auth0, Copenhagen Capacity and Startup Sweden, jointly organize FTW Conf - a mini conference celebrating marginalized genders in technology.

Through several parallel tracks we’re excited to invite you to a half day of learning and connecting with industry peers. Make sure to also check the inspiring stories and get energized by hearing how others experienced their journey in IT.

What can you expect?

FTW Conf is for the womxn, the wonderful, the witty, the wondering, ... which is why we've created a diverse line-up of sessions across 5 parallel tracks, so you can mix-and-match For The Win!

In the Security track you will learn about Threat Modelling, Trust and how you can get into security yourself. And don’t worry to bring your questions as there will be ample time for Q&A with the speakers and hosts.

If you’re interested in technologies gathering personal information, accountability and trust, then you shouldn’t miss the Transparency in Tech panel discussion about how to change the way transparency is built into technology.

Feeling nervous about approaching a salary negotiation or promotion discussion with your boss? Keen to find a mentor but unsure where to begin? Wonder how you can best bounce back and build resilience in an ever-challenging world? Applying to jobs and receiving zero response? Join our Career track as we explore real experiences, practical advice, and guidance from inspiring women in the industry on these important topics. Engage with us through our open Q&A and we will help you take your career to the next level!

All work and no play makes anyone dull. During the pandemic we’ve all picked up new hobbies, adopted new habits. In the Creative track, we won’t be talking sourdough bread, but we will explore more brainy creative outlets, like LEGO, sketch noting, and... knitting.

And don’t forget to pop in and out of our Main track, where we’ll have inspiring stories, discussions about diverse topics and where we’ll tie everything together in a panel with speakers from the different tracks.

Who are the organizers?

This event is organized by a passionate group of people who strive for making the IT industry a more diverse and inclusive place. Putting in place an event like this requires many helping hands, from the behind-the-scenes production team, scheduling sessions as a track owner, to moderating or hosting sessions themselves.
We have Sherry List and Suzanne Daniels from Microsoft running the main track, Ana Cidre and Sam Bellen from Auth0 are leading the Security Track, Lisa Mallner from Copenhagen Capacity is responsible for the Transparency in Tech topic, the Career track is in the capable hands of Ellie King from DigitTech Search and Peggy Poon from Microsoft for Startups, and finally, Microsoft’s Floor Drees oversees the Creative track. Behind the scenes, Nick Trogh (Microsoft), Goran Vuksic (Stratiteq), and Rasmus Jaque (Microsoft) are part of the production team.

When is it happening?

FTW Conf is happening on March 8, 2021 and we're kicking off at 17h30 CET | 8:30am PST. Check the full conference schedule on https://ftwconf.com

What should you do next?

Make sure to register and/or save the date at https://ftwconf.com and follow #ftwconf on social media for the latest updates.

dataMinds Connect 2020 - keep learning!

Nick Trogh — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 10:42:24 +0000

Earlier this week the thirteenth edition of the (virtual) dataMinds Connect conference took place. Traditionally organized as an in-person event, happening in Belgium, they moved to an online delivery for the first time this year.
The event is organized by the people from the dataMinds community and is aimed at bringing together people with a passion for the Microsoft Data platform.

Aside from an amazing closing keynote with Rohan Kumar, our Azure Data CVP, they had an impressive line-up of speakers from the community, companies and also Microsoft, delivering close to 50 hours of live quality content! Great to see was how they organized the content in 8 tracks, catering to people with different interests but also varying skill levels (kudos for the newcomer and expert tracks). Most of the sessions were recorded and will be published online 🙌. I have a bit of a sweet spot for AI and machine learning, so that's where I spent most of my time. So looking forward to seeing the recordings come online 🎥!

As Microsoft, we were a conference partner, and had a virtual booth, delivered through Microsoft Teams. We shared a bunch of learning resources, across our database, analytics and AI products and services. You've likely absorbed a lot of information during the conference.

To make sure you make the most of it, we're providing you with a list of resources to help you develop your skills further.

Azure SQL Database

Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure AI

SQL Server

eBooks

Join a local event

For a list of all our local Azure events, check our events page. Virtual Training Day events give you a technology introduction, whereas the Discover events allow you to get a hands-on experience.

Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Intelligent Decision Making Through Modern Data Warehousing
Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Modernizing Web Applications and Data
Microsoft Discover: Analytics in a Day by Element61 (Oct 14)
Microsoft Discover: Database Modernization in a Day by Kohera (Oct 21)
Microsoft Discover: Analytics in a Day by Cegeka (Nov 24)

Stay Connected

If you want to stay in the loop of local events and interesting developer news, make sure to subscribe to our Microsoft.Source newsletter (no marketing fluff, just technical stuff!).

Don't hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter to share your developer experiences or questions!

CONTRIBUTING: Maartje Eyskens on cert-manager

Nick Trogh — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:08:28 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Maartje Eyskens, maintainer of the cert-manager project.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?

Cert-manager is an x509 certificate management solution for Kubernetes but that's a mouthful of words. What cert-manager does, it automates your certificate lifecycle inside Kubernetes. Just like Kubernetes would manage anything else for deployments, cert-manager will do the same for your certificates inside Kubernetes.
What cert-manager then allows you to do, is use these certificates to secure your application. For example, your ingress, but even your internal applications within Kubernetes can be secured using
cert-manager. To do this, cert-manager plugs into enterprise solutions such as Vault and Venafi. However, cert-manager can also manage its own certificates and it can even get certificates from an ACME CA issuer like Let's Encrypt.

What contributions are you welcoming?

We are welcoming all kinds of contributions to the project. This goes from helping out users in our Slack, to improving our documentation and our
general website. In the code base there are also a lot of things to do: from fixing small bugs, to implementing one of our 100 open feature requests. This can be for a specific cloud provider you're familiar with or for the general Kubernetes controller.

What skills do people need to contribute?

Experience with Kubernetes is a must-have and knowing Go is also nice-to-have. However, I see many people who just jump into the project and start learning Go while contributing.

How do I get started?

You can go to our GitHub repository and look for 'Good first issues'. We label the ones that we think are best to
get started there.
Also, if you have any questions, we are available every day in the Kubernetes Slack in cert-manager-dev, for any development-related questions.
Also, feel free to jump into our community meeting which is every two weeks, where we talk about the latest updates. And you can even join in our daily standup which is also public.

Join, October 2nd, for CONTRIBUTING.md - a virtual Hacktoberfest meetup, free and open for anyone who wants to join. Learn what Open Source projects are looking for contributions, which communities are looking for new members, and who is looking for advice from someone with your exact skill set. Check this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers which we'll release until the event.

CONTRIBUTING: Freek Van der Herten on Spatie

Nick Trogh — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 09:51:54 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Freek Van der Herten, co-owner and core contributor for many open source projects at Spatie.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?

At Spatie we don't have one open source project that we work on but we have we have many of them. In each client project that we deliver, we see that there is functionality that is useful for other developers as well. Things like communicating with Google Analytics, setting up event sourcing, setting up multi-tenancy, or how to handle media files in an application. Whenever we discover such functionality, we expose that functionality and open source it via a package.
Over the past years we've created over 200 of those packages and I think we are the largest contributor of packages to the Laravel ecosystem.
On our GitHub organization you can see like a big list of things that we've made. Also, when we have created such a package,
that's not like the end of the story, but rather the starting point, because that's where maintenance begins.
In creating the packages, I get a lot of help from my team. We have a team of 10 developers working and maintaining them. This takes a lot of effort, so we give ourselves half a day a week to work on these PHP and Laravel packages. But often that isn't enough, and we get a lot of help from the community as well.

What contributions are you welcoming?

People often think that working in the open source space is only about contributing code and doing bug fixes. But there are a lot of things that need to be handled in addition to that.
Of course, we welcome new issues when you encounter a problem with our package and we welcome pull requests (PRs) that fix those problems.
But documentation needs to be taken care of as well, so we also welcome PRs that fix typos or make documentation better. How you can help us as well, is by writing a blog post about one of our packages.
And another way that you can support is by reviewing open issues and PRs of a package and try to give an answer to the issue or try out the code in the PR. If several people say, "hey this PR works", that's more trustworthy for us.
A lot of the issues that we get on our packages are mainly by users that use our package for the first time, and you can help us a lot by answering some of these questions as well.

What skills do people need to contribute?

If you are using our package and you think that the documentation can be improved or there is like a functionality that isn't working or some functionality that should be added make a contribution.
We welcome people with any level: beginners, intermediates or experts are all welcome. Beginners can help us with reviewing documentation, or working on one of the issues that we've labeled a good first issue. If you already know the package quite well, we love PRs that make the package better.
Most of our packages are written in in PHP and for the Laravel framework. So it definitely helps if you have knowledge about that language or that framework.

How do I get started?

The easiest way is just searching the GitHub repos on our organization. We label the PRs so you can see which ones we need help with. Something that you can also do is
follow our Twitter account; we tweet out some issues where we need help. And on my personal Twitter account I also make suggestions where we need somebody to help us.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to reach out on me on Twitter or send me an email.

CONTRIBUTING: Tom Kerkhove on KEDA

Nick Trogh — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 09:45:17 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Tom Kerkhove, contributor for KEDA.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?

KEDA is an application auto-scaler for kubernetes which makes it super simple for you to auto-scale your applications on Kubernetes without having to understand the details of Kubernetes. Another benefit that it has is it allows you not only to scale on the standard Kubernetes metrics but we will also get your metrics from external metric providers such as Kafka, Prometheus, Azure Monitor, AWS CloudWatch and more. So basically you just tell us how to scale, and we will manage all the rest for you.

What contributions are you welcoming?

KEDA has an extensible model where it's using the concept of multiple scalars and we always welcome more of these scalars.
So one scaler is scoped to a single metric provider that you want to scale your applications on. For example, we have an Azure Service Bus scaler which will scale applications based on the queue depth of the Service Bus queue.
We already have more than 20 scalers ranging across different open source projects and all the major cloud vendors, but we are always happy to add new skills and new functionality.
If you're not one of the coders, you can also write an example on how to use KEDA, so that people can get started.

What skills do people need to contribute?

If you want to contribute a scaler, all you need is Go knowledge and you're good to go. In terms of the samples, you'll just need Markdown skills and access to a KEDA-enabled cluster and something to scale on.

How do I get started?

Getting started is super simple! We provide a contribution guide on our GitHub repo which basically guides you through all the things you need to know on writing scalers. For example, how we do testing and how to introduce a new scaler.

CONTRIBUTING: Tom Kerkhove on Promitor

Nick Trogh — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 09:43:05 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Tom Kerkhove, maintainer for Promitor.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?

Promitor is basically an open source project which allows you to get metrics from Azure Monitor and other systems. Today I support StatsD, Atlassian Statuspage and Prometheus, so that you can reuse the same metrics.

How it works behind the scenes is that we have two agents. One that scrapes the metrics from Azure Monitor itself. You can use a declarative approach as of version 2.0, which is now in preview. You can also use dynamic resource discovery on top of Azure Resource Graph, which allows you to dynamically get all the metrics you need in your applications and we will bring them where you need them.

What contributions are you welcoming?

Promitor works in a very flexible way where we have the concept of scrapers where you can very easily add a new scraper for a certain Azure Service. Today we have more than 25 scrapers but there's a backlog of more scrapers to add, such as Azure Application Gateway and others. It should be fairly easy to add those.
I'm also open for contributions for new metric sinks, but to save you time, it's best to discuss them first so that we don't reinvent the wheel, as they might already do it out of the box.

What skills do people need to contribute?

Contributing is very simple: all you need is .NET coding skills, an Azure subscription to create the resources and test against, and Markdown skills to write the documentation.
I also provide a small guide which walks you through the process of adding a new scraper. Or you can also use GitHub Codespaces or Visual Studio Code, which will give you a code tour of what that looks like.

How do I get started?

Getting started is very easy! You can go to Promitor.io to read the documentation and where you can find the link to the GitHub repo. I also provide a contribution guide which walks you through how the repo is set up and how to run it the solution locally. You will also find a link guidances on how you can add a new scraper to Promitor.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to open an issue, a discussion, or reach out to me on Twitter.

Inspiring Stories: Gitte Vermeiren

Nick Trogh — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 07:55:12 +0000

As a society we tend to focus on titles and roles, and we forget that behind each title there is a person who has a story to tell. And truly every person’s story is unique.
In honor of International Women's day, we interview inspiring women from the community on the story of how they got into Tech, and where they are today.

In this post I interview my amazing colleague at Microsoft, Gitte Vermeiren, who is based in Belgium.

Meet Gitte

I’ve been in IT for 15 years now, always on the tech side of things, starting out as a teacher, later as a developer, team lead and architect. I just started a new role within Microsoft as a FastTrack Engineer, helping our customers design and operate our cloud services. I love sharing knowledge and being on top of the latest technology advancements. I have a knack for really digging in to a problem and trying to solve it. Collaborating on designs and seeing the different businesses of our customers for me is tremendously interesting. I have also done quite some community speaking at several events. I like inspiring people through this, however, with a vivid three year old at home, this is a bit at a lower pace right now.

When did you first become interested in technology and what sparked this interest?

Technology, science and all things logic have always interested me, even from when I was really young. I wasn’t really a doll player, but rather preferred Lego and my Game Boy. Once a teenager, I got my ‘Kijk’ (the Dutch teenage version of Scientific American) on a regular basis. By doing computer science in higher education I also found out I have a natural talent for problem-solving. Programming just felt really natural and I loved doing it.

What education do you have?

After high school I first started movie school but soon realised, while I do love storytelling, I don’t have any cinematic vision whatsoever. It was a tremendously fun 2 years of my life though: I didn’t have to do too much studying, saw a huge amount of movies and just hung out. I loved living the student's life!
After 2 years and advised by my mom, I started computer science, which was actually an instant match. I first went for a professional bachelor, which I very much liked because of the practical side of things. Once I started my first job, I also achieved my masters’ degree during evening classes.

Describe your way towards your first job in tech; how did you land this job?

I started teaching at the university college where I studied. I got to prep and teach programming classes, but also classes like game programming, software testing, database technologies, etcetera. Each year I took on new subjects to teach, so I myself as well could keep on learning and evolving, it was tremendous fun to do.

Do you have any role models that influenced you?

First and foremost my mom. She inspired me to go chase my dreams and keep on working hard until you get there. She herself never let life get her down, but kept on fighting to provide the best for her family. She’s the strongest person I have ever known!

Second, Katrien De Graeve, she’s the first woman I saw on stage at tech community events. She really inspired me to want to do the same.

Third, Michel Grootjans, a guy I worked with during my consultancy years. He taught me everything I needed to know about agile and lean methodologies. He taught me how to teach by handing away the keyboard. He inspired me in the way I later became the one in charge of coaching our junior hires.

Who were/are the biggest supporters in your career?

First and foremost my family, of course!

But also all the great people I have worked with who gave me chances to grow. You have to make a lot happen for yourself in your career, but if you are surrounded by people who believe in the best of you, that really helps. Especially during my consultancy years, the company I was with really felt like a family and I got the opportunity to grow and experiment. During these years I did my first community sessions and I went from being a developer to becoming an architect.

Tell us more about your current job – e.g. what do you like most about your role?

In my current job, I guide our customers on their cloud journey. I advise and teach them on the services they would want to use, and help them make the right decisions. The most fun days are the ones in which we do design sessions and listen to the problem customer wants to solve and together we draw out a solution for this, taking all concerns into consideration.

Even more fun is it when we get to do a challenging proof of concept together with a customer. Figuring out things that are cutting edge or bringing together things that haven’t been combined before, really brings out my problem-solving skills. I love to dig in.

What does your typical day look like?

It depends a bit on the day since there is a lot of variation in my job. There are days in which I prep tech sessions and demos. There are other days where I’m doing a presentation, workshop or a design session at a customer. Some other days I spend on training myself, either through videos, reading or hands-on trying things out. There are also days which are spent answering emails and trying to find answers for customers’ questions. And some days are a combination of all of the above.

What do you do in your free time?

Spend time with my family. I have the greatest daughter alive, and the sweetest husband (who is also in IT, it’s the only subject we bicker about). We either go to the zoo, go swimming or to a trampoline park. We try to spend a lot of time outside of the house. Long walks, however, which I love to do as well, are close to impossible right now with the little one (kids get bored quickly). I also love to cook and eat.

What advice will you give to women and girls who dream about a career in tech?

Go for it and stay yourself! At the beginning of your career, keep your eyes and ears open and try to learn as much as you can. And once you know your stuff, don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. If you know your stuff, you will naturally get the respect you deserve, but do expect you will have to prove it.
And don’t let know-it-all people get you down, their behavior only comes from their own insecurity.

Inspiring Stories: Eva Dovc

Nick Trogh — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 07:50:14 +0000

As a society, we tend to focus on titles and roles, and we forget that behind each title there is a person who has a story to tell. And truly every person’s story is unique.
In honor of International Women's day, we interview inspiring women from the community on the story of how they got into Tech, and where they are today.

In this post, I interview Eva Dovc, who is based in Belgium.

Meet Eva

I’m Eva, a Slovenian in Brussels, and a self-taught web developer that once took a gamble that worked out just fine 😅! I quit my job at the age of 30 to learn how to code and pursue a career that would allow me to follow my wife around the world, as she’s a diplomat.

I love learning and teaching what I know to others. I’ve co-founded GirlsCode MK (UK) and includeJS (Belgium) - both initiatives are for teaching women how to code, for free.
I work remotely for a Norwegian startup called VIBBIO and have excellent home office workmates: a dog and two cats! 🐕🐈🐈

When did you first become interested in technology and what sparked this interest?
I always liked tinkering with techie things, but due to poor performance in all science subjects at school, I decided to steer away from doing anything “mathy” professionally 🤷‍♂️. Instead, I decided to study foreign languages (Mandarin Chinese and English), which took me to China where I lived for more than 5 years.

There I started working for an educational podcast to teach people how to learn Chinese and through that, I got exposed to audio and video editing, blog writing and social media. Then another hop into an e-commerce startup where I managed several websites and tried my hand at basic HTML and CSS stuff. From there I learned some basic Python to automate some of the boring processes and finally, attended a Django Girls workshop which opened the web development worldwide open. I quit my job shortly afterward. 💪

What education do you have?
I have a BA in English Language and Literature, a BA in Chinese studies and an MA in Sustainable Development. I’ve also finished a gazillion online courses ranging from design, programming languages to productivity skills and psychology. I still spend between 1-2 hours each day learning new things. 👩

Describe your way towards your first job in tech; how did you land this job?
I went the internship route and was lucky to be the recipient of both Rails Girls Summer of Code and the Outreachy scholarships. I also met a lot of people through meetups and freelance projects that I picked up here and there. Ultimately, I had great timing and caught a tweet about a job opening sent over by a former colleague of mine.

Do you have any role models that influenced you?
My mom for sure, who raised 5 kids and still managed to have a kickass career. My wife, who switched her career shortly before me and is now a diplomat. All the event organizers, volunteers, and coaches that I met in the last 3 years, who devote their time and expertise for making tech more diverse. All the girls and women who choose to become developers and are working at it hard every day, even though it’s not always easy.

Who were/are the biggest supporters in your career?
My wife has always been my no. 1 fan and supporter ❤️. She has been a believer in me even when I thought I wasn’t going to make it and all those doubts - about my age, ability to learn, technical skills - came seeping in.

I’ve also met a lot of coaches and teachers through meetups who became my friends and continue to support me today.

Tell us more about your current job – e.g. what do you like most about your role?
I work as a web developer for a small Norwegian startup. I mostly do front-end development (Sass, ReactJS), but sometimes I wander off into the back-end or the database parts as well.

For the first time since working in tech, I have a woman as a manager which automatically makes the team dynamic more comfortable (it just does!). There’s also a nice balance of being independent (and actually encouraged to make mistakes) and having help and support when I need it. The other developers in my team are keen to take on the role of mentors and although we are a fully distributed (remote) team, it just all works.

What does your typical day look like?
I am very fortunate that I can work from home so my commute can be measured in meters. I typically work 8 hours between 7:30 - 5:30 and I have time to run some errands during the day, walk the dog and play with the cats. My working hours are divided between coding, learning stuff, meetings, and pair programming.

What do you do in your free time?
I just started boxing, which is great fun (except the punching in the face bit). I organize events and go to meetups, I play table tennis, go indoor climbing and sometimes drink too much beer (I blame you, Brussels 😃).

What advice will you give to women and girls who dream about a career in tech?
Don’t compare yourself to others (a.k.a. the twentysomethings that managed to land a dream job after just 3 months of studying). Carve your own path and follow it. Be disciplined and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Realize that being a developer is not just about tech skills and that you and your life experience are enough.

You got this! 💪

Inspiring Stories: Isabelle Van Campenhoudt

Nick Trogh — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 10:44:46 +0000

In this post, I interview Isabelle Van Campenhoudt who is based in Brussels, Belgium.

Meet Isabelle Van Campenhoudt

Hi! I'm Isabelle. I'm a Microsoft Data Platform MVP, co-founder of www.shareql.com, and have been working in the world of databases for more than 25 years. I'm a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and a consultant working with developers, and the infrastructure team. I'm a user group co-leader (GUSS.pro) and I frequently (co)organize events such as Power Saturday, SQL Saturday and 24HOP.

When did you first become interested in technology and what sparked this interest?

When I finished University in 1993, I randomly picked an ad for a course to learn how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet. To be selected, you needed to pass some tests. I finished very quickly, and they asked me to do some extra logic tests. During the interview, they advised me to go for the Networking and Telecommunications courses. I had no IT education at all but still decided to take the challenge. In my first week, during the first database course, I managed to block the system. My teacher asked me to fix it by myself and gave me a big book. I found the solution, and this is when I fell in love with IT. Ever since, it has been my passion as it challenges my brain every day.

What education do you have?

I had a very traditional education with ancient Greek and Latin, and then a degree in Political Sciences, actually nothing related to STEM.

Describe your way towards your first job in tech; how did you land this job?

During my year of training, we were told to ask for an internship. I had an enlightened moment, and spontaneously proposed to be an intern in the training center itself. They were very surprised, but they accepted. I created a training course during my internship, and I was hired right after. Worth mentioning is that this training center today still exists and is dedicated to educating women on Information Technology.

Do you have any role models that influenced you?

My first IT teacher was also my tutor, and she was a woman. She inspired me a lot. Then, when I started my consultant's life in the 2000s, I was really driven by Kimberley L. Tripp, and other people like her.

Who were/are your biggest supporters in your career?

My daughters have always been very proud and supportive of me, even with all my travels. But my biggest support I find in the community of speakers, user groups, and MVPs. They inspire me to share and to keep learning every day.

Tell us more about your current job – e.g., what do you like most about your role?

I have been a freelancer for 12 years. I work on different projects to help people with their data roadmap, the adoption of the Power BI technologies, and the data literacy of their teams. I have also done a lot of very technical things like architecture and migration project on SQL Server farms, worldwide monitoring systems, farm auditing, and code tuning. I also give training and workshops. My driver is always to share the road to excellence, and the optimization of solutions. Teaching people how to leverage their data technologies is my most favorite thing. Once or twice a month, I travel to speak at meetups and conferences, which I enjoy a lot.

What does your typical day look like?

I typically head out of the house at 7am for a 25-minute walk to the tram station. I quit using the car six months ago and now walk 10000 steps a day. It helps me meditate and mentally prepare for my day.

Around 8.30am I arrive at the customer (I usually work on 2.3 projects and customers in parallel). I first process my email with the GTD prioritization and check up on my tickets and issues. Then I prepare my task list for the day and at 9:00am we then have our "stand-up".

My work can be very hands-on: audit of a system, refactoring, building a proof of concept, testing of new features. And I also need to present my ideas, document my solutions, or give trainings. When I have meetings during the day, I like to keep them short and efficient!

By 5pm-6pm, I leave the office to return back home. My children are old enough to not need me for their daily activities. It was different before, but I always managed to be there for them. Being a freelancer helped me to organize my own schedule. Before that, I worked as a Microsoft Certified Trainer, which meant that I had a regular schedule, which was good when my children were still babies.

At 8pm, I am usually back to my computer to work on my community activities: tech-talk preparation, blogging, a conference call to organize an event... Not every evening, though!

What do you do in your free time?

I like to use my hands: cooking, sewing, and gardening. My technical community contributions are my hobby as well, they keep me passionate about my work, and give me the opportunity to travel to other cities and places. And I also like to read, anything from sci-fi novels to feminist essays.

What advice would you give to women and girls who dream about a career in tech?
A career in tech is an excellent opportunity to have a choice. There are a lot of different roles and possibilities, so there's always a job that fits you. It is an exciting environment with very smart people, and you can stay enthusiastic about it because the playing field is constantly evolving.

You can be part of that change! From start-up to the public sector: the sky is the limit!