Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners » Event

– Definitely Does Compute

05.05.2016 (10:59 pm) – Filed under:

Join SugarCRM and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners in Sunnyvale on Thursday, May 12, 2016, for a fun evening of talks, networking, drinks and dinner — raffle prizes, a photo booth, and fun will be had by all!

SugarCRM’s popular panel discussion will center around identifying, developing and owning one’s brand both professionally and personally.

The panel of inspiring women will provide insight on what to focus on and be aware of especially because what you project impacts your brand.

These women will knock your socks off so bring your questions!

About SugarCRM:

SugarCRM enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative, flexible and affordable CRM solution in the market. The company uniquely places the individual at the center, helping businesses transform the customer experience and enable highly personalized interactions that drive customer excellence and loyalty throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Recognized by leading market analysts as a CRM visionary and innovator, Sugar is deployed by more than 1.5M individuals in over 120 countries and 26 languages.

Twitter: @LifeAtSugar @BayAreaGGD

Event Hashtag: #SugarCRMGirlGeekDinner

SugarCRM Girl Geek Dinner Agenda

5:30pm – 6:30pm:

Registration, Drinks, Dinner, Meet & Greet, Demos

6:30pm – 7:30pm:

Panel Discussion and Q&A

7:30pm – 8:30pm:

Dessert, Networking, Demos, Raffle

SugarCRM Girl Geek Speakers

Laura Adint (Vice President Sales Operations, SugarCRM)

Laura is the Vice President of Sales Operations at SugarCRM, responsible for the operations of the functions that directly support the worldwide sales team, including Sales Process, Infrastructure, and Sales Training & Enablement. Prior to Sugar, Laura ran operations for Kelly OCG’s global high tech practice and at Xilinx she helped setup their Asia Pacific Singapore Headquarters and led their CRM transformation program. Laura earned her MBA from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and her Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Economics at UC Davis. When she is not working, Laura enjoys time with her family, husband, two kids, and German Shepherd, Duchess.

Katherine Andruha (Sales Development Manager, SugarCRM)

Katherine oversees the North America, LATAM and APAC Sales Development Representative teams. Katherine’s teams are the key drivers in building a quality pipeline for the Enterprise Sales Teams.

Prior to her role at SugarCRM, Katherine managed a team of Inside Sales Reps at FinancialForce.com.In her career, Katherine has sold everything from CRM, ERP, 3D Virtual Holographic Devices and Networking hardware. When Katherine is not finding ways to break into new logos and mentoring her Sales Development Reps, she is spending time in her rose garden and her pumpkin patch.

Guadalupe Garcia-Pham (Senior Director, Legal, SugarCRM)

Lupe is a seasoned legal professional with over 14 years of experience advising both start-ups and large publicly funded corporations in a wide variety of matters, including commercial transactions, corporate governance, IP and labor law. She currently serves as a Sr. Director on the SugarCRM legal team and has been instrumental over the last 3 ½ years in establishing many of the Company’s legal processes and procedures as well as assisting with the Company’s commercial, legal, HR and compliance matters. Prior to joining SugarCRM, Lupe held commercial counsel roles at Apple Inc. and Symantec Corporation and associate roles at Pillsbury Winthrop LLP and Cooley Godward LLP. Lupe obtained a JD/MBA from Santa Clara University and an AB from Harvard University.

Jenny Gonsalves (Vice President Engineering, SugarCRM)

Jenny joined SugarCRM in 2006, as one of the early engineers on the team. She has since been an instrumental force behind the creation of SugarCRM’s core platform and product. Today, as the VP of Engineering, Jenny leads both a strategic vision and execution path for Sugar’s engineering team to create products critical to millions of users worldwide. She is responsible for ensuring the design, stability and scalability of the SugarCRM product lines and leads a team of dedicated engineering leaders to create and deliver one of the fastest growing CRM solutions in the world. Prior to joining SugarCRM, Jenny was an engineer at CRM leader E.piphany. She holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

Riley McLeod (Product Manager, SugarCRM)

Riley is the PM/PO for the frontend framework and common UI components teams at SugarCRM. She joined SugarCRM as an intern in 2013, and returned full time after completing her B.A.Sc. in Management (Industrial) Engineering at University of Waterloo. Riley is a process and Agile enthusiast with a keen interest in user-centered design. When she isn’t supporting her team as they save the world one bug at a time, Riley can be found getting lost on remote islands or enjoying a good book.

Shilpi Narang (Vice President Customer Success, SugarCRM)

Shilpi works for Sugar’s Chief Customer Officer and leads a team of Customer Success Executives who are aligned to Sugar’s largest and most important customers. Shilpi spent over a decade at Gartner in sales, account management, and leadership roles, working with both technology buyers and technology providers – customers ranging from start-ups to Fortune 50 companies. Prior to Gartner, Shilpi spent several years at Motorola in systems engineering and technical account management functions. Shilpi has a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from USC (Los Angeles), and an MBA from UCLA. In the workplace, Shilpi has always been passionate about supporting and advancing women in technology and leadership. At home, Shilpi and her husband have fun with their two daughters traveling, playing sports, and tinkering with tech toys.

Shana Sweeney (Director Human Resources, SugarCRM))

Shana Sweeney is Director, Human Resources at SugarCRM where she is responsible for HR activities around the globe. Prior to working at SugarCRM, she co-founded a startup and has worked at a variety of companies including Xactly, Google, Severn Trent Services, and BMC Software. She holds a BS in International Politics from University of California, Santa Cruz and an MS in Human Resource Management from Fox School of Business, Temple University.

Event Tickets & Details

Donations are non-refundable. All proceeds go toward

to learn to code at , an engineering school for women.

28.04.2016 (9:12 pm) – Filed under:

Join IXL Learning and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners to celebrate Cinco De Mayo on Thursday, May 5, 2016 in San Mateo from 5:30pm to 8:30pm with tacos, drinks, dessert and networking!

Hear from IXL Learning engineers share lightning talks about the challenges we’re facing and solving at one of the top edtech companies in the world.

Come chat with IXL Learning staff from our engineering, product management, and curriculum design teams about how we’re reshaping the teaching and learning process! We’ll be giving away kits for a mini desk plant to commemorate the IXL Learning Girl Geek Dinner.

About IXL Learning:

IXL Learning is an educational technology company like no other. Our team is full of smart, motivated people with a passion for creating the best educational technology possible. We leverage cutting-edge technologies to solve seemingly intractable problems in education. Millions of users count on us to make learning as effective as can be, and we’re looking for exceptional people who are committed to solving the real-world challenges faced by students and teachers around the world..

Twitter: @IXLLearning @BayAreaGGD

Event Hashtag: #IXLGirlGeekDinner

IXL Learning Girl Geek Dinner Agenda

5:30pm – 6:30pm – Registration, Food & Drinks, Networking

6:30pm – 7:30pm – Lightning Talks by members of the IXL engineering team

7:30pm – 8:30pm – Dessert & More Networking

IXL Learning Girl Geek Speakers

Suzanne Pelz (Director of Engineering, IXL Learning)

With over 10 years engineering experience at IXL Learning, Suzanne has played a pivotal role in shaping the IXL product and developing our current engineering team. She now leads a dedicated team of engineers who focus their efforts on creating the code modules and supporting libraries that generate the questions in math, language arts, science, and social studies, that millions of students in over 190 countries answer every day.

She holds a bachelor’s degree and a masters of arts in mathematics from UC Santa Cruz.

Victoria Zheng (Engineering Project Lead, IXL Learning)

Victoria joined IXL right after graduating from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering. She first started on the mobile team, and helped with shipping out the 1.0’s on both Android and iOS, then 2.0 on iOS. Today she leads the Product engineering team, which focuses on adding more features and providing better user experience for IXL users on the website.

Yachen Sun (Software Engineer, IXL Learning)

Yachen is a front-end software engineer on IXL’s content engineering team. She completed bachelor’s degrees in biology and computer engineering at Vassar and Dartmouth prior to joining IXL.

Ritchie Iu (Senior Software Engineer, IXL Learning)

As a senior software engineer, Ritchie has helped architect, develop and launch Sugarcane, IXL’s newest product offering, from the ground up. Ritchie is interested in writing modular software that is flexible and easy to maintain. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Cornell University. In his free time, he enjoys hiking around the Bay Area and playing piano.

Jocelyn Tang (Software Engineer, IXL Learning)

Jocelyn is a content engineer working on IXL Math. She joined IXL last year after spending a year in Laos as a Project Manager. She has a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Princeton.

Gavin Brown (Software Engineer, IXL Learning)

Gavin is a software engineer on IXL’s mobile team. Right now he’s working on mobile subscriptions, Scratchpad, and networking in iOS and Android. His interests include software architecture, design patterns, and figuring stuff out. He completed his B.A. in Mathematics at Reed College, and he grew up on a llama ranchette in Oregon, where they used the llamas as pack animals while hiking!

Event Tickets & Details

Donations are non-refundable. All proceeds go toward

to learn to code at , an engineering school for women.

20.04.2016 (1:00 pm) – Filed under:

The Tech Women @ Intuit community invites you to join us at Intuit in Mountain View on the evening of Thursday, April 28, 2016 for a Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner!

It will be an evening of great food and killer desserts, cocktails and mocktails, raffles and networking … and some of Intuit’s best and brightest talking about the cool ways we use technology to solve customer problems. Real, everyday problems, like running a small business, doing your taxes or making sure you can afford that latte. We think there’s nothing more glamorous than simplifying the business of life for our customers in the most delightful way possible – securely in the cloud, optimized for any device, driven by data. We’d love to share some of our secret sauce with you.

About Intuit:

On the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list for the past 15 years, Intuit is a 33-year-old startup, continuously reinventing ourselves to stay ahead of changes in cloud computing, mobile, social, data and security. We believe finances should be simple. Taxes shouldn’t be taxing. Numbers should crunch themselves. Combining innovation and technology, we help people reach their financial goals with products like QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint.

Please follow us:

Twitter: @Intuit @BayAreaGGD

Event Hashtag: #IntuitGirlGeekDinner

Intuit Girl Geek Dinner Agenda

5:30pm – 6:45pm: Registration, networking, dinner, drinks & demos

6:45pm – 7:15pm: All of the above plus dessert & coffee

7:15pm – 8:30pm: Speakers & raffles

Intuit Girl Geek Speakers

Manimala Kumaravel (Sr. Software Engineering Manager, Intuit)

Manimala leads engineering teams building QuickBooks Online Payroll. She has more than 20 years of software development experience, with the last 8 years spent leading engineering teams that deliver SaaS solutions and platforms. She has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Anna University, India, and a master’s degree in Computer Science from California State University.Talk Topic: “Transforming QuickBooks Online Into a Component-Based Platform”

Carol Tsai (Software Engineering Manager, Intuit)

Carol manages a team of UI developers at Intuit who are building the next generation UI platform for QuickBooks Online. Before becoming a manager, she was a full-stack engineer for nine years at various startups in Silicon Valley. Back then, websites sported “under construction” GIFs, dancing babies, and blinking text. Now, she’s excited to part of the golden age of Web development. Carol has a B.A. from University of California, Berkeley and an M.S. from Stanford University.Talk Topic: “Transforming QuickBooks Online Into a Component-Based Platform”

Mita Mahadevan (Sr. Data Engineering Manager, Intuit)

Mita leads a team of data engineers at Intuit who are building high throughput, real-time data products and end-to-end decision analytic systems. She has spoken at big data conferences and meetups, including Cassandra Summit 2015 and GHC 2014. Prior to Intuit, she led data infrastructure and social analytics at Ning and spearheaded retail analytics at Demandtec. She has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Mumbai.Talk Topic: “Unlocking Data Insights to Deliver the Exact Personalized Products Customers Need”

Kristina Thai (iOS Software Engineer, Intuit)

Kristina is an iOS Software Engineer at Intuit, where she works on the QuickBooks Self-Employed iOS application. She is an expert in Apple Watch development and regularly writess tutorials and technical commentary on the subject on . As an international technical speaker, she has presented multiple times on Apple Watch development and has hosted workshops on how to build watch apps. Her past speaking events include iOSDevUK, Swift Summit, GHC 2015 and many more. Kristina has a B.S. in Computer Science from University of California, San Diego. Follow her on Twitter .Talk Topic: “What Makes a Compelling Apple Watch App”

Shannon Lietz (DevSecOps Leader, Intuit)

Shannon is an award winning innovator with over two decades of experience pursuing advanced security defenses and next generation security solutions.

Shannon is currently the DevSecOps Leader for Intuit where she is responsible for setting and driving the company’s cloud security strategy, roadmap and implementation in support of corporate innovation. She operates a 24×7 DevSecOps team that includes Red and Blue Team operations.

Previous to joining Intuit, Shannon worked for ServiceNow where she was responsible for the cloud security engineering efforts. Prior to this, Shannon worked for Sony where she drove the implementation of a new secure data center and led crisis management for a large-scale security breach. She has founded a metrics company, led major initiatives for hosting organizations as a Master Security Architect, developed security software and consulted for many Fortune 500 organizations. She has a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Mount St. Mary’s College.

Event Tickets & Details

Donations are non-refundable. All proceeds go toward

to learn to code at , an engineering school for women.

10.04.2016 (10:26 am) – Filed under:

Join Slack at our SOMA headquarters for the 115th Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner on Monday, April 18th, 2016. We are thrilled to be hosting our first Girl Geek Dinner and can not wait to meet you!

On Monday, April 18th, Slack would like to invite the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner community to mix and mingle with us over California cuisine and signature cocktails and mocktails. We’ll kick off the night with a Slack girl geek panel discussion focused on technical challenges, learnings, and best practices that Slack’s engineering, product management, and customer support teams have experienced. Next, we’ll launch into an advanced Slack demo where you can learn next level tips and tricks!

About Slack:

Slack is a messaging app for teams, on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive. It brings all your communication in one place, where everything is instantly searchable and available wherever you go. You can even integrate it with many of the tools and services you use every day, like Google Drive, Dropbox and a whole lot more. Founded by the same team that brought Flickr to the web, Slack has offices in San Francisco, Vancouver, Dublin and Melbourne.

Please follow us:

Twitter: @SlackHQ @BayAreaGGD

Event Hashtag: #SlackGirlGeekDinner

Slack Girl Geek Dinner Agenda

6:00pm – 7:00pm – Registration, Networking, Dinner

7:00pm – 7:45pm – Slack Girl Geek Panel Discussion

7:45pm – 8:00pm – Advanced Slack Demo

8:00pm – 8:10pm – Audience Q&A

8:10pm – 9:00pm – Open Networking

Slack Girl Geek Speakers

Ali Rayl (Director of Customer Experience, Slack)

Ali is the Director of Customer Experience at Slack, the platform for team communication. Ali’s team is a key driver of Slack’s mission to make its 2.3M+ daily users’ working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. Prior to Slack (and its predecessor, Tiny Speck), Ali was the Director of QA at Songbird, one of the world’s first open-source cross platform music platforms. Ali has a degree in Humanities from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Joann Anderson (Director of Application Engineering, Slack)

Joann is Director of Application Engineering at Slack where she oversees core product including Messaging, Files, and Performance. Joann focuses on engineer career growth, internship program development, and feature release quality and velocity. She previously led engineering teams at Adobe and Symantec where she streamlined engineering processes to accelerate release delivery. Joann has a Masters in Security Informatics from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelors in Computer Science from Rice University. In her free time, she channels her inner child by playing with her toddler and is on the constant search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Duretti Hirpa (Senior Engineer – Integrations, Slack)

Duretti is a senior engineer on the backend engineering team at Slack. Currently, she’s working on the new user experience team, though she’s also spent time on the Slack Platform team – making it easier and more intuitive to build applications on top of Slack. She’s constantly thinking of ways to humanize engineering – there’s strength in the soft skills, after all. She’s arguably probably the most extroverted person she knows, and is intensely interested in other people. She produces a podcast called “snackoverflow”, about snacks, computers, and their surprising intersection. She has an undying love for Beyoncé (praise be), an immaculate gif game, and a real candy problem.

Kiné Camara (Senior Engineer – Android, Slack)

Kiné is a Senior Engineer on the Android team at Slack. She has ten years of experience working on various mobile technologies. Kine isn’t new to building communications platforms. Prior to joining Slack, Kiné developed the Android app for tablets and smartphone at Skype. Kine has a Masters in High-Tech Project Management and a Bachelors in Computer Engineering, both from from École Polytechnique, Montreal.

April Underwood (Vice President of Product, Slack)

April is VP of Product at Slack, where she oversees product vision and strategy. April also drives key growth initiatives, including the development of platform products, partnerships, API integrations and developer relations. A technology industry veteran, April spent nearly five years at Twitter shaping product and partnership and cut her teeth in developer and management roles at Travelocity and Google.

Merci Victoria Grace (Growth Group Product Manager, Slack)

Merci leads the Growth team at Slack. Prior to joining Slack, she was most recently the Director of Product Management at Gigwalk, a mobile workforce platform. In 2007, Merci founded GameLayers, a venture-backed social game studio. Her first game, The Nethernet nee the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, was a finalist for Game of the Year. It lost to World of Warfcraft: Burning Crusade. Merci recently started the Women in Product Slack team to bring together women in product management and PM-adjacent roles. She enjoys kicking ass, taking names, and running down hills with her dog, Ms. Pixels Wigglebottom.

Event Tickets & Details

Donations are non-refundable. All proceeds go toward

to learn to code at , an engineering school for women.

06.04.2016 (10:08 pm) – Filed under:

About Tableau Software:

Tableau Software Girl Geek Dinner Agenda

Tableau Software Girl Geek Speakers

Terry Roberts (User Experience Designer, Tableau Software)

Max Berman (Development Manager, Tableau Software)

Melanie Tory (Senior Research Scientist, Tableau Software)

Nibedita Das (Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, Tableau Software)

Stephanie Nicholson (Software Engineer, Tableau Software)