By: Rupa Dachere, President and Founder, Thrive-WiSE

 

I’m not one for writing blogs – I find myself procrastinating extensively anytime I’m asked to do things like write recaps, blogs, articles etc.  Especially about myself and my doings.  

 

So, in an effort to break this behavioral pattern (or is it just laziness?) I’m starting this series of posts on what it takes to build an org from scratch with a LOT of headwinds from different directions.

 

In this series of factual anecdotes, experiences and musings, I hope to provide readers with a better understanding of some of my journey from being a “regular” software engineer to what I am today to what I hope to be in the future.

 

So, this is Part 1 of “x”.  The “x” is unknown since I’m not sure how many of these posts I’ll end up writing.  For the most part, these posts will be chronological, however, I will probably have some pointers back/forth in time in reference to incidents and experiences.

 

In May 2009 (13 years ago), I held the first “get together” at my house in San Jose and invited 2 women engineers whom I had met at ShesGeeky that year.  One was an embedded engineer and the other was a hardware engineer.  And then there was me with a background in network engineering, telecommunications and embedded systems (Motorola and Bell Labs + my first startup which went belly up + Nokia + second startup which got acquired by Motorola).  At that time, I was at Motorola as part of the acquisition of the second startup where I was a Principal Engineer on the Network Management team (embedded side of things).

 

At this first get together, we talked about different Linux/Unix distros – at that time, CentOS, Gentoo and Ubuntu (still pretty small) were around as well as some Slackware installs.  Ubuntu was awfully buggy and there was no “UI” to initiate the rookies.  We discussed creating a UI for Ubuntu since that seemed like something that might be needed in the future.  And we talked about the different install processes for each distro, who had run into what god-awful-nightmare scenario and had to wipe the HD and start all over again.  And how to *really* wipe the HD.  Remember, stackoverflow didn’t exist at that time.  Neither did the plethora of information on all of this that you can now find with a few search terms.  

We also talked about how to bring in more women into our midst since none of us really knew others like us.  We just happened to meet at the conference and were the only ones in the conference who were on the sidelines with respect to focusing on the very, very technical aspect of embedded software and operating systems.

 

Fast forward 6 months.  The group grew to almost 10 women – I’m not sure how.  I invited one person who showed up once or twice.  The others invited their contacts and that’s how it grew. Interestingly, I was the only non-caucasian woman.  We had mostly hardware-centric and embedded engineers in the group.  I was probably the most “software” centric of us all.  Hell, I had done “Network Management”, which was about as UI-centric as you can get for a bunch of embedded engineers. :).  We had one engineer who worked at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator) with a bg in Physics.  I thought she was super cool. 

 

And then I met Akkana, through another member.  

 

Never had I met a woman engineer like her.  She didn’t have a strong “educational” background (at least not by Asian standards, i.e., Ivy league stamp, honors, blah blah).  She didn’t work at a fancy, big name, high tech company which paid obnoxiously well.  She wasn’t dressed in the latest trends of anything – jeans, tshirt (several years old), sneakers, unassuming.  I felt at home with her, thank god.

And she had the most extensive knowledge of embedded systems and hardware of anyone I had ever known.  And was super helpful and encouraging.  And she knew and understood open source to the core.  At that time, this was almost unheard of – at least, I didn’t know any other women who had that level of technical contribution in open source.

I felt I had achieved something beyond belief in being able to find/meet her.

 

All the cookies, cakes, salads, drinks etc. that I baked/cooked for months and the huge electricity bills from all the laptops/devices being plugged in as well as the DSL crashing every now and then due to the load of downloading several distros simultaneously were totally worth it.  I had met Akkana.