News

Berlin Buzzwords 2021 demographic survey

Max King — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 12:59:44 +0000

Berlin Buzzwords 2021 demographic survey

Max King Tue, 06/29/2021 - 14:59

Berlin Buzzwords is committed to ensuring that it is accessible to everyone regardless of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation or age. To that end we have put together a demographic survey so that we can get an idea of who comes to Berlin Buzzwords. Completing this survey will help us to improve Berlin Buzzwords, and aid our efforts to make it more inclusive and diverse.

The survey is short and should only take about 2 minutes to fill out.

The information you give in the demographic survey is anonymous and will be used to provide demographic statistics on the conference. All information we collect around equality and diversity will be treated confidentially in accordance with GPDR.

You can find the survey here.

Photo by Canva Studio from Pexels

It's a wrap! What was your personal highlight?

Nina Müller — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 09:49:10 +0000

It's a wrap! What was your personal highlight?

Nina Müller Mon, 06/21/2021 - 11:49

It's a wrap! Berlin Buzzwords 2021 is over. We have had four amazing days full of learning, gathering new experiences, and meeting new people! In a fully virtual environment we had a great selection of talks, workshops, debates and discussions by amazing speakers from all over the world. Some were first time speakers at #bbuzz, others were popular speakers returning to share some new ideas and insights.

All talks will be available in the coming two weeks on our youtube-channel, subscribe so that you're the first to know when the videos go up.

Watch out on twitter, linkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter where we'll also be letting everyone know when the first videos are out.

In the meantime, please have a look at last year's videos or take part in our feedback survey! We want to know what you liked and what we can do better next year. What wer're your favourite topics? What was missing? Share your thoughts and ideas and get a change to win one of ten Github voucher codes! They can be redeemed in the GitHub shop. The first ten to complete the survey win. Adding your email address to enter the raffle is optional, and feedback results will still be anonymous. We will only use your email address to notify you in case you have won.

Thank you for everyone who participated: from the attendees to the speakers, the program committee, the emcees, our partners and sponsors! All of you make the event happen and we cannot believe how quickly it went. We had a great time, and here are some of our highlights:

TUESDAY:

Eric Pugh measured the diversity of search results
Scaling Search Clusters with Apache Solr and Kubernetes: Amrit Sarkar
Building a new big data distribution with a twist Lars Francke, Sönke Liebau
There is no such thing as bias-free tech: How models shape our world. Daniel Guagnin
Vector search ask me anything with Dmitry kan and Max Irwin

WEDNESDAY:

Megan Byrd-Sanicki: Be the leader we all need! Megan shared some important insights on how to be a good leader, and that it doesn't take authority to be a an excellent one. She further shed some light on what it means to be a woman in a leading role or taking on a lead in a company.
Change Data Streaming Patterns in distributed systems - Hans-Peter Grahsl, Gunnar Morling
The future of Lucene's MMap Directory: Why use it and what's comingwith Java 16 and later?
Search and Sushi; Freshness counts: Jo Kristian Bergum

THURSDAY:

workshop: Encores? - Going beyond matching and ranking of search results: with René Kriegler and Eric Pugh
Facets of Reproducible Research on Kubernetes: Sophie Watson, Will Benton
workshop: Event-Driven micro-services with Kafka Streams: Christoph Schubert
debate: Which Search engine? hosted by Charlie Hull. With Jo Kristian Bergum, Anshum Gupta, Josh Devins

Thanks to all you amazing attendees, speakers, emcees, partners and sponsors. Stay safe and see you next year in person!

Success Stories: Deepthi Sreenivasaiah

Nina Müller — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 14:46:13 +0000

Success Stories: Deepthi Sreenivasaiah

Nina Müller Mon, 06/14/2021 - 16:46

Berlin Buzzwords Success Stories is our brand new blog series where we ask people in the bbuzz network to share their own story.

Part of ensuring a wide range of opinions and ideas can be shared at Berlin Buzzwords is ensuring that people from underrepresented groups within the Berlin Buzzwords community can attend and engage with the discussions. Historically Berlin Buzzwords, like the tech scene at large, has been a pretty white and male dominated space.

One way we want to change this is to highlight some of the voices of people in our network from underrepresented groups. We want to share their stories and learn what drove them in their careers.Today, we hear from Deepthi Sreenivasaiah. She is a Machine Intelligence Engineer at Merantix and saw the other success stories here and decided to take part. Welcome Deepthi, we're glad to share your story here.

Being raised in a family where both my parents are engineers, there was some natural affinity towards technology since my childhood. When I was taught to build an AM radio receiver in my 8th grade as a hobby project, I was curious to see it working even though I did not fully understand the electronics behind it. This motivated me to learn basic electronics as a part of the HAM radio license examination which I passed at the age of 12.
The excitement grew along with me and I became passionate about technology. After my 12th grade, there came a time in my life, where I really had to make a choice between medicine and engineering. That was at the cost of dropping my medical seat in one of the prestigious colleges in my state in India. This moment was a big turning point in my life. Although it was a tough decision, now when I look back, I think I made the best decision of my life. I followed my passion to pursue my bachelors degree in electronics and communication engineering.

After completing undergrad with flying colors, I landed a job in what was considered a “core company” in my domain. There I was, who started with a mini AM radio now designing big hardware devices. Things went rather smoothly until I started realizing that I was getting too comfortable with my position in life. To get out of that comfort zone and explore new fields, I decided to continue my technical education further by pursuing my masters at University of Stuttgart and I made a transition to Information Technology. Moving to a new city in a different continent with a different culture and language altogether was not an easy decision. Despite a lot of hurdles and risks, I took this “unconventional path”. I always thought continuous learning is a part of life and this decision was a consequence of it. When I joined my masters, I only had a bare minimum knowledge in programming and that posed a major challenge in front of me. I was struggling to keep up with my fellow classmates who had prior experience in the software field. I accepted this challenge and grasped each and every opportunity that came in my way, I never looked back. As mathematics is my all-time favourite subject, I got interested in artificial intelligence. Very soon I was motivated to be a part of this emerging technology. After successfully completing my masters in Information Technology, I was thrilled to join Merantix Labs as a Machine Learning Engineer and delve deeper into the practical challenges of machine learning. At Merantix Labs, I work on exciting projects in the area of computer vision, related to both
research and industrial applications. In short, this is how I made my way into Berlin’s AI startup ecosystem. With lots of turning points and challenges, this is my story.

In all these years, not even once there was a thought in my mind that I, as a woman, cannot make it in a tech field.As it is said, Dream big, because until you do, you do not realize the true potential of yourself :)

What about you? Do you want to share your story here too? Feel inspired by the stories you read? Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@berlinbuzzwords.de

Join us for the barcamp, and post your ideas now over the weekend!

Nina Müller — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 16:05:41 +0000

Join us for the barcamp, and post your ideas now over the weekend!

Nina Müller Thu, 06/10/2021 - 18:05

The Berlin Buzzwords barcamp takes place on Monday, 14th July, 2021 at 16:00 CEST. Please enter the virtual venue via your ticket link and go to the room named Barcamp! Our host Nick Burch will welcome you there and discuss ideas and trends, speak about topics that didn't make it into the program, ask questions or bring a line of code.

In preparation for that, you can now enter your ideas and topics to our white board the we created here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_l_yzu2o=

We will present all ideas on Monday and you can vote what you'd like to talk about in greater detail.

Berlin Buzzwords Venue Guide

Max King — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 14:38:31 +0000

Berlin Buzzwords Venue Guide

Max King Wed, 06/02/2021 - 16:38

Berlin Buzzwords 2021 kicks off on Monday, 14th June, 2021!

We want you to be ready and prepared to make the most of this year’s event.

To join the online conference just click your personalized access link in your confirmation email of your ticket.

Can't find it? Don't worry! Just click here and enter your email address – your access code will then be resent to you.

Haven't got a ticket yet? Tickets are still available in our ticket shop throughout the event.

Stages

Once you have joined Berlin Buzzwords and set up your account you will be able to see a list of the locations where Berlin Buzzwords takes place on the left of the screen. This year we have four stages, Kesselhaus, Maschinenhaus, Palais Atelier, and Frannz Salon named after the stages at the IRL Berlin Buzzwords venue Kulturbrauerei. Each stage has a chat bar on the right hand side where you can chat with the other people watching the stage and a questions tab. You can ask your questions for the speaker in this tab, at the end of the talk the moderator will ask the speaker these questions.

For each stage there is a break out room where you can meet after the talks to chat with the speakers and other attendees. Think of it as a place to ask more in - depth or informal questions after the Q&A. Please note that when you join these break out rooms, the default setting is muted and the camera is turned off

Networking and socializing

As well as the chat bar on the main stages and the breakout rooms there are even more ways to network and socialize. In the menu bar on the left side you will find the attendees tab. Here you can search for other attendees and message them through the virtual platform in a private text chat or even have 1:1 video calls with each other.

Spatial Chat

In the menu bar the left of the screen, along with the list of stages, you will also find the Spatial Chat. Think of it as the hallway track for Berlin Buzzwords, a place to meet and chat with other attendees and speakers.

Spatial Chat is group video chat that lets you move around the virtual space and join conversations. The closer you move to people in the space the louder they become, chat in a group or move away to have more private conversations. You can find out more about spatial chat here. We will open the Spatial Chat in the evening after the talks have finished.

Partner Area

Make sure you take a look at the partner area where you will be able to engage with all of our wonderful supporters this year. Click on the their logos to find out more about them and how to get in touch with them. Some partners have booth staff to get in touch with directly (like the text chat with other attendees) and download material ready for you.

Please do not miss empathy.co’s workshop on Digital and Ethics on 16 June, 21:20 - 21:50 CEST

or Open Source Connections’ workshop “Encores? Going beyond matching and ranking of search results” on 17 June, 16:50 - 18:00 CEST

Both workshops can be entered through their partner booths or via the “empathy.co workshop” and “OSC workshop”-tab respectively in the menu bar on the left.

If you have any questions we will be on had to help you out. Look for us in the Networking tab, team members will have [Team] in front of our names, we’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. Please also have a look in our FAQ section for help.

Success Stories: Monica Sarbu

Nina Müller — Mon, 10 May 2021 11:52:45 +0000

Success Stories: Monica Sarbu

Nina Müller Mon, 05/10/2021 - 13:52

Berlin Buzzwords Success Stories is our brand new blog series where we ask people in the bbuzz network to share their own story.

One way we want to change this is to highlight some of the voices of people in our network from underrepresented groups. We want to share their stories and learn what drove them in their careers.Today, we hear from Monica Sarbu: Monica is in the Berlin Buzzwords program committee and the founder and CEO of xata.io, providing a serverless database service for Jamstack applications. Furthermore, Monica founded tupu.io, which she tells us more about today. Welcome, Monica!

What shapes us as a person? A cumulation of origin, day to day life events, meeting new cultures, learning from mistakes, raw models, passion, determination.. Life is a series of ups and downs and they all contribute to us being what we are.

In good times, you need to keep your feet on the ground, and in the bad times you need to learn from your mistakes and find a way to move forward. This is not easy. If you are in an argument with a colleague, if you are struggling to get a promotion, if you are struggling to get recognized for your contributions, if you are struggling to balance family with work, it’s important to have someone to reach to so that you don’t feel alone.

For this reason I decided to build tupu.io, a non-profit organization that offers free mentorship for women in tech, People of Color, and LGBTQ+. Because even a small piece of advice or support can push someone over a situation and change their life in the long term.

I have seen many software engineers approaching personal development in a very structured way. They set their goal to become a manager in a few years. When this happens, they actually realize that being a manager is not the next level of software engineering, and in many ways as a manager you are starting over, and your learnings from being a developer don’t really apply as a manager.

As silly as it sounds, my goal was to be happy and work on the things that make me happy. Without even realizing it at the beginning, working on something that I enjoyed and made me happy, motivated me and forced me to always learn new things, new skills, and evolve much faster as an individual in my career.

What about you? Do you want to share your story here too? Feel inspired by the stories you read? Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@berlinbuzzwords.de

Success Stories: Sherin Thomas

Nina Müller — Mon, 03 May 2021 08:29:20 +0000

Success Stories: Sherin Thomas

Nina Müller Mon, 05/03/2021 - 10:29

Berlin Buzzwords Success Stories is our brand new blog series where we ask people in the bbuzz network to share their own story.

Historically Berlin Buzzwords, like the tech scene at large, has been a pretty white and male dominated space. One way we want to change this is to highlight some of the voices of people in our network from underrepresented groups. We want to share their stories and learn what drove them in their careers.Today, we hear from Sherin Thomas. Sherin is going to hold a keynote titled: Democratizing climate science: Searching through NASA’s earth data with AI at scale this year together with her co-speaker Dharini Chandrasekaran who shared her story last week. Welcome, Sherin!

When I look back at my career and life so far, two moments stand out more than others. The first is when I quit my first job after college. I dropped off my laptop and hopped, skipped and jumped my way across campus - feeling free, liberated and honestly physically lighter for the first time in two years. I was fortunate enough to get a job at one of the large FAANG companies, soon after college. But if you ask me to describe my time there in two words, it would be “impostor syndrome”. I was one of the 3% of women in an engineering organization dominated by men. From the very first day, I felt like I didn't belong there, that they brought me on by accident, that I would be found out. This looming cloud prevented me from standing up for myself, from speaking up, from pushing back against loud confident men around me.
I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful support system around that included my boyfriend at the time - who is now my husband, my wonderful friends and my family who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself and encouraged me to start afresh, with a company whose mission I was more aligned with, where I felt empowered to speak and voice my opinions, where I didn’t feel burdened by impostor syndrome.

Another time that shines through for me, is when my manager messaged me on Slack one day “Scale by the Bay is inviting speakers, I think you should apply”. I remember making excuses “I am not very good at public speaking”, “I don’t know if people want to hear about my work”. I’m so glad now that in response he said “You are good at communication and of course your work is worth talking about! I think you should do it”. To this day, I’m grateful to him for pushing me to the deep end. The first time was hard, I remember shaking before I picked up the microphone, but when I saw the line of people who stood up to ask questions I had a big smile on my face. People were interested in my work, they wanted to learn more, they wanted to be in touch and continue our discussions. After the first time it became easy, I presented my work at several conferences, meetups, all over the world. Even now, after every project I ask myself “is this something worth talking about?”, and the answer almost always is a loud resounding “Yes!”.

Speaking at conferences has also made me a better engineer and technical leader. I’ve realized how important good communication is as you grow in your career. Ability to pitch ideas, break down complex concepts for a diverse and broad audience is a good skill to have. It has helped me become more empathetic, more tuned to industry trends, problems facing engineering organizations and when I share my work - I’m no longer thinking about whether this is worth sharing or not, but instead “my solution may not be perfect, but this is 'a' solution and someone might find value in it”.

Berlin Buzzwords is an excellent conference. There are so many past technical talks from Berlin Buzzwords, that I still refer to when I'm dealing with an engineering challenge or designing something new. I’m really looking forward to talking about the work I did for NASA and SpaceML there, and I hope someone will find value in what I have to share.

What about you? Do you want to share your story here too? Feel inspired by the stories you read? Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@berlinbuzzwords.de

Volunteer at Berlin Buzzwords

Max King — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 10:25:56 +0000

Volunteer at Berlin Buzzwords

Max King Wed, 04/28/2021 - 12:25

Are you interested in becoming a volunteer at this year's Berlin Buzzwords? We offer a free ticket and the chance to get get involved with your favorite topics and engage with our great speakers and community.

As a moderator, it will be your task to introduce the speaker(s) and their session before the the talk. At the end of the talk, you can read out questions from the live chat asked by the audience. If there aren't any questions yet, you can start a conversation or ask questions yourself and then thank the speaker and close the session. You can pick the sessions that you would like to moderate, preferably topics you are already familiar with. To help you pick will send you the draft schedule.

We work with Streamyard so all you need is a stable internet connection, a headset, webcam and a modern web browser.

If you want to be involved in this year's #bbuzz send an email to: volunteer@berlinbuzzwords.de

Success Stories: Dharini Chandrasekaran

Nina Müller — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 07:13:34 +0000

Success Stories: Dharini Chandrasekaran

Nina Müller Mon, 04/26/2021 - 09:13

Berlin Buzzwords Success Stories is our brand new blog series where we ask people in the bbuzz network to share their own story.

Today, we hear from Dharini Chandrasekaran who is going to open day 3 of this year's Berlin Buzzwords. Together with her co-speaker Sherin Thomas, they will give a keynote titled: Democratizing climate science: Searching through NASA’s earth data with AI at scale

Welcome, Dharini!

My first memories of being on a computer were from my fourth grade, making single slide Powerpoint presentations about interesting things I learned from browsing Encarta Encyclopedia (yes, I was a nerd, and I also had no idea about the actual utility of powerpoint), and rifling through the PCWorld magazines that my dad had subscribed to. Right before high school, I vividly remember traipsing to the computer lab along with my friend to chat with the teachers before choosing Computer Science as an elective. Stepping into the classroom in eleventh grade, I recognized the skewed gender ratios for the first time, which had been roughly equal in my classrooms until then. In the computer science division, I was one of 9 girls, in a class of 40! Little did I know that the ratio would only get worse as I continued my education.

I was lucky to have teachers who encouraged us all, regardless of gender, and I scored the top marks in my school in my senior year of high school. To my utter disbelief, I was chosen to be part of an Indian National Olympiad in Informatics (conducted by the Indian Association for Research in Computer Science) due to my performance in Zonal Informatics Olympiad where I solved programming problems in the only language I was familiar with at that point, C++. Being taught complicated computer science algorithms during the day and putting them to practice every evening as part of the camp bolstered my love for the subject, but I had already picked out my major for my bachelors degree as electrical engineering, since I loved physics as well.

During my undergrad, I was once again part of a skewed gender-ratio classroom where there were 7 girls in a cohort of over 70. Most of my male peers only paid attention to me after I got the top GPA in the class in the first semester, but this didn’t faze me much since I had grown accustomed to the environment by this point. By my fourth year though, I had come to a realization. The field of electrical engineering had lost its appeal and I was not looking forward to any of my job prospects. Having taken additional courses in AI and advanced mathematics, I decided to pursue my masters at Carnegie Mellon University and make a switch to computer science.

At one of the top computer science schools in the United States, I struggled to catch up with my peers who had 4 years of undergraduate study on me, but I really enjoyed the courses and the challenge. Two years of study at Carnegie Mellon were invaluable, and each challenging class I took validated my decision to move to computer science. Having an internship at NVIDIA under my belt, I moved to Silicon Valley to start my professional career. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to have worked with multiple talented people in top tier companies including Amazon and Twitter. I still love diving into new areas, and I try to work across different layers of the technology stack every chance I get, from device drivers to distributed systems. And that’s my journey in a nutshell - always learning, always exploring.

What about you? Do you want to share your story here too? Feel inspired by the stories you read? Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@berlinbuzzwords.de

Success Story: Aline Paponaud

Nina Müller — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 11:33:15 +0000

Success Story: Aline Paponaud

Nina Müller Mon, 04/19/2021 - 13:33

Berlin Buzzwords Success Stories is our brand new blog series where we ask people in the bbuzz network to share their own story.

Today, we hear from Aline Paponaud who was a speaker and an MC at Berlin Buzzwords. We are happy to publish her story here today! Welcome, Aline!

When you ask me who encouraged me in my career, the simple answer is white men, actually. I have been lucky to cross the path of great superiors, collaborators, dev community people... in all my work experiences. I would tell I could meet various behaviors, not always appropriate but still with the best intentions.
I was very inspired, very early in my work life, by tech or agile community leaders who were passionate and ready to spend a lot of personal time with others to share their discoveries and explore them together.
Negative experiences encouraged me too! When I was crossing the path of someone a little sexist or too paternalist or simply not having the same behavior with me as with my other colleagues, this encouraged me to teach them, prove that their assumptions or original "ancestral" ideas were absolutely wrong.

About speaking for the first time:
I joined Agile Grenoble community just after graduating, I think I was 22 or 23 years old. There, they told me that the "story of a junior who discovers agility" would be a fresh topic, very interesting for a lot of people. We did it with a friend of mine, keeping that freshness and youth in mind. We put a lot of jokes in the slides and were ready for the show! When we presented the room was big and packed, with a lot of tech influencers. I think what we said was absolutely immature, funny in a way, but also senseful to understand the way the young generation saw things... Maybe simpler and more straightforward than some Agile coaches!
More than 10 years later, I see that being a woman is now a thing. I am often asked to talk about my "womanness" in tech. When my talks are accepted or when I'm invited I know that it's probably 50% due to a diversity quota. It bothers me, but it's probably necessary to do so, so that the next generation won't have to. I really hope that. Once, after my talk at a conference a guy came to me to give me feedback (which I always encourage). He said "What you said, I also know about it - I could totally have it done myself" and "How is it that they accepted someone like you?". Well, to begin, be nice and you may have your chance someday :)
About Berlin Buzzwords:
At Adelean we always had a wonderful experience at Buzzwords. Always at the edge, highly technical and specific. Meeting a lot of wonderful people IRL, or lately virtually. Keep up the great work!

What about you? Do you want to share your story here too? Feel inspired by the stories you read? Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@berlinbuzzwords.de