Success Stories: Aizhamal Nurmamat kyzy

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 Aizhamal Nurmamat kyzy who was a speaker at Berlin Buzzwords in 2019. It was her first big conference to speak at and we were honored to have her! Welcome back, Aizhamal!

I have been very fortunate to start my journey in open source 3 years ago. The world of open source has been very kind to me, and I have had the opportunity to contribute to projects like Airflow, Beam, Istio, Knative and others.

This journey would be challenging, intimidating, maybe even impossible without support of my dear friends and colleagues from the beginning. Their guidance helped me to grow and become a good citizen of open source: Jakob Homan, who replied to my first email to an open source mailing list, and told me to not get discouraged by the low number of enthusiastic responses; Kenn Knowles and David Nalley, who have always been incredibly kind and advised me and many of my friends in Apache projects. Most importantly, Gris Cuevas and Riona McNamara - my dear friends and mentors who held my hand in every step of the journey, and who encouraged me to share my experience by speaking at many places, including Berlin Buzzwords.

Berlin Buzzwords was the first big conference where I spoke. The anticipation was nerve wracking, as I had never spoken in front of such a big audience in an industry that was still very new to me. However, once I got on stage the whole talk went by so quickly! The audience was kind, and they were interested in what I had to say. It was a great experience, and although at first it was intimidating, in the end it was incredibly rewarding to know that the knowledge we shared was new and useful to the audience.

After my talk at Berlin Buzzwords, I gave many more in different conferences and meetups online and in-person. To be honest, I’ve never overcome the anxious feeling before a talk - but now I know that people are kind, and they always appreciate the knowledge one shares. This motivates me to keep participating.

I really hope to come back to Berlin Buzzwords to learn more inspiring stories, make new friends and acquaintances, and continue to explore the fascinating stories of Berlin. I still remember June 2019 BB, when my friend Riona and I arrived a day earlier before the conference and spent the whole Sunday in Mauerpark, listening to music, enjoying live performances and delicious food! Nothing beats that :)

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