60 Seconds with WITS West Speaker — Michelle Hodges
Michelle Hodges is a Cloud, DevOps, and Security Engineer at Slalom Build & is the President of Women Leaders in Tech. Her session at WITS West is Wage Your Bets: Microservice, Monolith, or Serverless.
Why is speaking at WITS important to you?
There are many talented women engineers out there — but not many come out to speak at conferences. As a consequence, many women that go to conferences often do not have the opportunity to identify with the people onstage. I want to be a part of a solution for this and speak at as much as possible, both to increase the visibility of women in tech as well as encourage others to get on stage.
What inspires you?
People with an overwhelming drive and grit to succeed and better themselves. This isn’t just one person — I’ve met several, and every single one of them inspires me to do better myself.
Most useful article you’ve read in the last month
It’s hard to pinpoint one specific article, however I do encourage everyone to be aware of the Glue tendency as described by Tanya Reilly:
While many women often find themselves accidentally taking on this role, this happens to many people of all genders in tech and I do think that both employers and employees need to be aware of it to prevent issues in professional growth.
When you were a kid what was your dream job?
To be a ballerina. On the way to daycare I would always pass ballet class, but my parents couldn’t afford to send me there. They told me that I should be a doctor instead.. which, after a convoluted process, brought me to the tech world.
Tell us something about your session
Whether you are an engineer, product owner or business stakeholder, you have probably heard buzzwords such as Microservices, Monolith or Serverless when it comes to building software. What are the different schools of thought and how will this decision impact the efficiency and cost of building your project?
