My talk at RubyKaigi 2014 - Diversity and Rails Girls

I gave a talk at RubyKaigi 2014: "Rails Girls: Not Only for Girls".

Rails Girls: Not Only for Girls - RubyKaigi 2014 from Haruka Iwao

Female engineers account around 20% at tech companies in the US, but tech companies in Japan have only 10% from my past experiences.

As in my slides, this situation ties tightly to our culture and society, and cannot be changed in a day. We need to work both in short-term and long-term ways, like equality in hiring and bringing more teenagers to tech fields.

There are a lot of activities in various ways, and Rails Girls is one of them.

There are links to such activities at the Women Techmakers website by Google. Academic societies also working in this area, like ACM-W and IEEE Women in Engineering. I encourage you to take a look at these.

RubyKaigi 2014 was a great success, without any gender issues unlike last year. Kudos to all volunteers, speakers and attendees!

"What makes AWS invincible?" from JAWS Days 2014

I gave a presentation at JAWS Days 2014 and talked with a title of "What makes AWS invincible?"

A moderator of the session, @con_mame told me to speak about anything which might be missing from AWS or any suggestions to the service. I was afraid of speaking of "existing" features as they are adding a lot of features so often and I don't know all of them. It turned out that the topics I chose were accepted by the audience including a few AWS employees.

I talked about two things: "Latency" and "Test". Higher latency is always an issue of cloud computing and virtualized environment. It is always higher than non-virtual environment by nature. I am suggesting to give "hints" to AWS when launching EC2 instances. According to an AWS employee, if you run c3 instances with placement groups enabled, you will get much lower latency. I'd like to check this later.

"Test". The web console of AWS is very useful and has a lot of features, however it is against the philosophy of "Infrastructure as Code." You cannot reuse or review your changes with it. Many users of course try to automate things by using SDKs or a CLI interface, but something "easier to use" would be great. "Record and play" with the web console will be a great way to achieve this, isn't it?

Here is my slide at the presentation.

What makes AWS invincible? from JAWS Days 2014 from Haruka Iwao

See also

• JAWS DAYS 2014で「これで最強のAWSに」のセッションをやりました - まめ畑
• #jawsdays の #最強のAWS で「ぜんぶ AWS でやらないワケ」という話をしてきた - TAKUMI SAKAMOTO'S BLOG