Our “Women do tech too” meetup event gives the floor to women working at Criteo so they can share their technical expertise. It is a unique opportunity to meet, network, and share insights with other passionate women from the tech field. Who can join? Basically, anyone who believes in supporting a more diverse and inclusive future for the tech industry.
On November 29, we welcomed over fifty people, 55% women, to our Barcelona offices and introduced them to who we are, what we do, and how we do it at Criteo.
In a nutshell,
- We are a global tech company that delivers richer experiences through our leading Commerce Media Platform. We combine state-of-the-art technology with business understanding to equip our clients with the best product fits, enabling them to target the right audience at the right time through tailored campaigns.
- To support our core business, we have built a solid Research & Development department with a presence across several countries like France, Spain, the US, Germany, Cyprus, Armenia, and more.
- Our passionate engineering experts are constantly stirring their brains and working on new technologies.
Takeaways
Why are we here today?
Alejandra is the core and the heart of this initiative at Criteo. She joined us in Barcelona that night to talk about why this event is happening and why it matters. Like other women nowadays, she reinvented herself, transitioning to a career in code. You can check her whole story in an article (and talk) we published in our Medium publication months ago.
Transitioning to a Career in Code (Women Who Code talk)
Sometimes people are lucky and find their call right away; other times, our interests evolve, and we wonder if we could…
medium.com
She delivered a very moving speech explaining how she sees this profession as a woman from her particular point of view. In her own words:
I am the person who came up with the idea of women do tech too because I wanted to celebrate women in tech community. Giving a space where women have the spotlight to talk about their expertise. For the last two years I’ve been investing myself to do the event, to speak at it or to go through our women at Criteo community and say: you have a great message, you should speak, you should talk at the event, and specially you can do it! You just need to try; perfection doesn’t matter anymore.
…
As 2023 is coming to an end, I’m reflecting about what do I want to do for 2024. Where do I want to put my energy, my voice. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to celebrate our Women in Tech community but that is moving at its own rhythm now and I want more. I want action, I want awareness, brainstorming and open the discussion.
…
In 2017, Meryl Streep said during a conference that women have learned to speak men as you learn to speak French or Spanish, they speak it and they dream it. But man don’t speak women. So I want that change, I want to say these language of man doesn’t speak to me all the time. The performance, the aggressivity, the strong character that women need to be to become a manager for example. Many of us don’t feel related to that but we still can bring our own toolkit and make a difference. Create awareness, this language is not for all of us.
…
I am a woman in tech, I do code and I spent time on coding school saying that women is exactly what tech is needing right now. I dare to defy convention, I don’t feel passionate about code, I don’t have a bear, I’m not introvert, I’m not shy, I’m very much opinionated, I’m a women and I do tech too.
The Secret Life of Software Engineers: Unraveling the mysteries of a workday
Lucia joined Criteo a couple of years ago as a Software Developer Engineer. She was really motivated by the idea of explaining to others, especially people thinking about joining this career or people new in the field, what the day of a software engineer looks like. Mystery? Magic? Strange acronyms and technical words? Let’s review the main points from her presentation:
- When she joined the field, she thought that being a software engineer would include coding, solving problems, testing, debugging, etc. But there is much more…
- She introduced the concept of “Agile” and explained the differences between “waterfall and agile” methodologies. At Criteo, to apply agile principles, we use frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming practices, etc. Main points: adapt, choose the task you want to work on and always communicate with your team.
- Adding something to the codebase requires several steps, and coding is just one of them. You need to analyze the feature/request, update documentation, monkey testing session after the implementation…
- And it’s not done when the code is ready and well-tested on your machine. Now it’s time for the review process, where your teammates give you feedback about your solution.
- Once you get the approval from the reviewers, it’s time to include your changes in the main code base. Now, the CI/CD dance starts, where your changes are deployed and tested again.
- And don’t forget to enable/disable your feature if you are using feature toggles 😃
- What happens once the code is in production? We have a role in the team: “sentinel/interrupt”. That’s the person who monitors the production environment to check the health of our services.
- In conclusion, coding is a small part of the job (testing, code reviews, communication with your team, monitoring, etc).
Solid as a rock: backend testing for a better sleep
Marina has a background in psychology with a specialization in neurosciences and neuropsychology, but after 10 years working in that field, she boldly decided to join an intensive 6-month web development boot camp focused on front-end development. Now, she is a software engineer at Criteo.
In her talk, Marina explained why testing matters for your backend and how to do it properly. Let’s review some of the main takeaways:
- We test our applications to ensure that everything works as expected and ensure quality.
- Writing tests is a costly activity sometimes, and we need to take care of them as we take care of the production code.
- Testing helps us to sleep better at night. Don’t you believe this? No one wants to receive a call at 3 AM because something is broken. This is a critical part of our activities as software developers and professionals. We don’t want to add bugs in the code. They might propagate and escalate really quickly at different levels. Furthermore, a bug could even impact your services, decreasing the performance. The sooner we detect those bugs, the better.
- There is not just a “testing phase”, but testing is part of the whole development process.
- How do we do testing? There are many categorizations, but Marina focused on white vs black box testing and isolated vs integrated tests.
- In the last part of the presentation, we could see some examples with real code. It was really powerful to see the huge improvements in readability that one can achieve with small changes, as well as the relevance of applying SOLID and DRY principles not just to your app’s code but also to your testing suite.
Roundtable
After the great presentations, we had the opportunity to organize a roundtable to review the main challenges for a woman in the tech world. The attendees participated by dropping anonymous questions to Ale, Lucia, and Marina. People were really engaged, and they had the opportunity to share their points of view about important topics such as barriers, education, mentorship, policies, imposter syndrome, etc. This was an intimate and inspiring moment for everyone because we could hear personal stories from our speakers. Even though there is still much work to do, it was great to find out that companies, such as Criteo, are considering many of the main topics to create a safe space for everyone.
Events like this have a huge impact on the community. Women can have the opportunity to share not just their personal experiences but also the technical expertise that they have as software engineers. It was a pleasure to witness how, during the networking time, women talked to each other and shared similar stories. We are happy to create those opportunities and provide the right space for them.
A huge thank you to all who could join us on this wonderful day! We also thank our three speakers and amazing team for organizing such a nice event.
Do not miss your chance to discover more inspiring people by joining our next “Women do tech too” meetup, and be part of the conversation!
To be part of our meetup communities, click here 👇
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