Strategies for a Successful Career in Computing

Jennifer Ash-Poole, AdNet Systems/NASA GSFC
Jessica McKellar, Project Lead, Ksplice Group, Oracle
Sherry Moore, Software Engineer, Google
Margo Seltzer, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Jennifer Ash-Poole ran 9-track tapes through a VAX to do translation of Voyager data while in college. After graduating with a BS in Astronomy and Physics, that experience led her to be the planetary expert in a data center request office at Goddard. After a few years, she needed some challenges, so she participated in a circle mentoring program through her company to find out what other opportunities were out there. Through the program, she switched to serving as systems administrator in the same division at Goddard. Now she is a principal systems administrator that works primarily on Web servers and the virtual machine environment.

Jessica McKellar is a kernel engineer from Cambridge, MA. She is a Python Software Foundation board member and an organizer for the largest Python user group in the world. With that group she runs the Boston Python Workshops for women and their friends, an introductory programming pipeline that has brought hundreds of women into the local Python community and is being replicated in cities across the US. Jessica is a veteran open source contributor and a maintainer for several open source projects.

Sherry Moore is a senior member of the Google Fiber team, unleashing the potential of ultra high-speed fiber to transform the Internet. Prior to Google, she spent 14 years at Sun Microsystems doing high-powered software engineering. She honed her computer skills during her extensive development work on firmware and the Solaris kernel for both SPARC and x86 architectures, and on platforms ranging from laptop computers to multi-million dollar enterprise servers. She has worked as a team member doing bring-up of new hardware platforms, as a team lead in the design and development of new kernel services, and is now bringing her unique talents and skillset to networking.

Margo I. Seltzer is a Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Her research interests include provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, and medical data mining. She is the author of several widely used software packages. Dr. Seltzer was a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, and is now an Architect at Oracle Corporation. She is currently the Vice-President of the USENIX Association and a member of the Computing Research Association's Computing Community Consortium.

Moderator Rikki Endsley started her career in IT as the Managing Editor of Sys Admin magazine. She moved on to become Managing Editor and then Associate Publisher of Linux Pro Magazine and ADMIN magazine. In addition to her role as the Community Manager for USENIX, Rikki is the Editor of Ubuntu User magazine and contributes to NetworkWorld.com and Linux.com. In 2007, Rikki received a Master's of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Kansas. For her thesis, she researched how to highlight women's contributions to open source technologies.