How I Got There

Each of the panelists has a “how I got there” story to share and can answer questions from the audience on how they traversed situations along the way.

Jean Yang is a Ph.D. student in computer science at MIT, focusing on programming languages. She graduated from Harvard University in 2008 with a degree in computer science. She has done internships at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft Research. In 2009 she co-founded Graduate Women at MIT, which now has over 1200 members, two annual conferences, and a mentoring program.

Kirsten Stewart is an Automation Engineer for Gap Inc. There's no infrastructure problem too great for her. She's scaled rapidly growing startups and has solved complex problems for Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft. She's active in the Hadoop, Puppet, and Chef communities. She hasa BS degree in networking and is currently working on a Masters degree in Database Systems.

Jessica Rothfuss has over a decade of experience working on large-scale infrastructure projects. She recently relocated from the D.C. area to work for Taos on an engagement as an IT program manager at Facebook. Prior to joining Taos, Jessica spent eight years at AOL managing infrastructure projects between one and three million dollars. Before joining the Internet industry, she was an implementation project manager for a software company in New Mexico that produced law firm management software. Jessica is PMP and ITIL certified; she also received her Masters in Information Systems Technology from George Washington University in 2007.

Melinda Graham is a geek girl with a background in Hadoop, storage, and IT architecture. She is currently working at SwiftStack to bring massive, scalable storage to the world at large via the OpenStack Swift project. Past gigs include Oracle, Yahoo, and various startups.