Katie, Valentina and I had the privilege of attending the Women Who Go event last Wednesday. This event was co-organised by Adelina Simion and Alice Cheung and was held at the Google offices. It was very exciting to be there (if you ever visit, bear in mind you cannot go anywhere without an escort as you will get locked out or even still lost!)

We hopped on a tube from work and joined others in discussions about how we could build a more diverse and inclusive Go community. Through their workshops and events, 'Women Who Go' are empowering women from all backgrounds to participate and collaborate with others in the Open Source community.

The event kicked off with a talk from Rachael Beacon-Smith, a Developer Advocate for Google who gave us some great insight into her career and the opportunities within Google.

Smashing assumptions with Rachael

Rachael got speaking to a Google Manager at the Women of Silicon Roundabout event, who encouraged her to interview for a Cloud Engineer opportunity. Rachael actually failed a part of the interview but was told to brush up on her knowledge and retake it when she was ready. And that's exactly what Rachael did. She passed with flying colours and secured her role at Google! 

After a few years, she decided to take advantage of the 80/20 project Google offers, where you can spend 20% of your time working in new roles and teams within Google. After 6 months and falling in love with the Developer Advocate role, she went full-time.

It's clear from her talk that you don’t necessarily need a Master's degree to be working with big companies like Google. There are so many opportunities to learn on the job, surrounded by a supportive team.  

Despite progress over the years, the tech industry remains very male-dominated, and a big part of this is down to a lack of encouragement and guidance for women who want to enter tech careers.

Often women feel underqualified or unable to apply for specific roles and will pass up fantastic opportunities even though they meet the necessary qualifications. This "confidence gap" prevents so many women from pursuing coding careers, so it's important for companies to recognise this and address it. We mentioned 8 ways in our blog on encouraging more women in tech. By addressing this confidence gap and supporting women in tech, we can work towards a more equitable industry that benefits everyone!

We then had a talk from Matthew McGibbon, who was also working at Google as Customer Engineer on the newly launched Service Weaver (a framework for writing distributed applications). Service Weaver allows you to write your application as a modular monolith and deploy it as a set of microservices.

It was really interesting to see this built live and have a real insight into Matthews's day to day. Matthew also supported Rachael's previous point that you do not need an academic background to join Google.

A fantastic event all-around!

Valentina, Katie and me at the event!

And of course, we ended with a drink at the pub where we could catch up and speak to the familiar and new faces! It was lovely to meet such great people and to be a part of such a strong community.

A big thanks to Alice and Adelina for organising and making us feel so welcome to join Women Who Go. I very much look forward to the next one at Monzo’s office on May 24th - it will be great to see familiar faces and perhaps new ones.

I would thoroughly recommend attending, so register your attendance here so you don't miss out! 

You can even consider doing a talk yourself, as members at this Women Who Go event mentioned it is a great chance to start if you are thinking of becoming a speaker in front of a small supportive audience to test your skills out. You never know, we may do one after learning lots about Go and what it has to offer...let's wait and see!

Thank you to speakers Matthew McGibbon and Rachael Deacon-Smith who shared great insights and advice from their own experiences.
And of course, a huge thanks to Adelina Simion and Alice Cheung for organising such a great event!

We're very excited about the future of Go!

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