Pulumi Blog: Pulumi culture

International Women's Day: Celebrating our Women in Tech

Sara Huddleston — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0800

Today is International Women’s Day, and this year the theme is #EmbraceEquity - which means creating an equitable environment. An equitable work environment means understanding that everyone, regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity, background, or resources, brings strength to the workforce and that opportunities should be given to them based on their individual needs.

For Pulumi, it means a work environment where everyone can share ideas and respect them even when disagreeing. Women’s experiences - as well as men’s and nonbinary’s experiences - inform the direction of digital technology and innovation.

Being International Women’s Day, today we focus on women in tech.

Women in Tech Stats Awareness

Women earn an average of 17% (US) to 13% (EU) less than men, according to U.S. Census Bureau and European Commission.
60% of women in tech said a parent or teacher encouraged them. Logitech and Girls Who Code’s report on understanding the barriers women face in tech noted the importance of having role models and people encouraging them.
In small companies, 30.2% of employees are women, according to the report Top Companies for Women Technologists.
75% of women in tech are asked to handle more administrative tasks compared to their male colleagues, according to Navisite’s survey.

Below, you can meet some of Pulumi’s tech women - their experience, why they chose tech, and advice to thrive.

Pulumi’s Women in Tech

Sarah Hughes, Software Engineer

“I was lucky enough to go to high school with a ton of other girls who were into tech, so I took AP Computer Science in a class that was close to a 50/50 split. It really helped to start from scratch on equal footing. (Almost) everyone knew absolutely nothing, and it was obvious that our strengths and weaknesses were completely independent of gender.”

Lina Desloge, Account Executive

“I have always enjoyed problem-solving and working with people…which is what ultimately led me to a technical product. The advice I would give my younger self is don’t worry, just start!”

Kelsey Dirks, Customer Success Manager

“When I entered university, I chose Electrical Engineering as my major. I soon learned coding was not my specialty and switched to Communications, but I loved the people in the classes. It was clear both the professors and students were passionate about their craft. I knew that when I left university, I wanted to work with these types of people, but I had no idea in what capacity. Over the years, my experience led me to be a Customer Success Manager.

What I would tell my younger self is to not stress about trying to figure everything out right away. Every job will have its ups and downs, but when it comes to a career, trust that it will all work out. The biggest piece of advice I can give to women entering the tech field is don’t be afraid to lean on your female support system. If you aren’t able to advocate for yourself, your sisters in STEM will.”

Jonelle Boyd, UX Designer

“If I could give advice to women entering the tech field, I would tell them don’t be afraid of change. Whether that be a role change or a job change, because every new opportunity is a chance to learn and grow. I’ve changed roles as well as worked at a variety of different places during my career and I’ve learned something new in every position. There’s tremendous value in having a wide range of experience, so never be afraid of making that change.”

Casey Huang, Software Engineer

“To my younger self - At some point, you’ve heard people sell working in the tech industry by saying the hours are more flexible - you’re not chained to your desk 9 to 5, you can leave early as long as you get your work done. This is somewhat true, but you should know: there is always more work to do. Some of it is important enough to move the business needle. Some of it isn’t as important, but you just care a lot about it. It’ll be up to you to define your boundaries, and it will be up to you to defend them. But it’s okay; if your work environment is truly a good fit for you, they’ll follow your lead and support you. You can’t min/max life like you like to do in video games. What you’re doing is good enough. Don’t be so afraid of making mistakes. If anything, you’ll learn faster that way.”

Guinevere Saenger, Software Engineer

“Working in tech provides me with significant financial independence, professional respect, and a flexible work schedule. These are worthwhile for anyone to have, but especially so for women.”

We’re always looking for more amazing talent to join us in our community and as part of the Pulumi team.

Get to Know Pulumi's UX Team

Anita Trimbur — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 12:06:33 -0400

What is user experience, or UX? There are plenty of answers depending on who you ask. At the core, UX is about asking questions and solving problems.

Who we are

Here at Pulumi, our UX team asks questions for and about developers. Our purpose is to understand the Pulumi user and do right by them. We come into conversations as user advocates on the lookout for stumbling blocks.

We are a cross-disciplinary UX team. Our designers define and imagine new experiences. Our dedicated UX engineer brings them to life. Collaboration affords us a dual-perspective on every problem. It also empowers us to make the changes we want to see. Together, our team adds value across Pulumi’s CLI, Service, marketing website, Docs, and Registry.

Some of the principles that matter most to us:

Community nurture
There are infinite ideas and not always a “right” answer
People are more important than tech

What we do

Sometimes our UX projects are as small as clarifying navigation options. Other times, they’re as large as exploring the future vision of the Pulumi Service Console. No matter what we’re working on, we’re always thinking about who we’re designing for. We optimize how users flow through our product. We reduce friction anywhere we can. In the end, our users can feel more confident using Pulumi.

Since the new year, our team has grown from one to four. Recently, we opened a new role for a second UX engineer! Our team expects to scale alongside Pulumi and continue to put people first.

Where you’ve seen us

You’ll find the UX team’s work everywhere. Maybe you noticed the revamped pricing page following our Business Critical launch.

Or maybe you clicked into our improved sign-in experience in Pulumi Service.

In truth, some of the best UX improvements are invisible. We aim to build experiences that feel so natural, they never break your stride. But should you have trouble, we’re here to help.

You can check out our public GitHub repo if you ever have a UX issue to report. There, you can also read more about our team members and our quarterly plans. If GitHub isn’t your style, we also frequent Pulumi’s community Slack channel.

Pulumi’s UX team is always ready to make an impact, and we hope you’ll stick around to, quite literally, experience it. Look out for more blog posts from our team moving forward!

2021 December Hackathon: Introduction

Laura Santamaria — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 09:39:28 -0600

Pulumi’s hackathon tradition continued in the last weeks of 2021 with our 2021 December hackathon. For one solid week, we had teams from across the company focus on improvements across the Pulumi ecosystem, and we brought in people from outside the engineering org to get perspectives on different needs. While there were some projects that were focused on internal work, there were still quite a few open-source projects that we can talk about publicly. We’ll get more details from some of those teams over a few more posts. In this post, however, we’re going to explore a bit about how we worked.

Setting up for success

We set up the teams for success before the hackathon began by starting discussions around project ideas in a Slack channel asynchronously. In in-person hackathons, teams often decide on projects the day of the start of the hackathon. By starting discussions early, we let folks decide on projects they’d be interested in contributing to and drove early architectural discussions so teams could hit the ground running. People also started to get excited about working on the various projects, and they were able to start connecting with folks outside of the engineering team to find time on their calendars early.

Using a survey, we gathered what sorts of projects or areas of the ecosystem people were interested in working on, their timezone, and how they would like to collaborate. By using this data to sort people into teams, we ensured that people who were interested in learning about new areas of the ecosystem could find the right projects, that people who needed to work in a more synchronous environment could be paired with others in their timezone, and that people who worked similarly could find people who worked like them. It was an interesting experiment.

Working remotely

One cool thing that we tracked this round is all of the different ways we collaborated across the different projects. In general, Pulumi is a remote workplace, and none of the teams were co-located for this hackathon. As a result, we had to consider how teams might work across timezones and outside of the classic physical co-located team dynamic. Each team got to pick the best ways for them to collaborate. Our teams’ preferences ranged from daily standups over Zoom to collaboration solely on Slack to extensive pair programming and Zoom hangouts. In all, each team used multiple ways to communicate and engage depending on which parts of their projects they were working on. Teams working on explorations of possible solutions often found that pair programming remotely was a great way to brainstorm, for example. Once teams had a solid sense of what needed to be done to get to the next part of a project, many still attended a hackathon-wide Zoom hangout session daily to have someone to hang out with and discuss any issues that arose. The whole org also had the opportunity to get to know one another a little better, and it did not have the feeling of lost time or forced socialization that weekly virtual watercoolers can have after a couple of meetings as many have found during this period of forced virtual interactions.

Showing off what we did

During the demo at the end of the hackathon, we asked teams to self-report which strategies they found the most helpful, what they learned, and obviously what the results of their hackathon project were. We found that everyone level-set to how their team chose to work, and the pairing of people based on location and work preferences helped a lot to have teams succeed.

We’ll have more from each team soon! Keep watch on this space for new posts about hackathon projects.

If you like our way of working and are interested in a new position, we have a lot of positions open right now and will have more in the future! Please head over to our careers page to find out how to apply.