So, I feel like companies in HR frequently use diversity as a trendy buzzword and they focus on the facts of who a person is. For example, I'm a queer South Asian Hindu woman, but what they miss is the story that's told by the background of their engineers individually and collectively. I'm going to frame this talk on the story of my background and how that influenced the teams that I've worked on.  So the talk is going to be based on, we'll talk a little bit about who I am. I'm going to define diversity, what it looks like, why you want it, and also how it plays out in reality.  And I'm also going to talk about inclusion and how it is really important to be inclusive in order to have a positive feedback loop and a culture of collaboration. So this talk came about because I've been asked many times about how I've gotten to where I am today and my path is a little bit unique and non-traditional. If you'd asked me a decade ago if I was going to give a talk on diversity, I would have emphatically said no because I'm a technologist at a tech conference, so why am I not giving a tech talk? Well, a decade later, having frequently been the only person like me in my teams, only woman, only brown person, only gay person, only Hindu, it matters a lot more to me what my teams look like and the choices that we make when we communicate with each other and the impact that has on everyone on our teams. So as we've discussed, I'm a queer South Asian Hindu, I was born and raised in Texas, I have a wife who's right there, two cats, a dog and I'm an amateur woodworker. Now the director of site reliability at Active Campaign, I'm also a former high school teacher, business analyst, DBA and database developer. So how did I get here? It was a lot funnier when I worked at a company called here. So I started my career, clearly I haven't updated my slides. So I started my career with an interest on the tech side, but because I have really great communication skills, I was told that I should stick to the functional track because I'd be more successful. Now being socialized as a South Asian woman in the 80s in Texas, I was socialized to believe that I should respect my elders and follow the paths that they lay out for me. So despite the fact that my interest was actually more technical, I followed the functional path. But I noticed that I always leaned towards the reporting and analytics and data side of the world, and so I kept moving in that direction. And eventually I was working with a DBA and what she did is she mentored me and she opened up my world so that at some point I was the actual DBA on a legacy system that we had because I was the one with the most functional knowledge of the system. And I had been working with it technically. This led me to be able to transition to being a full-time DBA at a trading firm and at that trading firm, this mentorship gave me the confidence to express an interest in the NoSQL databases and my boss at the time was thrilled and was like, great, here's MongoDB and Elastic Search, please spin up all of our clusters and handle it. Also, we don't have any monitoring or learning or any way to spin these up automatically, so figured that out too, which is sort of how I was introduced into DevOps and configuration management and that has led me to my career in infrastructure today which I love instead of one that I just tolerate. So what do I care about diversity? Well, somewhat obviously I care, but also this non-traditional path following the functional route all the way over to the technical side, it means that I have a lot of skills that are helpful and that I use every day to help my team coming from the functional world. However, it also means that my experience may not follow the full path of what people expect someone on a site reliability team to have. And so having co-workers who are empathic and are collaborative means that we all fill in the holes together and we have a better and more positive team and that's why I care about diversity. So diversity is not just about race or gender, it's also about the skill set that the people around you possess. In my case, the fact that I was a young woman with a liberal arts background made it so that my true vocational interests were overridden by the facts of me and I'm certain I'm not unique in this. In that example at the trading firm where my boss let me be the DBA that worked on the NoSQL databases and he ended up letting me be one of the experts in SaltStack, which was our config management tool of choice. Nothing pointed to me to be the person that he should pick on his team to do that. What he did was he was listening when I was speaking to him and I'm sure that everyone's heard that if you don't ask for things, you're not going to get what you want. However, I have something like 20 years of socialization running counter to that advice. So I frequently employ something else called a soft ask where I gauged the interest of the person I'm speaking to and so when I was talking to him, I was like, hey, so I've heard about MongoDB and it's really cool and I'm really interested and he did one better than just saying, oh, that's nice. He was like, do you want to manage it? Yes, great, here. It's all yours and so this was good for me but it was also good for him because at the time our SaltStack deployment was using MongoDB as its returner and I was interested in automating our MongoDB installs and monitoring, which I eventually did using SaltStack, but also because our deployment was the returner was slightly broken because it wasn't using MongoDB correctly, I ended up fixing that for my team. So what he ensured by letting me learn new things and allowing me to broaden my interests was that he strengthened his team by diversifying their skill sets. He also strengthened his tool set because I fixed a broken deployment and then he also bought some of my loyalty by giving me new cool things to learn. So that's one example of why a diverse team is a good team and a stronger team, but why is a checklist not enough? There are a lot of studies that show diverse teams are more successful but I'm sure everyone here has read all of those articles about diverse candidates fleeing from toxic cultures. So why is a checklist not enough? If you hear me, I'm gonna use a woodworking example. So I made this beautiful cutting board for my wife last year or something like that for Christmas. And I was so excited about how pretty it looked and the design and the appearance of the design and what it went and making sure everything lined up perfectly. And then three months later, it looks like this, what happened? I was so focused on the appearance of my design and not the components or function of them that I forgot that when you're actually putting wood together, it moves. And so because of wood movement, the toasted ash on the sides blew off the cutting board. So what we need to do is to focus on the actual function instead of on the appearance. Now what does this look like in real life? Well, we have the benefit of being people and not wood. So we get to make our own communication choices. So early in my career, when I was a business analyst, I was getting my first performance review and everything was going great.  The client thinks you walk on water, blah, blah, blah. And then right at the end of the review, he's like, well, there's this one dude whose name I've forgotten because it's been a decade, who you're really short with and I'm just so disappointed in you. And growing up in Texas as a woman in the 80s, I knew better than to talk about sexual harassment because you want to know what happens, A, people don't believe you. B, you have to relive your experience and you see, even if they do believe you, nothing really happens. But this was my review, so I felt the need to say something. So I was like, hey boss, I don't know how to tell you this, but this guy makes me really uncomfortable at work. He stares at me by stare. I really mean leer and doesn't meet my eyes and is looking in use your imagination and he stands way too close and it's just generally not cool. And my boss sadly responded in the way that I expected and said, well Rhea, I was hoping he's really young and just over from India and he doesn't know how to talk to women. I was hoping because your communication skills are so great that you could teach him how to talk to women, for real. So now, what this told me is that this cutting board was not a place that I would stay on much longer. It said to me that the comfort of my male coworker and boss were more important than my safety and security. Now, how do you help diversity thrive? First, I want to dispel the notion that the person I was talking about in the last slide is a bad guy. He was actually a fantastic manager. He fought for me in a lot of really good ways and he made a really egregious mistake. Also, it's been a decade and our sensibilities have changed a lot in that decade. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but people are complex and we are more than the sum of our parts and we should remember that. Having empathy for people on your team is not a bad thing. Having empathy for that guy wasn't a bad thing. What he was missing there was that maybe I had a point. Maybe I shouldn't have to feel uncomfortable every day when I go to work. Now, I wasn't looking to go to legal or HR. All I wanted to do was set some boundaries and have him talk to this guy and be like, hey, here are some boundaries. Don't stare, don't be professional at work. The end, and so what I was looking for and what I generally think would be really helpful is to actively listen. Because this is a pretty simple instance. We're actively listening to what I was saying. And talking about coming to a point where we can remediate it and work together is what's important. You don't have to go to either extreme to show the person that you're talking to, that you're listening to them. You respect them and you take them seriously. Take, for example, my boss at the trading firm. He was listening to what I was asking for without always having to ask directly for it. And I'm not advocating for a soft ask. I'm saying that if you were actively listening, it gives you the tools to fill in that information and to ask more relevant questions so that you can get a better understanding with your employees. And with your teammates. So also the DBA that I was working with. When I was working with her, she allowed me to ask her questions and broaden my skillsets. And that's a type of advocacy.  And they could be anywhere. They could be in any department. And letting them learn new skills opens up doors that you may never have thought were available. So there are two types of advocacy I want to talk about. There's advocating for others and there's also self-advocacy. The examples with my manager and the DBA I was working with are examples of advocating for others. And there are also other ways that you can advocate for others. And one really useful way is amplification. So studies show that women are not heard as well as men. And it's pretty detailed in the language I've linked it. So if you look at my slides you can actually click on the link and learn more. In the instance where we're talking about women's voices not being heard as well, one of the most frustrating times this happened to me, I was a MongoDB DBA.  And at the time the infrastructure had been set up before I even knew what MongoDB was. And so it was these huge boxes. And everybody knows that MongoDB scales horizontally and not vertically, right? So clearly we were set up for failure. And so what I did is I actually started our database cluster. And it increased our query performance by 20% making no changes to any of the dev work. Now this was a pretty big change and to actually implement that change on the cluster would require a significant amount of work that was never scheduled. So a few months later we're in a meeting and they're still complaining about query performance. And I say, yeah, you could start the cluster. And my male DBA sitting next to me saying, hey, the only way this is gonna work is if you shard the cluster. More than a year later, it's still credited to the male DBA despite the fact that I did an entire proof of concept on it with data. So it really matters who the speaker is and how you hear it. Now I worked at another company called Here. And I had this really amazing co-worker named Russ who did this really awesome thing. If anyone helped him with any piece of a project or just anything generally at work that made his life better, he would credit that person by name like multiple times a day. And at first I thought it was a little weird. Not gonna lie, probably says a lot more about my background than his. And what I noticed by him doing this is it created this culture of positivity. Just naming people, like he would be like, oh yeah, so I was creating this CloudWatch dashboard but Rih let me set it up and blah, blah, blah, blah. So now my work is done. By giving people credit where credit is due, you're amplifying their voice. You're amplifying who hears about it. And not only are you doing that, one of the things that happened on that team is that everybody started doing it with each other. So our entire team started talking about the work that everyone else was doing that helped them do their own work. And that created this positive feedback loop. And it culturally made it so that it was easier to self advocate because knowledge sharing was embedded in the culture. We all know that no matter where you are you do have to advocate for yourself but if you have a positive culture and a team that actually lifts up the idea that knowledge sharing is just inherent in the culture that makes it much easier to advocate for yourself because mentoring and pairing is a really easy way to find growth and opportunities already within your environment. And this brings me to inclusion, to better support our diverse teams including everyone in the conversation is a crucial step. When I feel included in a conversation and I know that people hear the ideas that I'm saying and give me credit for those ideas I'm much more willing to fully participate and give an unfiltered version of my ideas which generally leads to more creative and better solutions. Now, not being inclusive is not always a deliberate decision to exclude people. There was a company I worked at where there was a private chat channel and it was like the dudes talking about sports which is totally fine but what I found having been invited several months later and I noticed that the intern dudes were invited almost immediately after they joined was that there were a lot of questions that were actually technical questions being asked. Now, being someone who is not in that chat channel initially the culture of that team was like night and day because when you're not in that channel you don't know that these questions are acceptable that they're being asked and that they're being answered and there's no judgment. So when you're outside of that channel you think you have to be perfect all the time and that can be a much harder culture to want to be a part of than a culture that celebrates knowledge sharing and collaboration. So one of the things that I loved about my time at here was that my coworkers Russ and Lee were pretty amazing about including people in conversations and I'm gonna use an example from that time. So we were having a conversation about immutable infrastructure and Lee was talking about how immutable infrastructure was great and you know kind of like Jeff I was like I don't know I like config management what's wrong with config management and so things were getting kind of heated and what was really great about this is in the middle of the conversation Lee says I wanna pause because I don't wanna invalidate all of the work that you've been doing to make our config management better. I'm saying and I'm not saying that this works in our reality right now but I'm saying philosophically immutable infrastructure means less points of failure and therefore it would be the ideal. Now it's less about what he's actually talking about technically. What my point is is that Lee stopped in the middle of a really heated technical debate to draw me into the conversation to say that he valued the work that I was doing he valued my opinion and he wanted to come to an understanding where we could have the best technical where we were making the best technical decisions possible. That's a really supportive environment that encourages knowledge sharing and different viewpoints and one of the things that inclusion allows you to do and in this case what it allowed me to do is to bring my whole self to work and I know a lot of people say you know I'm the same person everywhere well that's not an experience I share. As a member of the queer community for a very long time the self that I presented was very very different everywhere including at work including at interviews. Up until last year I did not dress like this if I was interviewing. I wore heels, makeup, grew out my hair holding yards, completely different person. With my family I do not dress like this I am lucky that they accept my wife with open arms but being gender non-conforming is not as easy to accept. So when I was hiding a part of myself there's this low level of stress that happened because you don't know how people are gonna react if they find something out about you. You don't know if it's gonna be positive or negative or how that will go. But when your coworkers demonstrate that they are listening and hearing and they care about you as a person they respect you as a person you don't have to agree about everything but respecting that person as a human being allows them to bring their whole selves to work. I feel lucky that I'm able to choose to work in environments where I bring my whole self. Inclusion is not just something that should be a nice to have. It should be something that always exists because that's how diversity thrives. Being inclusive helps find and support people from diverse backgrounds and advocating for their success empowers team members to contribute to their fullest. Remember to listen, hear and ask your team members what they want and raise your own awareness whenever possible. If there's nothing else you get out of this talk the one thing you can do that can make a really meaningful impact in people's lives is to remember to call out good ideas by name. Remember to credit the person by name and that can change your entire team dynamic. And because this is Dev Update, here's Kat, yes. I'm gonna ask a question then. So is there anything that you feel like your teammates can do every day to be more inclusive of diversity? And also have you ever found yourself also not being inclusive? Because I know as a woman in tech I'm in a minority, right? But every now and again I just make assumptions about people based on their gender or the looks or whatever. I know that I am also biased against certain things, so. Oh yeah, totally. I mean one of the things that I do which is not a very traditionally female trait is I talk over people. I catch myself doing it all the time. I have to try really hard not to do it. Like it's not just like a dude thing. Like I can do it too. And it's still not good. Like you should not do it, I try not to. And to be more inclusive, like one of the things that I try to do is I try to pause whenever we're having a technical discussion to think about the merits of what someone's saying and what I'm saying so that it's not personal, right? Like you want to come to the best technical decision to move the company forward or to move the project forward. It's not about my ego. And so that's what I try to embody that it's not that when we're trying to work together you're trying to work together to make whatever it is you're working on better. You're not, it's not about you personally and having that culture of collaboration and the team effort, it helps to lift it up as a whole team so it's not all on any one person's shoulders. Yeah, I was curious if you had any suggestions on how you can try to identify some of the champions for diversity through like the hiring process. So not specifically trying to hire diverse people but try to identify people that will help embody that spirit of diversity. So I try to look for people who when I'm doing hiring I try to look for people who tend to like to collaborate. So like I do some collaboration projects as part of the interview process and it helps to gauge like how receptive people are to actually collaborate just in general. Because it's really hard because the interview process just kind of sucks all around for everyone. Like it's not pleasant. So I try to make it as like least pressure intensive but also like to have like a collaboration project. So you can see if they're gonna talk to you if they're gonna engage with you or if they're gonna try and railroad you or if they're just gonna like go in a corner and work by themselves. Not to say that any of those things are bad but that's just you know what I'm looking at. Thank you Rhea. Thanks.


let's make some lazy man's marinara and you'll probably never buy a regular marinara sauce again check it out some virgin olive oil a couple little tablespoons of minced garlic fresh basil now that everything's fragrant we're gonna add our San Marziano peeled tomatoes this is where you add the most important ingredients the canoes oh gee get that mixed in let that simmer for about an hour so we're making rigatoni i do a lot of salt in my water all right so it's been about 30 minutes on a simmer and i'm gonna add another handful of basil let it continue to simmer now we got our sauce right where we want it get you one of these that's absolutely delicious rigatoni in last step we gotta hit it with the cheese it is missing one more thing hit it with the pop pop now i know what you're thinking man that's a lot of seasoning but you don't know until you don't know yum yum get you some


Hey, this is Brett and this 2014 Ford Escape Titanium is stock number 21T188B. We're here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, you're new and used SUV headquarters. This 2014 Ford Escape Titanium has the two-liter turbocharged deco boost engine. It pumps out 240 horsepower. This escape has been fully-safetyed and inspected by our service shop for the state of Wisconsin inspection process. It has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off and this escape is 100% ready to go. We're going to go inside under the hood, start it up in this video all the way around of course and sunset metallic is the color we shoot all of our videos in 1080p 60 frames per second. So if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet, smartphone or television, I highly recommend turning them on right now because it is your best way to check out the quality condition and options of the vehicle before seeing it in person. And if you like the video on how we do things here at Summit Auto in the upper right hand part of the screen is a subscribe button, click that and then click the bell notifications you'll get updates every time we do videos here at Summit. This one comes with the 19-inch painted alloy rims. Looks like it has brand new brakes on it in the front here and it has Kumo Solis tires or I'm sorry Kumo Krugin tires these are 235 45 R19s and they have a really good amount of tread left. I would say that they are brand new. You can still see the little wear knobs on there a little bit of the line so very very new tires or brand new I would say 99% of the tread left. Front fender and bumper is in excellent condition. I didn't see any major dents on there actually there's one tiny little tiny little crack there but it is a used vehicle. The hood is in excellent shape and that's why we do the videos we want to make sure you get the most accurate representation possible so when you get here there's absolutely no surprises. The passenger side front fender looks really good and the passenger side rim I didn't see any major scuffs or scrapes on there. As you go down this side of the vehicle take note of how clean the body is how reflective and mirror like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by you can still see the vehicle hear the vehicle and have confidence in what you're looking at and like I said so when you get here there's absolutely no surprises and you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at and if this video helps you make that decision let your salesman know that you saw the video it was helpful and that Brett sent you. Back rims in excellent shape as well and the back tires they look like they are just about as new as the front tires you can still see those little wear dots on there from when they're brand new so I would say brand new tires on here. Sunset metallic it's kind of a cool color kind of a burnt orange it's got a lot of metal flake in it really cool color has a capitalist fuel flow which is a really nice feature and as you come around to this side of the vehicle rear bumper is in nice shape does have the backup parking sensors you get the dual rear exhaust has the receiver hitch on here and four pin wiring the tailgate is in nice shape must be in a titanium I would expect that to be a power gate and it is I didn't see any corrosion or anything on that gate looks really good and the back storage area is in really nice shape this one does come with a set of carpet floor mats and a spare tire those seats do fold down for extra storage and to get this down you just press this button right here comes down nice and smoothly as you go down the driver's side just as clean as a passenger side no denser dings on the rear quarter for full disclosure this back rim excellent shape as well and the driver's side doors look really good too it was this one does have the driver's side door code entry we do have the code for this vehicle and if you ever wanted to figure out what your door code is for your 2013 to 2019 escapes in the upper right hand part of screens of video I show you how to find your door code on your personal vehicle heated mirrors built in directional signals and blind spot mirrors on there inside the titanium package gives you the gray leather interior there are no rips there are no tears on these seats they are in really nice shape both front seats are heated you get power driver's seat factory all weather floor mats auto headlamps tilt telescopic steering wheel power windows power locks power mirrors and memory driver's seat we'll hop inside turn the ignition on check out the miles radio and everything that this car has to offer and see that this one has 45,376 miles you do get a temperature display distance to empty instrument cluster is very nice and clean comes with the leather wrapped steering wheel cruise controls and information center controls on the left and volume and Bluetooth controls on the right get the nice thumb pads on there and the steering wheel is an excellent shape does come with the my Ford touch radio and FM and serious XM radio capabilities also has the factory navigation system on it you can do your climate controls here as well and then your radio you have your AM FM and serious this is also where your backup camera shows up and you can see that that is working nicely you can obviously hook it up to your Bluetooth cell phone as well down here your more tactile climate controls including your dual climate controls push button start six-speed automatic transmission with the optional tap shift there your heated seat buttons keyless entry with the remote start passenger side format and seat are an excellent shape smells very clean inside this escape I don't think it's ever been smoked in and the headliner is an excellent condition as well this is for your ambient lighting you do get home like buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems we'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we'll start it up and take a look under the hood back seats are just as clean as the front seats no rips no tears back here it does have the latch child safety system has factory all-weather floor mats carpetings in pretty nice shape these seats do fold down I had risk come down like that and not sure if there's a different release on here or not or if I need two hands to do it but these seats do fold down give me a second I'll pause and I'll get that seat down for you all right I got that seat down I did have to put the front seat up just a little bit but you can see just how nice and flat that that goes and to get it back up pretty easy I think it was just kind of stuck on the seatbelt there but you can see that that works pretty nicely like so so I think it was just stuck on the seatbelt but that works good has child safety locks back here bottoms of the doors pretty nice that just a little bit of corrosion there but nothing too bad we'll start it up take a look under the hood starts right up no check engine lights or anything like that I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you will have been able to verify the quality and condition of this escape all the way around inside and out under the hood we have the two liter turbocharged e-boost engine 240 horsepower engine base very clean runs very smooth once again this escape has been fully safety and expected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change brand new brakes in the front like new tires on it there's your mission sticker really good looking color really nice condition and I would highly recommend this escape from a quality and condition standpoint and to see more pictures of this one or one of our other 450 new and used cars trucks scvs minivans Wranglers you name it we got to go to that website right there www.summitauto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at summit auto.com if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there click the bell notifications you'll get updates every time we do videos here at summit auto in fact in a second we'll see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel the upper left a link to more escape videos like this one the upper right a link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left and a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right click those check us out and we really look forward to helping you with this super clean 2014 Ford Escape Titanium in Sunset Metallic thanks again for checking out the video remember to like subscribe and share


This is your space pod for Thursday. I am joined by our astronomer Jared head you're to talk to us about some exoplanets Yeah, and we're gonna talk about some really cool things that we found with one specific exoplanet going around a star so Formation of systems around stars is what we call nebular theory This basically says that after all the gas and dust has collapsed in and started nuclear fusion Which is when a star officially becomes a star It says that after that any remaining gas and dust around the star should form like asteroids and comets and maybe planets And that should be proportional in size to the star itself Well, we took a look at a star with a special Telescope used by the European Southern Observatory and it was conducted by the University of Warwick And they have challenged this finding by finding a hot Jupiter type exoplanet around an m-class red Dwarf star now the system is known as NGTS 1 named after the telescope that the European Southern Observatory actually takes a look at it with it's about 600 light-years away in the planet NGTS 1b is about 80 percent the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star once every 2.6 days now that current nebular theory says that red stars are significantly more likely to make rocky planets But here is a hot Jupiter orbiting one now what is so cool about this study besides the fact that it's sort of Flying in the face of nebular theory is that this was the first time we actually found an exoplanet around a red Dwarf star via the transit method with the NGTS telescope that we have a really awesome photo of right here now the transit method method is when the planet blocks The light from a star you see a dip in the light We see it the curve actually go down and then come back up previous discoveries of exoplanets around red Dwarfs like Trappist one we're actually done by what we call radial velocity That means we literally looked at the star Wiggling back and forth from the gravitational pull of the exoplanets orbiting around it This is also really exciting because red dwarf stars They make up 75 percent of the stellar population in the Milky Way and likely the universe itself as well So this tells us that the most numerous Population of stars in our own galaxy can actually have a multitude of planetary flavors around it And this is really important because if we're gonna really actually start looking at exoplanets Resolving them actually being able to get their light instead of the overwhelming light of the star around them It's very important for us to understand The type of planets that we should expect around there and also look at our Modeling of nebular theory and see if we can actually do some type of a model that can explain this and that is what is so cool About finding things that are outside of our predicted models is that we can then go in and actually modify our models And then when we modify our models we get an even better understanding of what's actually happening around that star So it's really cool stuff happening with with exoplanets with that tiny little telescope the European southern observatories using Man and exoplanets aren't even that old from a discovery standpoint, right? I mean, yeah, I mean theorized since antiquity If you will but discovered Really in the early 90s late 80s early 90s depends on which organization you you ask All right Thank you so much Jared if you like that news make sure to like and subscribe this channel Make sure to hit subscribe and the little notification icon on YouTube so that you get notifications of our live shows that happen every Saturday at 1800 coordinating universal time this last week we talked with the brick Owens Fellows. It was really great click over here to watch that video