Coffee Bytes with DevOps — Micro Podcast
Women in Tech: From ‘Computers’ to Code Breakers?! 👩💻
Transcript
Hey there techies! 👋👩💻👨💻 Welcome back to your favorite podcast series, ‘Coffee Bytes with DevOps.’ ☕💡 You got it right! We are here with our 10th episode today 🎙️🎉, and I, your host, Swami K, am just as excited as you are 🥳. If you’re wondering why I’m so thrilled, it’s because we’ve got another engaging session lined up for you, a thrilling rollercoaster ride 🎢 through the pages of tech history 📚💻. And yes, our favorite MCU metaphor will be along for the ride too 🦸♂️🎬. So buckle up, people, because we’re about to travel back in time to the era of World War II and visit the first ever ‘Computers.’ 🕰️💾 But hold on! It’s not your desktop kind folks! 🖥️ Ready to find out more? So, let’s hit the road! 🚀
Let’s kick off by setting our ‘time stone’ 💎 to the 1940s, a time when developers were operators 💻🕹️. Picture this! Our ‘Captain Marvel’ of the tech industry, Jean Bartik, was one of the many women responding to the US government’s call for math majors 📚➕. Her mission? To serve as a ‘computer’ 💡, crunching numbers and calculating ballistics firing tables for the war effort 🎯💥.
Her college advisor urged her to continue her family’s tradition of education instead, believing these number-crunching tasks to be repetitive and monotonous 🔄😴. But, much like Carol Danvers, Jean’s destiny was far greater than she imagined 🌟. This role placed Bartik smack in the middle of the tech universe at a crucial time, transforming her into one of the pioneering programmers of the ENIAC, the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer, the first all-electronic, programmable computer system 🧮🖥️.
Just like Tony Stark, with no documentation or plans, Jean and her team had to understand the intricate workings of the ENIAC from scratch 📝💡. Now imagine, programming this behemoth, and its 18,000 vacuum tubes meant adjusting dials and swapping cable connections across 40 control panels 🔌💾. That’s like operating Stark’s Iron Man suit with no manual! 🦾📚❌
Back then, the spotlight was on hardware engineering, with programming relegated to the wings 🧑🔧💡. It’s funny and a bit ironic, when something went wrong, the hardware engineers would come in and proclaim, “It’s not the machine; it’s the operators,” reminiscent of how Tony Stark would blame Jarvis when something went south with his suit! 🤖🔧
Much like our heroes in the MCU, these ‘computers’ had their battles to fight. Replacing fuses, cables, and removing literal bugs 🐜💥. They were indeed, the Developers as Operators 🛠️💻.
And that, my tech friends, brings us to the end of this exciting episode of ‘Coffee Bytes with DevOps’ ☕💡👋. Jean Bartik and her contemporaries paved the way for us and gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘Developer as Operator’ 🚀💻. It’s about time we broke the cycle of increasing specialization that creates silos and devalues specific roles. We hope you enjoyed this journey through time, and as always, we’ve loved having you with us 💖🎧.
Before we sign off, let’s stir up some coffee table discussions ☕💬. How do you see the role of developers changing in the future, and how can we foster a culture of appreciation for all roles in the tech industry? 💭👥
I’m your host, Swami K, the architect behind the content for this podcast, and the voice that brought our tech history to life today was Andrew 🗣️📜. So, grab your coffee mugs, keep sharing your thoughts, and keep brewing new ideas until we meet next time on ‘Coffee Bytes with DevOps.’ ☕💡 Stay Techie! 👩💻👨💻👋
