A Trip Back in Time: If you missed AWS WomenInTech Day India 2022
Tags: aws, womenintech, career, leadership
Published: 2022-08-29 15:49:00

The most awaited event of the year and close to my heart - AWS Women in Tech Day 2022 was very well organized, housing 200+ aspiring women with a very well curated agenda.

To see how far we have come in diversity within AWS Community, the 4th AWS WomenInTech Day would stand as testimony and I can proudly say that I had an opportunity to be part of 1st in-person [AWS WomenInTech Day 2019] (https://www.awsugblr.in/blog/2019-05-17-awssummit-mumbai-aws-womenintech-day/) in Mumbai , traversed through two virtual and got bigger & better now with 4th as in-person at Four Seasons Hotel, Bengaluru.

> I hadn't realized how many women in technology I had inspired until those refreshing conversations and to carry that memory forward for years to come, started putting them as a blog.

Back home conversation between both of my boys went like this
**Sharvesh:** Yoogesh, did you enjoy the conference ?
**Yoogesh:**  Yes, it was great, meeting lot of people

**Sharvesh:** Did you get bored?
**Yoogesh:**  Not much except when Amma was busy posing for so many pics with her friends and fan followers 😊

**Sharvesh:** Did you enjoy lunch?
**Yoogesh:** Same, because Amma was busy talking and I was following her to listen

_Amma => Mom _

Thanks to my Male Ally, Yoogesh, for giving me the right prop to pose with. 

![Sky](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/h8uukda8vxe5u0uck24q.png)

### Table of Contents
* [Registration](#Registration)
* [Welcome](#Welcome)
* [Opening Keynote](#okeynote)
* [Panel Discussion: Male Allies in Tech industry](#MaleAllies)
* [Panel Discussion: #BreakTheBias](#BreakTheBias)
* [Taking control of your tech career](#kris)
* [Accelerate your career with AWS Skills](#accelerate)
* [Demystifying Lakehouse](#Lakehouse)
* [Infrastructure as Code with AWS and Terraform](#IaC)
* [Fundamentals of Data Encryption](#encryption)
* [Closing Keynote](#ckeynote)
* [Gallery](#Gallery)

### Registration <a name="Registration"></a>
Four Seasons was decked up awaiting to make the #WomenInTech delegates and speaker's experience an everlasting memory.

![Registration](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/x37a44kg0yzk58l61dbf.png)

![Registration - team](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ekpu5dj3mvbtc9qukbyl.png)

![WithNimmy](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/p0bsrs4mew55jfodfg7z.png)

### Welcome <a name="Welcome"></a>
Ridhima was super excited about her dream event coming live after months of hard work. She was all set to extend a grand welcome to the #WomenInTech and wonderful speakers of the day!

![Welcome-Ridhima](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/73nf18y9y0o04hi7xpb8.jpg)

Lively Emcee, Anitha who kept us engaged through out the day and would love to have her back for any event we organize. Thank you, Ridhma

![Ridhima-MC](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/6bqa7d9s48w7o568qvn5.png)


### Opening Keynote <a name="okeynote"></a>
Wow! What a graceful presentation, [Ekta Parashar](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ACoAAAI0TT4BAS0oDfdHiEWI8WmWvn1ApYDPq3k?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_detail_base%3BGCG2Lk0%2FRnS5lMztgo9LyA%3D%3D). Awesome!!

![Ekta](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tj3eetuoup4a0v9gz848.jpg)

### Panel Discussion: Male Allies in Tech industry  <a name="MaleAllies"></a>

![Male-1](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/thpr2zw94825rw5q4pf2.png)

What a pleasure to witness a great conversation through the lens of leaders Puneet Chandok, AWS India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Private Ltd. (AISPL),  Vaishali Kasturae, Head Enterprise, Mid Market & Global Businesses, AWS India, and Deepti Varma, Director, Human Resources, Amazon with the best ever moderator Rohini Gaonkar, Senior Developer Advocate, Amazon Web Services (AWS) India and South Asia.

This message from Puneet stayed with many of us
> 12% of the tech workforce is digitally enabled. By 2025 we'll need 9x more digitally enabled professionals. By 2025 each one has to learn a minimum of 7 skills.

Thank you Vaishali, for being a role model Marathon Runner amidst all your accomplishments. A lesson well learnt on how to be heard in a room.

In her capacity as Human Representative, Deepti emphasized that what matters more than being the best employer on earth is making every day a better day for her colleagues.

![Male-2](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/6tnihlqp24y3fbldj4oy.png)
 

### Panel Discussion: #BreakTheBias  <a name="BreakTheBias"></a>
Getting to meet fellow #WomenInTech from all walks of life under one roof for an engaging conversation was very refreshing to me personally!

Thanks to Ridhima Kapoor and Rohini Gaonkar for inviting me to #BreakTheBias panel discussion along with my friend VijayaNirmala and Ragavendra Chandrasekar. Got to discuss lot of views on how to handle bias both personally and professionally, learn from each other.
![Bhu, BreakTheBias Poster](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xfzulx9u19ilyi8xjcp5.jpg)

Its my honour and privilege to be a speaker at our signature event 😊

![Speakre-Tag](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/mp12vt9wyxv3hr97mbwq.png) 

I was happy to share my journey, challenges I faced, how do we promote diversity in AWS community and my advice to fellow #womenintech.

![BTB2](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/8k2fh1co6k18mpm46yf9.png)
For my association with AWS Community for the past years, spoke about what are the steps we as community are doing and can do to improve diversity and inclusion in the community? 
  
I shared my views in 3 dimension
1. What do we do to promote diversity in the community?
2. What are the honours and recognitions our fellow women in tech received?
3. What we all can do to promote diversity?

**1. What do we do to promote diversity?**

- When you have women as the co-organizers of user group meetups, I have seen fellow women come forward to attend meetups; We have Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Madurai and Ahmedabad UGs having WomenInTech promoting diversity. 	
- Twice a year, we organize meetups with women speakers and hosts and also we see good women participation. Many UGs run special meetups around International Women’s Day to promote diversity.
- For 2019 AWS Community day, we even had a dedicated session for Diversity which was overflowing with attendees.

- With all this awareness, now we get good proposals for community day from WomenInTech which helps us to ensure that we have women speakers in all tracks. That doesn’t mean we compromise on quality. Proposal reviews are always anonymous.

**2. What are the honours and recognitions our fellow women in tech received ?**

I highlighted some of the honours and recognitions our WomenInTech from India have received for their continuous contributions to the AWS Community.

#### AWS Community Builder	

- The AWS Community Builders program offers technical resources, education, and networking opportunities to AWS technical enthusiasts and emerging thought leaders who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with the technical community.
- We have more than 20 or 25 AWS Community Builders as WomenInTech

#### AWS Diversity Scholarship Recipient

- In 2018, I received AWS reinvent Diversity Scholarship and went on a fully sponsored trip to reinvent as one of the five women across the world.
- In 2019, Sridevi Murugaiyan from AWS User Group Chennai and Sukanya AWS User Group Mumbai received AWS ReInvent Diversity Scholarship and Vijaya Nirmala from AWS User Group Bengaluru received the WePowerTech grant to make it for AWS reinvent.

#### AWS Hero Recognition
Ok next how about the highest degree of honour - AWS Hero? Do we have our presence?

I was the first woman from India to receive AWS Hero recognition in 2019 followed by first woman across the world to receive AWS DevTools Hero.
We had Sridevi Murugayen as first AWS Data Hero from India in 2020 and Dipali as AWS Community Hero in 2021. 
Would love to see many more ladies joining us soon.

#### AWS Developer Story in 2021

Dipali and myself were featured in that 2 mins inspirational video. 
To my surprise, the our videos went viral with 2.6 million views shortly after launch. I am not a celebrity yet. But see how many people can resonate with the grassroots and the growth path?
Stay tuned for more stories coming on your way!!

**3. What community can do to promote diversity ?**
When we what community can do to promote diversity, I would say we are the community and what we can do? 
I started using social medial effectively only during 2018 AWS Community Day. I started seeing more techies - not just women in tech - ping me over linkedin asking for suggestions on how do I get started with AWS, Help with Blogging, Speaking, certification and so on. I have a huge list of folks who is transformation into blogger, speaker and certified professionals. To my surprise couple of attendees of WomenInTech day event told that they came to see me in person and following my social media posts, one #womenintech returned to work after career break and completed overall 23 certifications. I really got goose bumps hearing all this.

If I as an individual can make an impact, all of us together can start that ripple effect to spread the positive vibe to inspire more women to learn and grow.

![BTB3](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/3m1zkf4tn31n5bxrkxte.png)

![Community](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/za4yok8jlf64pgektgdk.png)

### Taking control of your tech career <a name="kris"></a>

Kris, you were certainly not standing between us and lunch! Techies had great take aways 

- Resume preparation is not knee jerk movement to prepare at the time of job hunt. Keep it up-to-date as you progress
- Have a mentor and sponsor
- Ledger for your weekly or monthly accomplishments

Most of them equally aligned with my perception as my piece of advice to the college grads or techies remain the same.

![Kris-1](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/p08pwc5r17oz2v9443ni.png)

Love to have this imaginary career path 🥰🥰
Glad to have Kris address us as part of #awscloud #womenintech days

![Kris 2](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/i1dmixp10izwqtqgvlg6.jpeg)

Never mind if you had missed the session, she has the complete details in her blog -> [Taking Control of your Tech Career
](https://www.web-goddess.org/archive/21503)

### Accelerate your career with AWS Skills <a name="accelerate"></a>
It's wonderful hear Deepika's own story of how she came back like a Phoenix riddle after multiple career brakes and still made it to the top to coach, mentor and most importantly inspire many through your training.
> When you're skilled, you know it
> When you're certified, everyone know it.

![Deepika](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/0wodqci7aj1mu1l0hwzz.png)

### Infrastructure as Code with AWS and Terraform <a name="IaC"></a>
Dipali Kulshrestha had a great presentation and demo on my favourite topic - DevOps, IaC. Audience had really great fun in learning to spin up the infra using terraform code.

DevOps – Infrastructure as Code with AWS and Terraform
Infrastructure as Code enables DevOps teams to test applications in production-like environments early in the development cycle. These teams expect to provision multiple test environments reliably and on-demand. Infrastructure represented as code can also be validated and tested to prevent common deployment issues. At the same time, the cloud dynamically provisions and tears down environments based on IaC definitions.

DevOps is evolving nowadays to new heights and Infrastructure as Code is at the heart of it. This session will share the Techniques and Best practices of DevOps to manage Infrastructure as Code and how it can simplify and automate the modern world Enterprise applications.

Well, we both have been talking for many years without realizing that we haven't met 🙂

![Dipali](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/0jk6aqppq2kjo6wfauae.png)

### Fundamentals of Data Encryption <a name="encryption"></a>
Loved to see ⁦Neetu Mallan making her debut for an in person speaking session about Demystified Encryption.

![Neetu](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/lxounex5pso3ep5aw9dk.jpeg)

### Demystifying Lakehouse <a name="#Lakehouse"></a>

Wonderful session from my duo friends Sridevi Murugayen and Ramya Natesan giving lively information about data warehouse and how well you can organize your data on #awscloud using key services.
As the volume of data generated increases  exploding from terabytes to petabytes and sometimes exabytes, technology is also evolving to ingest, transform, store and analyse the data effectively. We spoke about lakehouse architecture  which is a new architecture that combines the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses.

![SriRamya](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/n4krhgsnmqglkjhzaj6c.png)

### Closing Keynote <a name="ckeynote"></a>

A great start by Ridhima came to a happy ending and my favourite techie Rohini, started the closing note at AWS #womenintech day with #gratitude. You both pulled up this event to inspire more women in tech.

What a day to cherish in the years to come 💐🥰

![RO-1](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/m8jx10cyntiev9aog7z4.png)

Rohini walked us through different community programs available and also shared her wish to see more AWS Heroes from #WomenInTech to the present list.

![RO-2](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/wej4rb6uz5dvdru6384w.png)

### Gallery <a name="Gallery"></a>
Not just good speakers, we can be studious listeners too. 
![Bhu-Rohini](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/9vj4a0m56njpx02dzy4v.jpg)

My little tech aspirant, Yoogesh was blessed to meet many tech giants and was happy for a pic with [Kristine Howard](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ACoAAAKha1QB6SwgHx05QJ43Xiijug3w0EZUYfM?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_detail_base%3B%2FdJBygCsTomS15TQarLtTw%3D%3D)

![YooKris](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/unbi7ae4lbauuq4fdi8k.jpg)

**BreakTheBias Panel**
![BhuPanel](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/yafve0adbg7eykiu9ow1.jpg)

**Great time with techies**
![Collage](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/z0ftg11ucxwzgqln4u38.png)

![With Asha](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/px5czpk7qetit49v3puh.png)

**Selfie Time :)** 

![Selfie-1](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ka9lirw2rs4vmwjzodyg.jpg)

![Selfie-2](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/t55z3robojby92m8r81f.png)