It was very exciting to see more than 700 attendees (mostly women, a few men) on a Friday morning at Santa Clara Convention Center, ready to explore the Future with Tech experts from AI, IoT, Big Data, Data Science, Containers, UI, Product Management and Engineering. With over 30 talks from industry leaders and more than five panel discussions, attendees were inspired to take charge of their careers. Interacting with successful keynote speakers and Founder panel CEOs helped attendees learn, and all benefited from inspiring rags to riches stories, stories of struggle that pointed out that one is not alone. All the technical tracks were really interactive and to the point, covering today’s trends and providing insight on what’s coming in future. Additionally, motivational speakers addressed soft skills, including leadership, negotiation, pitching for oneself, and techniques to deal with stress. Details of the agenda can be found on VerveCon Agenda.

An amazing panel of experts from MapR, Ancestry.com, LinkedIn and Intel discussed and demystified the hype around Big Data – Trends, Tools and Tips.

Crystal Valentine (VP of Technology Strategy, MapR Technologies), Suja Viswesan (Director of Engineering, Big Data Platform LinkedIn), Fauzia Chaudhry (Senior Technical Product Manager, Ancestry), with Radhika Rangarajan (Engineering Director, Intel) as moderator, enthralled the attendees with a vibrant panel discussion on Big Data technology trends, the latest tool stack,  and tips and tricks about use cases at scale. Each spoke of her own journey into Big Data, offering perspectives from their experience as to inspire the audience on how to transition from what you are doing today into Big Data roles.

The different roles and growth opportunities of these roles was discussed in detail. Open source has played a role in evolving the architecture, presenting choices to be made about whether to build or buy or go the open source route for your big data stack. Examples from LinkedIn, MapR, Ancestry and Intel gave breadth and depth to the discussion. Some of the real world use cases of Big Data applications at scale were discussed.

Cynthia Kaschub (User Experience Architect, Intel) was part of the panel on “UX Design Systems: The Intersection of Design & Development,” along with Louise Fox (Engineering Manager, Survey Monkey) and Sadia Harper (Senior UX Strategist, Fuseproject) representing women from UX Research, Design and Engineering. Ben Hsieh (Senior Experience Researcher-Lead, Adobe Systems) served as moderator.

This panel focused on how leading tech companies have created their Design Systems. Even when developing for drastically different web-platforms with diverse target users, the process for a successful system is very similar.  The panel enlightened the audience as to why Design Systems are useful, how they are built, and what to watch out for when building one for your company.  The audience was engaged from start to finish and had a series of questions around how they might address specific challenges within their own organizations’ journey toward creating a design system.

Overall it was a wonderful event with inspiring talks, perspectives and networking at end of event. Thanks to Sudha Kasamsetty, the organizer, Women in Big Data and VerveCon Supporters, this event was a huge success!

Blog contributor Srabasti Banerjee is a Software Developer with over a decade of experience in development, testing and implementation of application software using Big Data and Oracle technologies.