Merge pull request #31 from scribd/wwc-toronto

Add harini's blog post with some minor copy edits

_data/authors.yml

@@ -55,3 +55,6 @@ ugi:
 
 hamiltonh:
   name: Hamilton Hord
+
+harinii:
+  name: Harini Iyer

_data/teams.yml

@@ -18,6 +18,9 @@ Core Platform:
 Core Infrastructure:
   lever: 'Core Infrastructure'
 
+Payments:
+  lever: 'Payments'
+
 Web Development:
   lever: 'Web Development'
   about: |

_posts/2019-12-09-migrations-meetup.md

@@ -0,0 +1,87 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Lightning talks with women of Scribd: migrations, owning quality, and more!"
+author: harinii
+tags:
+- meetup
+- toronto
+- featured
+team: Payments
+---
+
+As we build [the largest library in the world](/blog/2019/building-the-library.html), we need more manpower, and more
+importantly: more **womanpower**. As we make plans to scale our product and make way
+to scale our users, we need a way to scale our engineering teams as well. We
+are actively looking to expand our teams at all our offices and particularly in
+Toronto. Between the University of Toronto and Waterloo, we discovered long ago
+that there are lots of talented people around Toronto, and have since made
+Toronto the home of our second engineering office! Partnering with Women Who
+Code Toronto chapter seemed like a perfect way for us to launch Scribd's
+footprint as an engineering brand and attract a diverse talent.  Four women
+from Scribd engineering flew to Toronto from San Francisco last week to talk
+about a wide range of topics. The
+[event](https://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-Toronto/events/266758297/) was
+organized by our SF based recruiter Lucas and our HR partner in Toronto office,
+Tammy who took care of every detail for the event to be successful. There were
+about 50+ attendees to the event, mostly women. The event started off with
+Katerina welcoming the
+guests and giving a brief overview of what we're building at Scribd, and then
+went straight into the talks!
+
+
+First up  was **Paige Stone** (Software Engineer, Notifications) who presented "Green Field projects
+and how I learnt to love Migrations."  She talked about the importance of
+evaluating and determining whether the solution should be to re-iterate through existing code or build something from scratch. She also shared some
+nitty-gritty details on the re-write of our marketing integration to integrate
+with [Iterable](https://iterable.com/), and the different trade-offs that we
+made in the process.
+
+<img src="/post-images/2019-12-toronto-meetup/paige.jpg" alt="Paige presenting"/>
+
+
+Next up was **Nikki Hernandez** (Web QA engineer) who chose to talk on the
+importance of quality with "Don’t go chasing waterfalls: owning quality as a
+whole team effort in an agile world." Not many people are aware of what a fully
+agile process means and most of us are pretty satisfied with "as long as we are
+not following the waterfall model" but Nikki's talk explained mini-waterfalls
+and how they may sneak up even when we are (or we think we are) following the
+agile process. She talked about about the many challenges that we face today to
+maintain quality in an environment with many cross functional teams. Building
+quality products is everyone's responsibility and she shared various tips,
+tricks and practical approaches that we could all use to build quality products
+and not make it just a certain team's responsibility.
+
+<img src="/post-images/2019-12-toronto-meetup/nikki.jpg" alt="Nikki sharing
+some charts"/>
+
+**Katerina Hanson** (Engineering Manager, Payments) jumped back "on stage" to
+share some thoughts on metrics and alerts with "Instrumenting your Code for
+Great Justice." Katerina is a self taught software engineer. She talked about
+metrics and alerts, the why's and how's of developing meaningful metrics,
+visualizing the health of your systems, and using instrumentation to
+effectively debug, deprecate, and optimize your code.
+
+<img src="/post-images/2019-12-toronto-meetup/katerina.jpg" alt="Katerina
+kicking it off"/>
+
+
+The last talk of the night was from me, and I chose a non-technical topic: "What you
+seek is seeking you : Find the company and culture that is right for you." I
+shared my journey as an engineer, as a woman in the tech field and as a
+mom, the many difficult situations one might face in this fast moving industry
+and how introspection to evaluate oneself is essential to make meaningful
+career decisions. Having imposter syndrome is a real issue but consciously
+fighting it is important too. I also discussed the importance of being valued
+and accepted at a company and how culture of a company could be influenced.
+
+<img src="/post-images/2019-12-toronto-meetup/harini.jpg" alt="Harini sharing
+the journey"/>
+
+Towards the end, we had some time for answering questions and most of the
+questions were around women wanting to know more about _switching careers to
+software_! There were some interesting questions about hiring and the process to
+go about it.  One of my greatest joys in life is to witness women uplifting
+other women and this event was certainly one of those occasions. We, at Scribd,
+are fueled to reach out to more female engineers and tell them about Scribd and
+the positive workplace it is to be - To be valued, to be accepted and to be a
+woman.