Kathyleen Beveridge

Overview: Kathyleen Beveridge was born in Vietnam and immigrated in the 1980s. She studied abroad in Spain and received her Bachelors from Santa Clara University. She did not have a traditional education and waited for her MBA.

Career: Kathyleen Beveridge has worked as a banker at Wells Fargo, a stock broker from 1995 to 1996, and at Qualcomm, HP, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. At Thermo Fisher Scientific she has worked with 125,000 employees, 7,000 R&D scientists and engineers, and has helped with the process of commercializing products if the voice of sales deems that it makes sense for the market.

Mission Statements: The mission statements of the companies she has worked at are: HP Inc.: “Create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere.” Qualcomm: “Inventing the tech the world loves.” Thermo Fisher Scientific: “Enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer.” All three companies cater to the people or the world using technology.

Kris Porter

Overview: Kris Porter is a software engineer, SRE, DevOps and infrastructure engineer.

Education: He is an alum of Livermore High School and enrolled in UCLA for electrical engineering. His first computer science class was Quarter 2 at UCLA, where he failed the first time, but then retook it.

Research: Kris Porter has researched at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensors and for Networked Info mechanical System (NIMS).

Timeline: He graduated in 2008 during the stock market crash and got a job at a startup for email marketing automation in 2010. In 2012, he worked at NBC Universal for streaming media infrastructure and in 2014, he transitioned to Qualcomm with the help of Mr. Mortensen. Currently, he is working at Twitter.

Continuous Learning: In order to stay up to date in his field, Kris Porter has taken CCNA training, machine learning and deep learning courses, Python courses (through Udemy), and courses on data structures, algorithms and system design.

Projects: His projects include streaming media infrastructure for the 2012 Olympics, analytics infrastructure projects (LocationSmart, Qualcomm), new data center development at Twitter, and migrating home timeline of Twitter to GraphQL from RestAPI.

Q&A Notes:

  • Agile methodology differs between companies depending on scrum size
  • Always start looking for a new job before you lose your current one (or see signs of loosing your current one)
  • Be ADAPTIVE and KEEP LEARNING
  • Know how to listen to requirements and translate in terms of how the technology can meet them
  • Ridiculous interviews nowadays (compile code that solves a problem in 30-45 min)
  • Twitter University / Meta University teaches how the systems work because they are built there
  • Knowing how to code effectively is not just a skill, it’s a way of thinking (problem solving, growth mindset, etc…)