Last week I asked on twitter for communities or groups that female leaders in tech were a part of.

Where do female leaders in tech hang out? Specifically looking for groups / communities to talk, discuss about engineering problems, scaling teams, hiring + firing, career growth options for tech leads etc.

— Princiya 👧‍ (@princi_ya) August 16, 2020

The tweet got some nice attention and some of the suggestions I received were helpful. None of them were women specific, and the next thing I had in my mind was this:

Would you be interested in a virtual Q&A to discuss engineering problems, scaling teams, hiring + firing, career growth options for tech leads, problems specific to women leaders etc.

RT for reach 🙏

— Princiya 👧‍ (@princi_ya) August 20, 2020

Over the weekend I sat down to map my mind on a paper and help myself get what I want.

What do I want?

Firstly, I had to be clear to myself on what was I trying to search.

I was in the lookout for communities or groups to discuss problems what tech leaders face, more specifically, what women tech leaders face. When I realised from my above tweet and after a bit of research that there weren’t groups or communities to discuss women specific tech leader problems, I wanted to create a virtual space myself so that women could come and share problems, find solutions.

Why do I want?

As a female leader in tech, sometimes I have my blue days and I was hoping to have a closed group to talk and rant over the day to day things. In the past, ~3 years ago in 2017, when I newly started out in opensource, it was overwhelming too. I contributed to Firefox devtools debugger and then I did Outreachy internship which was a game changer.

Last year, in 2019, I was helping co-organise the bi-weekly open source diversity calls, where people in open source used to gather and discuss how to make the space more diverse and inclusive. Prior to this, I was part of a closed open source maintainer cohort whose attempt was to bring more diverse maintainers into open source.

During my mind-mapping activity I realised I wanted a similar thing about female leaders in tech.

How do I want?

When I got to the HOW part, it made more clear to me about the earlier WHAT and the WHY topics. I started analysing similar activities from the technical and non-technical space. For example:

• Monica Lent’s blogging for devs

• Entertainment shows which I love to binge watch; for example: The Kapil Sharma Show

  • Kapil Sharma is an Indian standup comedian who is known for his witty jokes and excellent comedy timings
• There are other examples too, but for now, let’s stick to these two
• One thing that is common here is that both of them know their domain pretty well and are able to generate content and keep the audience engaged
• When I started to ask myself how do I want to create a closed space or answer in detail the WHAT and the WHY topics, it made sense to learn the subject matter and get better so that at some point (say in one year from now) I could lead the discussions myself or produce more content around these topics

What have I found so far?

I have joined the below slack groups, and I am reading lots of articles by scouting through their old messages. I try to read ~3 articles per day.

https://twitter.com/Jupiterrrr/status/1295116583661166594

Not specific to women, but there’s a slack group for engineering leaders that I find super useful to discuss these topics: https://t.co/0kPVROCl2Q

— Kenza Iraki (@kenza_dev) August 16, 2020

I also found this interesting newsletter from Patrick Kua.

This github repository on leading and managing is in my browser bookmarks.

You can follow my blog where I try to document what I learn in this space.