L Jagger

One of the many topics that come up when discussing the gender diversity issues in tech is the lack of visibility of people in tech who aren’t straight, white, cisgender men. I myself didn’t even know about software engineering until I began researching computing degrees so I can’t say I ever had any role models for such tech roles when growing up. Until this point my only experience of IT was creating spreadsheets in my GCSE ICT class and that certainly didn’t excite me but in the past few years I have noticed that college courses are adding software modules and there has been a rise of coding clubs for kids. [Read More]

This year the squad I work in at Sky Betting and Gaming have been refactoring our application in order to deploy it into AWS. It is something that we have been excited to work on and wanted to share what we have been up to so I wrote a post for the Sky Betting and Gaming tech blog which you can read here. Update: After publishing the post, other publications in the industry got in touch to ask more questions then posted about our move to AWS. [Read More]

In the past year at Sky Betting and Gaming colleagues of mine have created groups to meet, discuss and try and address various diversity issues. We have a Women in Tech group and more recently the Diversity group for the Bet Tribe with the aim of improving our diversity as a whole. We have discussed a range of topics from how job ads may put people off applying if the language is gender biased to how our company celebrations are often after work and may not suit the lifestyle of those who are parents. [Read More]

As part of my own professional development I like to watch tech talks to get a view of how other companies work and see what ideas they may come up with. Recently I watched a couple of talks from TravisCI, one was about building inclusive teams which then led me to watch a talk from their CTO on replacing salary negotiations with an app called Sinatra. First off I was impressed at the gender parity they have achieved with pretty much a 1:1 ratio that remains so in engineering, I would have liked to hear more about how they achieved that but that could be a whole talk in itself. [Read More]