Marta Paciorkowska

Infrastructure Developer


Main focus: Infrastructure engineering

Twitter handle: @a_meba

Website/blog: https://thatmarta.wordpress.com

Languages: English, Polish

City: Oslo

Country: Norway

Topics: translation, communication, continuous deployment, configuration management, open source, feminism, devops, activism, ruby, literature, code review, golang, kubernetes

Services: Talk, Workshop management, Interview

  Willing to travel for an event.

  Willing to talk for nonprofit.

Bio:

An activist/project manager turned programming enthusiast. I currently hold the position of Infrastructure Developer at FINN, where I'm responsible for keeping hundreds of microservices running on our Kubernetes platform. I actively support initiatives that make the tech community more inclusive. A very occasional Rails Girls and Clojure Bridge coach. I ♥ Kubernetes, alleycats and pizza.

I enjoy public speaking and have a fair amount of experience already from my NGO-days. You can see some of my slides on my speakerdeck and you can read a few of my talks on my blog. I spoke at tech conferences/meetups in Berlin (Ruby Users Group Berlin, CoreOS Fest, eurucamp), Warsaw (Warsaw Ruby Users Group), Wrocław (wroclove_rb), Ghent (Cfg Mgmt Camp, DevOpsDays), Buenos Aires (RubyConf Argentina), Kiel (DevOpsDays), and Oslo (DevOpsDays, Girls Can Do IT) .

I'm interested in all things DevOps, live coding music, programming in Ruby and Go, similarities between code and text (especially text as art). At this time, I don't want to talk about the life of a woman in tech - let's leave it to specialists on the subject. I'd rather give talks related to company culture, my engineering experiences, or far-out subjects like comparing the evolution of programming languages to (European & North American) literature epochs, or treating code as art.

Some recent talks:
- DevOps Days Oslo, October 23, 2019: Making our applications greener,
- Ada Lovelace Day Mini-Conference, October 8, 2019: From Ruby apps to large-scale distributed systems: Navigating technology as a self-taught outsider.

Examples of previous talks / appearances:

"A Case Against Showmanship", given at eurucamp 2015
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Every other company is looking for ninjas, cowboys or superheroes. Every other conference talk is full of jokes, puns, comedy skits and personality. Nowadays, conferences breathe showmanship, but in our need to be the best of the best, or the funniest of the funniest, we are excluding others. When less than exceptional becomes not good enough, the barrier of entry goes up and it is the underrepresented groups that suffer. When did we start mistaking programming conferences for stand up comedy shows? Our drive to be edgy, exceptional, memorable or controversial too often ends up with distressed audiences and badly handled PR scandals. This talk’s aim is to reflect on how this is a problem, how we’re all losing and how the cult of the stage hero needs to stop.

"The Ultimate DevOps Test", given at DevOps Days Belgium 2014

"Culture", "tearing down the silos", "continuous integration", "infrastructure orchestration", … Did DevOps fall into the buzzwords trap? Do some of us use certain terms mechanically, just because everybody's doing it, without a 100% confidence we grasped their meaning? Or, even worse: we are more than positive we got it, but we actually didn't?

Let's do a sanity check: will we be able to tell the difference between sentences authored by actual people and a well-fed Markov chain text generator? The condition of our community rests on our shoulders!

Video.

"Programming, languages, literature", given at Rubyconf Argentina in 2014

Have you ever pondered on the similarities between programming languages and literature? If you haven't, here's your chance! Just as the development of literature can be divided into epochs with their distinctive themes, there are stages in the evolution of programming languages. Code and literature have more in common than you think! Let's have a look at programming languages and compare them to well known works of literature to (hopefully) come to a conclusion that programming does not exist in a cultural vacuum and that its development is significantly inspired by culture.

From Ruby apps to large-scale distributed systems: Navigating technology as a self-taught outsider
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A talk given at the Ada Lovelace Day Mini-Conference in Oslo on October 8th 2019: https://techwomen.no/ada-lovelace-day-2019.html

What's it like to switch to IT from another field? What makes IT infrastructure so interesting for me? A high level overview of the most important shifts in infrastructure in the last years.

This talk is in: English
"Let's play a game", given at wroc_love.rb 2014
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A lightning talk I gave introducing the diversity drives innovation approach (starts at 10:35).

“DevOps is Dead” at DevOps Days Oslo 2016
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When DevOps came, it brought hope to the tired masses, enprisoned in the nauseating siloses of their tiring existence. But now once-faithful disciples have proclaimed DevOps dead. The Dark Ages of #NoOps have arrived. Some people are rejoicing, others are weeping. Everyone is asking: will DevOps stay dead forever? Or will it be rediscovered and given a new name (just like containers and microservices) to bring hope to us all, once againg? Let's observe the original followers and the various sects that sprouted from the DevOps seed and try to determine if DevOps will indeed stay dead forever.

This talk is in: English