Session: Building a path to technical leadership
Recently, I had the opportunity to take on a temporary leadership role. This was my first time leading a team, although I have always had a leader's character: eager to organise events, lead initiatives, proactive attitude, build connections and, most importantly, caring for those around me.
In this talk, I will share some of the lessons learnt on this path (that I'm still building) and, hopefully, this will encourage those of you who are currently hesitant about aspiring to leadership roles.
Bio
Algorithmics enthusiast, I am always eager to learn and confront new challenges.
Currently, I am Senior Software Engineer at Ocado Technology. I develop mostly in Java and under Spring framework and I am very active on broadening my tech skills by several means (tutorials, books, talks).
Before I spent around 8 years in Bioinformatics. First, I was postdoc in Algorithmics at Centre Nacional d'Anàlisi Genòmica, CNAG. My work was focused in de novo assembly from NGS data (a sorting problem with huge and uncertain data). I participated in several genome projects and work both on the development of a new assembler and the enhancenment of production pipelines. Then, I moved to the Made of Genes startup, where my main responsibility was the genomic pipeline design. I adopted Agile principles and I used technologies as Python, REST APIs, docker, bash and SLURM.
My academic background is in Algorithmics, specifically in Algorithm Engineering. I graduated in Computer Engineering and then, pursued a PhD in Computer Science, both at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). My thesis contributed results on core problems such as sorted sequences, dictionaries, sorting and selection taking advantage of the particularities of string keys, memory hierarchies and parallellism. Besides, I participated in the GCC libstdc++ parallel mode project during a research stay at Universität Karlsruhe, and did an internship in Engineering Productivity at Google Munich.
In addition, I have attended and been involved in the organization of several international conferences, I teached in a first year programming course, and I co-supervised a degree thesis in Computer Science and a master thesis in Bioinformatics.
Proactive person, I work comfortably in interdesciplinary and international teams, with excellent communication and interpersonal skills. My mother tongues are Spanish and Catalan, I have full professional working competence in English and an intermediate level of German.