Growing strong communities with Isidora Katanic

12/21/20 • 37 min

Isidora Katanic is going talk to us about how to grow a strong community, how successful events are organized, her tips and tricks to give great online presentations, and the importance of diversity and inclusion.

She’s also going to share her opinion on how Covid-19 affected the conference world, and how these 2020 changes encouraged more people to join tech and use it in everyday life.

Isidora is going to talk about some of her future goals and share with us her favorite Community Projects as well as explaining to us what the “Head in the Cloud, Heart in the Community” video series is all about.

Guest Bio:

Isidora Katanic is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Co-Host of the video series "Head in the cloud, Heart in the community".

She’s also the Co-Founder of the event management company districtUP - organizing IT community conferences Experts Live Europe and Experts Live Switzerland focused on Microsoft cloud, data center, security, and modern workplace technologies.

Isidora engages with the Microsoft community and travels around the world to organize, speak, and attend conferences to learn, connect, and share with others.

In 2020 Isidora has been awarded the #AzureHeroes badge in the category of Inclusive Leadership. She has also been selected as the 1st Cloud Community Champion, a community-driven initiative.

Quote

“When you think about it, community stands for a common-unity. So I think the importance is to find people who actually have something in common, the power and success are to get those people to work together. To form a unity together.”Isidora Katanic

Timestamps:

(0:00) Episode Summary
(1:43) Guest Intro
(2:51) The meaning of Community
(3:42) How to build a successful tech community
(5:12) The power of storytelling
(7:13) How to grow a Twitter community
(10:50) How to keep people interested in your event
(13:32) What Isidora finds appealing in an event
(16:38) The conference world post-Covid-19
(19:53) Tips on doing online presentations
(23:40) Top 3 tech things Isidora is passionate about
(26:49) Isidora's favorite fantasy tech
(28:58) Diversity and Inclusion
(31:54) How to empower others
(33:07) Isidora's future community projects
(34:09) Shout out to the community
(35:49) Episode wrap up and goodbyes

Links:

Connect with Isidora on:

https://www.twitter.com/isidorakatanic
https://www.linkedin.com/in/isidora-katanic-0b479534/
https://www.isidorakatanic.com/video-series
Isidora's video series, Head in the cloud, Heart in the community: https://www.isidorakatanic.com/video-series

Lists of female speakers:

Connect with Cloud Gossip on:

Tech calender: https://festivetechcalendar.com/

Connect with Annie on:

Connect with Karl on:

She’s also going to share her opinion on how Covid-19 affected the conference world, and how these 2020 changes encouraged more people to join tech and use it in everyday life.

Guest Bio:

Isidora Katanic is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Co-Host of the video series "Head in the cloud, Heart in the community".

Isidora engages with the Microsoft community and travels around the world to organize, speak, and attend conferences to learn, connect, and share with others.

In 2020 Isidora has been awarded the #AzureHeroes badge in the category of Inclusive Leadership. She has also been selected as the 1st Cloud Community Champion, a community-driven initiative.

Quote

Timestamps:

(0:00) Episode Summary
(1:43) Guest Intro
(2:51) The meaning of Community
(3:42) How to build a successful tech community
(5:12) The power of storytelling
(7:13) How to grow a Twitter community
(10:50) How to keep people interested in your event
(13:32) What Isidora finds appealing in an event
(16:38) The conference world post-Covid-19
(19:53) Tips on doing online presentations
(23:40) Top 3 tech things Isidora is passionate about
(26:49) Isidora's favorite fantasy tech
(28:58) Diversity and Inclusion
(31:54) How to empower others
(33:07) Isidora's future community projects
(34:09) Shout out to the community
(35:49) Episode wrap up and goodbyes

Links:

Connect with Isidora on:

https://www.twitter.com/isidorakatanic
https://www.linkedin.com/in/isidora-katanic-0b479534/
https://www.isidorakatanic.com/video-series
Isidora's video series, Head in the cloud, Heart in the community: https://www.isidorakatanic.com/video-series

Lists of female speakers:

Connect with Cloud Gossip on:

Tech calender: https://festivetechcalendar.com/

Connect with Annie on:

Connect with Karl on:

Previous Episode

Data, Data & Data with Adi Polak

Adi Polak is going to share her expertise and thoughts on Machine Learning, Big Data, and the future trends in the industry. She’s also gonna talk about how these complex things work, the challenges they present, and some of the buzzwords typical of her industry.

Adi’s gonna share with us which tasks she performs on a daily basis, which personality traits are beneficial for her work, and the differences between the different job roles in her field.

We’re also are gonna learn more about Adi’s involvement in the community, her approach to teaching and learning, and how this can make a difference in people’s lives.

Guest Bio:

Adi Polak is a senior software engineer and a developer advocate at Microsoft working on Azure, where she focuses on distributed systems, big data analysis, machine learning at scale, and functional programming. She does extensive work in the Big Data and Functional programming communities.

Adi has an extensive background in software development. She holds an M.sc in Software and Information Systems Engineering from Ben Gurion University, during her studies she worked with IBM and Deutsch Telekom Research labs on various projects where she gained expertise in ML.

Adi was nominated to be 1 of 25 influential women in Software Development by Apiumhub.

Quote

"It takes some dedicated work, but It takes strategic work sometimes as well. So it's not alwaysabout working hard, it's also about being strategic on the things that you decide to pursue." Adi Polak

Timestamps:

(0:44) Speakers and podcast introduction
(3:05) Microsoft activity in the Open Source field
(4:25) How Adi deals with Open Source work
(8:05) Differences between big data and machine learning
(12:33) The newest things in the industry
(15:43) Versioning challenges
(17:15) Different Job Roles and what makes them unique
(21:35) How Adi approaches learning
(26:05) How Adi teaches others
(29:08) How Covid-19 has changed things
(33:11) Personality traits that Adi finds beneficial in her role
(36:19) 3 things in tech that Adi's is excited about now
(37:42) Adi's favorite fantasy technology
(39:57) Adi's involvement in diversity projects
(43:33) How to help and encourage others
(46:46) Adi's shout-out to a special community

Links:

Thanks for listening to Cloud Gossip! You can find us from our website CloudGossip.net.

Please leave us a review and subscribe to us at iTunes, Google, or Spotify!

Connect with Cloud Gossip on:

Connect with Adi on:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adi-polak-68548365/

Connect with Annie on:

Connect with Karl on:

Next Episode

Adventures in open source with Tom Kerkhove

We’re going to learn about KEDA and CNCF Sandbox projects, what they are and how they work, and learn about some of Tom’s insights in the industry.

He’s going to talk about how GitHub is helping the world of Open Source projects and how he uses the platform to engage with the users.

We’re going to hear his opinions about the future of tech as well as discussing how we can use what we already have in a better way.

Enjoy the episode and don’t miss the links and resources that Tom shared with us, you can find them at the bottom of the page.

Guest Bio:

Tom Kerkhove is the creator of Promitor.io , he works for Codit as an Azure Architect and he’s also a maintainer of KEDA and Arcus as well as a GitHub Star and a CNCF Ambassador.

On top of this, he’s also a member of the AZUG crew and he has been a Microsoft Azure MVP & Azure Advisor since 2014.

He’s very passionate about Open Source Projects and Tech in general and he’s very committed to constantly improving them going forward.

You can find Tom on GitHub where he’s very active and you can read the articles that he posts on his blog on blog.tomkerkhove.be where he shares his expertise with the community.

Quote

“Let’s not worry about the next big thing, but let’s make sure we use the current technology at its best .” Tom Kerkhove

Timestamps: