Technologist | Community Organizer | Investor

Opening Keynote, Tech Equity Collective INNOVATE, Atlanta, GA

Biography

Erica Stanley is an engineering executive, community organizer, and equitable tech advocate. She is a Director of Engineering and site lead for Google Play Atlanta, as well as a startup advisor and angel investor. During her 20-year career, she’s worked in Fortune 500 companies, early-stage startups, and academia.

She holds a B.S and M.S in Computer Science from Clark Atlanta University and has conducted post-graduate research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specialized in graphics, visualization, and telepresence.

Erica is active in the Atlanta technology community. She helps develop and teach youth coding programs, speaks at conferences, and user groups, and mentors entrepreneurs for incubators and accelerators. She founded the Atlanta network of Women Who Code and co-founded REFACTR.TECH, a tech conference series that showcases technologists from underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds.

Available for

Keynotes
Workshops
Fireside Chats & Panels
Podcasts

Topics

A strong, well-communicated technical strategy can empower your leaders and teams, help increase velocity and set a stage for quality. A resilient, forward-looking strategy can act as a North Star, guiding your organization in times of change. But how can we tap into these superpowers? How can we build a resilient technical strategy? And if there are superpowers, is there also strategy Kryotonite? We'll discuss these topics and more, while walking through examples where strong tech strategy gave teams the power to leap tall OKRs in a single bound.
Inclusion doesn't just happen. It has to be intentionally and continuously cultivated. In this session, we'll discuss the ways we can all be responsible for building communities with an inclusion-first mindset. I'll describe my lessons learned and walk through a framework for optimizing for inclusion.
I was once that engineer that thought she would never move into management. I loved coding my days, and often nights away. Why would I ever want to stop? My ideas about management began to change once I started the Atlanta network of Women Who Code. I've learned so much about the people challenges we face in tech, while also learning how to empower the people around me to get big things done. What I didn't realize until years later was how these experiences were preparing me to build inclusive teams and lead and motivate engineers from various backgrounds to work collaboratively. This session will share some of my lessons learned as a community leader and how I've applied them in my role as an engineering manager. We'll also discuss ways building communities can help companies grow their team and their engineering brand.
As we hear more and more about Machine Learning, few web developers have actually had the opportunity to use it in production. It seems like you have to have years of Data Science, Statistics or AI education to even understand how to start. While some prerequisite education is needed to get you started, it’s not as much as you might think and there are collections of libraries to help along the way. This session will give a brief introduction to Machine Learning, delve into the libraries that make it possible and discuss lessons learned from evolving machine learning efforts from prototype to production. from startups to big tech.