>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you buy SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Dr. Deborah Berebichez. She is the chief data scientist at Metis, which is owned by Kaplan. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks for inviting me, too. >> You have had such an interesting and varied professional career. You were even a host of a lot of different science-oriented television programs. You work on initiatives to get young women into technology. But one of the things that is most impressive is that you were the first Mexican woman to ever earn her PhD in physics-- >> Deborah: In physics, at Stanford. >> From Stanford University. What an accomplishment. But talk a little bit about your path to Stanford. Tell our viewers a little bit more about your trajectory. >> It's definitely a convoluted, and not a typical path. I grew up in Mexico City in a conservative community that discouraged girls and young women from pursuing a career in the hard sciences. I was told from a very young age that physics was for geniuses, and that I had better pick a more feminine path, like communications or something else, which were great careers, but they were not the right ones for a very inquisitive mind like mine. When I confessed to my mom in high school that I loved physics and math, she said, "Don't tell the boys, "because you'll intimidate them, "and you may not be able to get married." >> Rebecca: Nonsense! >> Actually, it's funny, because that kind of overt bias is sometimes easier to combat than the one that more women experience, which is a more subtle bias. You know, that the media tells us that some things are for boys and for women. So, in my case, it was very open, and so it almost gave me more courage to try to fight against it. Anyways, so, it came time to pick what career, what BA to do in college, and I was told by the advisors in school that philosophy was a more feminine and acceptable path, but it also asked a lot of questions about the universe. So, I enrolled in a local college in Mexico City to study philosophy, but the more I tried to stifle my love for physics and math, the more that inner voice was screaming, "This is your path. "You have to do it, you have to study physics." Just like a lot of kids do their rebellious things behind their parents' back, I would go and rent from the library books about obscure physicists like Tycho Brahe, this Danish astronomer who was locked up in a tower, and I was thinking, I'll be just like him, kind of antisocial, nobody will like me, but at least I'll have my data, my numbers, to keep me company. >> Rebecca: This was your teenage rebellion, is reading about brooding philosophers? >> Well, there other-- >> Okay. >> In the middle of my BA in philosophy in Mexico, I decided to apply to universities in the US to give it a chance, and give myself the opportunity to pursue both BAs, physics and philosophy. I was very fortunate to get a full scholarship to attend Brandeis University, and I say that because, in Mexico, universities are about eight times less expensive than in the US, so I could have not afford to go anywhere else. While at Brandeis, I took the courage to take a very general course in astronomy. Very little math, introductory course, and there I met the teaching assistant, who was a graduate student by the name of Roopesh. He was from India. Roopesh and I became good friends, and he told me that I wasn't the typical student that just wanted to get an A in the class and do the homework well, that my curiosity had no end. That I would ask questions about quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, and I wanted to know everything about the universe and nature. So, one time, we were walking in Harvard Square, and I realized that I was the only one who could make my dream of becoming a physicist happen. With teary eyes, I told Roopesh, "I don't want to die without trying. "I just don't want to die without trying to do physics." He called his advisor on a payphone. He was the head of the graduate student committee, so he called me to Brandeis. He handed me a book called Div, Grad and Curl, Vector Calculus in Three Dimensions. For me, it was an alien language. He said to me, "There's a problem, "because the BA in physics takes four years, "and your scholarship is only for two years. "But guess what, someone else has done this at Brandeis. "His name is Ed Witten. "Do you know who he is? "He switched from history to physics." I said, "You're kidding. "Ed Witten is a very famous physicist, "the father of string theory. "Clearly, there's no way I could pull this off." He says to me, "I give you two months this summer. "If, by the end of the summer, "you pass a test on this one book, "I'll let you skip through "the first two years of the physics major "so you can complete the BA in only two years." Roopesh decided to mentor me and tutor me 10 hours a day for eight weeks. I tell the story of Roopesh because I always wanted to pay him back. He said to me, when he was growing up in India, in Darjeeling, there was an old man who would teach him and his sisters the tabla, the musical instrument, English, and math. And when they wanted to pay him back, the old man said, "No, the only way you could ever pay me back "is if you do this with someone else in the world." That's how my mission in life started, to inspire, encourage, and help other, especially women, but minorities who, like myself, want a career in STEM, but for some reason, whether it be financial or social, feel that they cannot achieve their dreams. >> Great story. >> Yeah, wow! Incredible! >> And then, you asked about Stanford. So, then I went back to Mexico, and I was doing a Master's in theoretical physics, and I was again told by my community, "Okay, you've got it over with. "Stay here, get married and stay as part of the community." But I was still more hungry for knowledge, and to do more physics. I was very late in the application cycle, and I decided to apply to schools. I went to my Mexican advisor's office, and I said, "You know, I'm going to leave again. "I'd like to go to the US where I can pursue experiments. "I wrote to a couple of professors." He says, "Who did you write to?" I say, "Well, there's one particularly interesting one, "Steve Chu at Stanford." His jaw dropped. He said, "Steve Chu?" I said, "Yes, why?" He said, "Do you realize he just won the Nobel Prize "a couple of months ago?" And Steve Chu later became Secretary of Energy in the US. I was so fortunate that he received my email with interest, invited me to work directly with him at Stanford. That's how my career started. >> It's such a good mix of fortuitousness, serendipity, but also doggedness on your part, so, really, there's a lot going on. >> Don't be shy, is my-- >> This gets to our final question, really, which is, what's your advice for the younger versions of you? >> The first thing is that it was not all easy for me. There was a lot of failure along the way. My first advice is, the people who get to the end of the line and succeed in life are not the ones that simply persevere and get everything right. They're the ones that keep getting up and succeeding step after step. It's the courage to get to the end and persevere even when failure exists. The second piece of advice, especially for parents out there, is when your kids ask questions about the world and nature, don't just give them the answer. Go through the pleasure of finding things out, as Feynman would say. Especially with computing. Computers are a tool, a magnificent tool. But they're just a tool to another goal, which is to gain insights about the world. It's more important to be a critical thinker and a thought leader, rather than just focus on being proficient at coding. >> You had the element of humor, you had the element of storytelling, you had the element of everyday things in the way, 'cause you're obviously a super smart lady to accomplish these things. Not everybody's so super smart, so you've created a style in which you can help those that aren't maybe necessarily PhDs from Stanford to gain interest, to become interested, to kind of hook 'em into this interesting world that you're so passionate about. >> Yeah, thank you. I try to do it through my TV show that I cohost with The Science Channel called Outrageous Acts of Science, which serves exactly that purpose, to get people interested in the fact that science and STEM is behind everyday life. It's not just some complicated equation in a board. It's what we go through every day, and if you just gain the joy of discovering those concepts, you're set. >> Great. Well, Deborah, thank you so much for joining us. It's been so much fun talking to you. >> Thank you. I loved being here. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from Grace Hopper just after this. (fast techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next '17. (funky techno music) >> Welcome back to our live coverage here of Google Next 2017, an event that last year was focused only on Google Cloud. They've actually expanded a bit, they're talking about G Suite, talking about some of the devices, and they bring in a really broad and diverse community, so when I talk to the Google people, it's not one show, it's a handful of shows. I went to the analyst event. My guest for this segment is Chris Wahl, who came in through the community event. So, excited to get that angle. Chris, thanks so much for doing the drive with me from San Francisco down to Palo Alto. For those of us not in the area, it's a 45 minute drive, it's not too bad. It's a beautiful, sunny day. It's great to catch up with you and thanks for coming. >> Always glad to be on, love being a CUBE Alumni, so, I think it's my third time. >> Wow, a three-time Alumni. It's like if you've been a host of Saturday Night Live for like seven times, you know you get the special jacket. - Automatically. >> Things like that. You're getting up there. Three times. It's like, you're not quite in Pak Elsinger area, but you have passed, you've been on more than Andy Jassey now. >> Wow, cool. >> I think that that's pretty impressive. >> Bucket list, accomplished. >> Exactly, so, what brings you to the Google event and tell us a little bit about the community event. >> Yeah, to be honest, I thought it was a spam email at first. I just got an invite saying, hey, we have this Google event going on, and I'm not really plugged in to the Google Universe too much. So I said, cool, I'm interested, I'll take a look. Got invited out by Sarah Novotny to a community focus day. >> Host: Sarah's awesome. Also a CUBE Alum, of course. >> Yeah, Alum, and ran OSCON I think, as a boarder or some kind of management facility for quite a while. So yeah, the Google Cloud Next is this week but on Tuesday. They actually had a bunch of influencers, evangelists, community members, out to spend time with all sorts of Google-y Google-ers, talking around what their vision is around kind of bridging the gap to the enterprise, what their thought around Kubernetes, and just really the community in general were. Which was kind of cool because it was all fresh and clean and new for me. So, it was really great to taste the Kool-Aid, and see how delicious it could be. >> Yeah, so I'm curious what your take is. I remember I did a panel at Interop a couple of years ago, and it was like, basically, hyper-scale, you're-not-Google, so what do you need to do, how do you do it, do you just use Google stuff, can you code like Google, can you act like Google, or are you just an enterprise and you're forced to live in the past. >> I think over the last couple of years, the idea of the Sight Reliability Engineers come out and been more focused on the enterprise and kind of dovetailed into the Dev-Op story. So, it was really interesting to hear, not only trying to talk to the enterprise, but also how they're trying to get the enterprise to kind of stop being the traditional enterprise that it's been. Which I think entirely, it's something that we practitioners have always been trying to do. No one wants to be on-call all the time and fixing these flaming disasters and things like that. But at the same time, you have to recognize that moving that much intrinsic culture poison from one side to the next is hard. They're admitting that too, it's like, we wold love for you guys to be more Google-y, and to use the tools that we have here, but we're not sure you even know what the tools are or how to use them, or what kind of documentation is necessary, or what meet-ups we can go to find my people, you know, the practitioners. >> I want to channel our friends, the Geek Whisperers, and alright Chris, so how did you transition out of being a VMware guy to someone that does cool and interesting things now, because VMware is no longer the coolness. >> That's been the vibe, yeah. It's something I personally have been trying to, I don't think in any technology you want to be that technology specific. VMware, love it, have been doing it for 12 something years, but you don't just want to be pigeon-holed in that kind of silo. Which is actually why I wanted to come out and talk with the folks at Google around what they're doing to build a community. I think it was Sam something-or-other-- >> Host: Sam Ramji. >> Sam Ramji actually came up and said, you know, as long as we're going to exist as a company, we're going to have this community day. It's the first one they've done, and they plan to do it basically infinitely forever, because they realized they had the analysts, and things like that out there, they had all the engineers and developers, but what were they missing? The folk in the trenches that are trying to adopt and use this sort of technology. I like that aspect of it. There weren't any huge, mind-shattering results that were out there, except for I think, me personally, I like that Google kind of admitted that yeah, they hadn't been doing the best job around interfacing with the community and getting IT practitioners and operation-centric folks into the fold, welcoming into the bosom of Google, and that they were trying to work on that. And it's like, okay, awesome. Let's have a conversation, which the other half of the day was an un-conference, where we literally broke up into groups, that we decided ourselves as like a democracy of Google decision-making. We formed eight different groups. Some focused on containers, I actually sat in in a two hour session where we just kind of riffed on abstraction layers and where we should we start working. Is it at the container level, is it at the hypervisor level, is it at the virtual machine level? And it was neat because everyone had a completely different idea and background around that. I felt like I was an alien in that conversation for a lot of it 'cause they're working on solving problems that are totally alien to my world. So I liked all that. >> It's an interesting crowd when the server-less stuff got talked about in the keynote today-- >> Yes! >> There was a big clap and I loved Brian Stevens. He's like, functions are just fragments of code, and they get applause, you know, he's kind of like-- (Chris laughs) >> It's like either remark, I got applause for that. >> Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny. But you know, that's the kind of people that come to this show, right? So, you checked out a thing called, what was it, Code Labs or something like that? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. >> Yeah, yeah, there was, I had some notes there that I'd written down. Certification in Code Labs, specifically. So Code Labs was interesting 'cause it's a place that you can, you have to book it in advance, like a day in advance, and from about 11 to seven each day, they just have Google-y Google-ers, you know, very Google-y people out there that say alright, here's all our various APIs, such as the new one where you can query a video and say I'm looking for, I think in the keynote, they had "find me baseball" in this video, and it actually shows you in the timeline where baseball occurs. There's also things to do image tagging and things like that. And, I don't know, it might be difficult to grasp that API interaction at first. And so you can sit down, and they'll show you how to write code in the languages of your choice. Obviously Go is very prominent. I'm a PowerShell developer, so it's like, alright, how would you write that in Curl, and that's maybe our bridge to one another, since I don't know Go and they don't know PowerShell, or the person I was working with. So that was cool, to hear how they approach those things, because I've typically done it as an Ops person. I'm typically looking at it from the perspective of I'm trying to automate some task and feed it into an orchestration engine. And I'm not super deep on APIs in general, I like them, but ... That was cool, I liked that you're basically getting to meet with really, really awesome engineers and SREs to pick their brain and their vast decades of experience on writing code. To work with APIs and things that are Google-centric. So that was awesome. >> So it sounds like you didn't feel like this was a marketing show, right, - [Chris] No! >> that they bring in the engineers, the technical people, I mean it's not far being from San Franscisco from the Google-Plex, the Mothership is nearby. >> Thats's a good point because a lot of these shows have just become a sales pitch in a wolf's clothing or a conference clothing, and this was ... I've never met so many really, really talented engineers all concentrated in one spot. I mean, you've got the rock stars that I think everybody knows, like Sarah, and Kelsey, that are very available and personable, but you also have a whole army of people that have a huge amount of passion around writing code and understand what your problems are and wanting to talk to you. I felt like a person, which I've been a Google customer since, I guess, Google came out, you know, Google apps and things like that. This is really the first time I really started putting faces to the technical practitioners that work there, and they're really interested and excited with what my mundane kind of problems. So, that's kind of cool. >> Yeah, I found they're definitely, they're listening, they're talking, it's really good, because right, we at our firm, we've used Google for a while and it's like, oh wait I have a challenge. Who do I call, who do I email? Nope, you should just watch the YouTube video and use it. C'mon, aren't you smart enough to use these things right? You know, was kind of how we all felt for a while. Interesting. Kinder, gentler Google than we've knew in the past? >> They had the Google leaders circle and the various groups that you could join online, but it was just, you can't fake that kind of raw passion, and I sat down with some of the SREs at the community day, and it was really just, talk to me about what you do, and why, and what tools you use, and what can we do to be better? More specifically, the Dev Rel, the developer relations folks were just awesome. And they're like, is our title threatening? What meet-up should we go to? What can we do to make your life better? And I just kind of, at first, said a few comments and realized, no, this is real. They want to know my day one and day two operations, so that they can find the right tools, or if there isn't one, build one. And I don't know, that's great. I've never seen that at a conference before. So I'm hooked. I definitely plan to go again. >> Alright, so anything you didn't see that you were hoping to see, follow-up that you want to have, other cool stuff going on that you want to share? >> I almost want to do like a plea to Google that throughout the community today and at the conference, there's been a lot of commentary and some, kind of some references to, oh we don't want to tell you how to do things, we don't want to tell you how to build architecture in a certain way. Please do tell me how to do those things. At least give me a reference architecture, or some example environments, because I feel like a lot of it is just, here's some cool things you can do, kind of in isolation. Or here are some things with Kubernetes that kind of exist outside of reality. I'm looking for, alright, I don't have any of that stuff, how do I onboard into that? Here's a white paper, and that kind of jazz. >> Yeah, and we saw, you know, I hate to always bring up AWS, but AWS went from here's this giant toolbox with all these things to right, here's some services, here are some tracks, here are some, not wizards, but you know, templates you can follow for certain things. Here are people that are probably similar to you and, boy, with Google with their AI and ML and all their things that they can do to help us sort out all the TLAs that they've got to. (Chris laughs) You know, they should be able to help going forward because, yeah, Google should be able to personalize all that to be able to work a little bit better for us as opposed to us having to just kind of figure it out a little bit. I know you played with the Google Cloud a little bit yourself-- - Yeah. >> And it wasn't as simple as you were hoping, right? >> It was hard. (both laugh) I mean-- >> Host: C'mon, if you can't figure it out, you know-- >> I don't feel like I'm the sharpest tool in the shed, but I was like, I'm kind of the representative layman ops person, and it felt very convoluted, complex, the documentation was fragmented. I'm like, just give me the wizard so that I can start fishing for myself. I just do that first hit for free, and then I'll take care of it beyond that. So, that would be my one ask to Google as a whole, but otherwise I think the tooling and the people, and the culture are all there, it's just build a few more things and I think we've got some interesting entanglements at the enterprise level once that's done. >> Okay, want to give me the final word, what's going on with you other than, your hometown, your new hometown of Austin, Texas. South By coming, so I know there's a lot of music and fun going on but, what's happening in your world, what's happening with Rubrik? >> Oh yeah, I'll mention South By, definitely will be there, I will not be available online or anything. I'm going to be going into sequester mode and just listen to music with my co-host actually. If you listen to the Datanauts podcast, with Ethan Banks, he's going to come by. So, we'll be at the show I guess if you want to hang out with us, hit us up. Otherwise, Rubrik's been awesome. It's definitely a rocket ship ride and it was actually dove-tailed into quite a few conversations I had while at Google Next. Because movement of data into and around clouds is non-trivial, so that's where the Cloud Data Management world that we're in, kind of fits into that equation, and why I personally wanted to go to this show, but also professionally I thought that there'd be some inroads there to discuss with the other practitioners. >> Absolutely, the whole infrastructure side and how that plays in the public cloud, how it plays with Sass, there's a lot of those discussions going on. Congrats, you guys have been growing some good buzz. You guys have been hiring, too, so check Chris out for all that. We'll be back, lots more coverage here of the Google Cloud Next 2017, you're watching theCUBE. (funky techno music)