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The Women in Compilers and Tools Meetup Series

The LLVM Women in Compilers and Tools Meetup Series is a free virtual event started on April 22nd 2021. It is a platform where all women (trans, non-binary, and cis) in various stages in their career, speak openly, discuss, and network with others. This series will feature talks, tutorials, mentoring events and regularly highlights individuals for their contributions to the compiler, programming languages, and tools field and offers continued discussions concluding each event.

This series is organized by The Women in Compilers and Tools (WiCT) working group. This working group is composed of volunteers in the LLVM community and supported by the LLVM Foundation. To learn more about the working group, check out this LLVM blog post!

Register Here

Past Meetups

Rebecca Swords

Rebecca Swords

An Introduction to E-Graphs
Rebecca Swords has industry experience in full stack appliation development and program synthesis research. She currently engages in research in her spare time as a stay-at-home mother. In this talk, Rebecca presented an overview of E-graphs, which is a data structure with applications in term extraction. She explored how E-graphs propose different techniques than traditional compilers for applying large sets of rewriting rules. She also taught the audience about E-graphs in the context of Quiche, the project she develops for implementing E-graphs in Python with specialized support for Python AST rewriting.
Hui-May Chang

Hui-May Chang

Insider View into a 30 Year Long Career in Compilers
Hui-May Chang has a vast career and expertise within the compiler industry with over 30 years of experience in the field. Her career background spans from her time at HP, Sun Microsystems, Apple and most recently at NVIDIA. She currently works on various production compilers for CPUs and GPUs. In this event, she shared about her journey from Taiwan, to her studies at the University of Pittsburgh and her path through industry. She discussed various topics spanning transitions into different career roles, contemplating the right career choices, interviewing and preparing when changing roles, and differences in company cultures. She also shared her perspective on finding a healthy balance between work and parenting along with much more.
WiCT Working Group

WiCT Working Group

Network Night
In this meetup, the organizers hosted the first in-person event! This event was held in the local Bay Area with many women across the professional compiler industry. There was also an opportunity to share with the community the future goals and plans for the meetup series and gather feedback that others would like to see and participate in for WiCT. We also learned the motivations and how attendees learned about the group and started engaging in hopes to continue to grow the environment that makes up the Women in Compilers & Tools Community Group!
Ruanqianqian Huang

Ruanqianqian Huang

User-Enhanced Learning Experience of Symbolic Logic Solving
Ruanqianqian (Lisa) Huang is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of California San Diego with focuses in the design and implementation of programming languages, tools and interfaces, and human-computer interaction in programming. Ruanqianqian spoke with Ayana about their joint efforts in developing the Online Z3 Guide which serves as the successor of the learning platform Rise4fun.
Ayana Monroe

Ayana Monroe

User-Enhanced Learning Experience of Symbolic Logic Solving
Ayana Monroe is a Senior Chancellor’s Science Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill as a double major in Computer Science and Information Science along with a minor in Cognitive Psychology. In this talk, Ayana and Ruanqianqian gave us an introduction of Symbolic Logic Solving and SMT solvers. They presented their development of the new Online Z3 Guide for learning symbolic logic solving and its applications during their internships at Microsoft Research.
Angélica Moreira

Angélica Moreira

Static Profiling: Why Should You Try It?
Angélica is a PhD Candidate at Federal University of Minas Gerais as well as a Research Intern at Microsoft Research. She gave an insightful overview of software based static profiling and its applications. She introduced concepts like static prediction using heuristics and ML. She also detailed The VESPA Project, which is a static branch predictor built on top of BOLT that her research focuses on.
Michelle Strout

Michelle Strout

Compilers Education and More with Michelle
Michelle Strout is the manager for the Chapel Parallel Computing Programming Language at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. In this meetup we explored the journey through her education and career which spans from her undergraduate and PH.D. at University of San Diego to her postdoc at Argonne National Laboratory. The audience asked her about their own academic goals and how she has managed a thriving career while prioritizing her personal life and family.
Theresa Foley

Theresa Foley

Taking the Slang Shading Language From Research to Production
Theresa leads the development of the Slang Compiler project at NVIDIA. The Slang Shading language and compiler extends the widely used HLSL shading language with the necessary mechanisms from modern general-purpose languages like Rust and Swift to allow developers to write clean and modular rendering code while still achieving the best possible performance on GPU hardware. This talk focused on the journey of developing Slang, which started with research insights in language design and implementation to carry them all the way through to production reality.
Anna Ossowski

Anna Ossowski

Python in Open Source and More with Anna
Anna is a Senior Community Program Manager at Github and active volunteer across many different open source communities related to the Python Programming Language. With a background as an effective community builder, mentor, teacher, and student, we explored the insights she’s cultivated throughout her career. Anna shared her journey getting started as a python contributor to becoming an active member. We also discussed her journey in mental health and how advocating for mental health in the technology space has impacted her career and the communities she takes part in.
Sangeeta Chowdhary

Sangeeta Chowdhary

Fast and Precise Approaches to Detect, Debug, and Repair Numerical Errors
Sangeeta shared an overview of her thesis research to detect and resolve floating point computation errors. These kinds of issues can influence program output, as well as, program control flow. She described approaches in resolving such errors by employing shadow analysis with real numbers to comprehensively detect numerical errors. This approach has been explored in the past but had high overheads making it unusable with long-running applications. Sangeeta shared the reasoning behind the high cost of detection and ideas that can result in a speedup of error detection and debugging by a significant factor over the current state-of-the-art.
Teresa Johnson

Teresa Johnson

ThinLTO and More with Teresa
Teresa is a Senior Staff Engineer at Google and an active contributor to the LLVM open source project. She shared insights about her long standing career starting with her studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to contributions in the Itanium project during her time at HP, and current open source work at Google with ThinLTO, the scalable link time optimization framework. It was an engaging discussion with focuses on work-life balance and supporting underrepresented individuals in the field of compiler development.
WiCT Organizers

WiCT Organizers

WiCT Trivia Night
In this meetup, the WiCT organizers hosted a trivia game to highlight the history of LLVM, compilers & related tooling, programming languages, and much more. This was a fun opportunity to test your knowledge on dragons, overloaded terminology and what really came first… a compiler or interpreter. Folks joined this trivia challenge with a randomized team of 4-6 individuals and each team had the opportunity to win LLVM merchandise!
Cristina Cifuentes

Cristina Cifuentes

From Student of Compilation to Mother of Decompilation
This talk provided insight on the field of decompilation and it’s applications. Cristina shared the retrospective on her decompilation PhD work, the growing interest on this technology throughout the past two decades, examples of commercial uses of decompilation, and a new project that makes use of decompilation as it relates to malware. Through her academic and industry experiences, the audience learned about the rejections and accomplishments that has spanned her career and the lasting effects her work has had on the field.
Uma Srinivasan

Uma Srinivasan

From Packing Decimals With Cobol to Optimizing Tweets With Scala: A Journey Through Space, Time, & Culture with Compilers
This talk gave the audience glimpses into a 30 odd year journey in engineering, industry compilers and surrounding technologies. Through Uma’s observations and experiences, Uma highlighted the ubiquity of compiler technology as it has adapted through time and continues to evolve with the changing environment and culture. She also shared her learnings, in hopes to instill confidence and inspire women engineers in their exciting journey ahead.
Jessica Paquette

Jessica Paquette

Bringing up GlobalISel for AArch64
This talk provided a great overview of instruction selection and the exisiting functionality within LLVM with a deeper focus on GlobalISel. Jessica detailed tooling that was designed to find and understand performance and compile time gaps between the FastISel/SelectionDAG infrastructure and GlobalISel. She provided insight into how GlobalISel’s design has improved upon the performance, code size, and compile time of the previous instruction selection frameworks.
WiCT Organizers

WiCT Organizers

The WiCT Meetup Series Launch
The Bird of a Feature style talk presented by members of the WiCT Working group gave insight on the exciting details of what’s to come from the meetup series and the community group as a whole.

If you are interested in volunteering in this meetup series or would like to learn more about the WiCT working group, we encourage you to reach out to us on Discord, Discourse or email us directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

This series is intended to be a supportive opportunity for trans, non-binary, and cis women to interact. Though we will not require anyone to disclose information related to their identity, individuals who may not be represented are welcome to participate in other ways.

To learn more, please visit the Get Involved Page.

This series will run continuously until otherwise specified.

Possibly. Recording meetups will always be optional and specified on each event listing.

Yes!

Yes! We believe this series will be interesting to all women who work in the field of compilers, programming languages, hardware, debuggers, linkers, security and analysis tools, and other related fields.

The Women in Compilers and Tools working group is a group of people who are passionate about increasing diversity, and especially women, in the field of compilers and tools, who help organize and plan events and resources. To learn more and get involved, check out the community group.

The LLVM Foundation is a nonprofit organization that supports the LLVM Project and education and advancement of the field of compilers and tools. We support the LLVM community by helping it to grow, foster community interactions, work to keep LLVM development productive through infrastructure, and work to ensure the long term health of the LLVM project.

One of the mission’s of the LLVM Foundation is to increase Diversity & Inclusion within the field of compilers and tools. For more information, please visit Community.o.