Looking ahead to International Women in Engineering Day and back on International Women’s Day, I’ve been reflecting on our industry’s amazing accomplishments and what we can do to foster even greater success.
Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD; Limor Fried, the founder of Adafruit Industries; and Calista Redmond, CEO of the RISC-V Foundation after years in leadership roles at IBM, are all examples of how far we’ve come technologically and socially.
Is it a coincidence that the success of these leaders seems to parallel the explosion of open-source technology? Open-source projects are fundamentally collaborative and invite a diversity of experience and perspectives that pave the way for more innovative, effective solutions.
I feel that further expansion of open-source projects will not only accelerate innovation, but also draw more diverse professionals into our sector.
Empowering the Different Developers of Tomorrow
I’ve been lucky: the companies I’ve worked with have been supportive and well-aligned with community-based approaches. I spent the first 15 years of my career at building ecosystem partnerships with many industry standards organizations at a leading technology media company. Then in 2014, I became CEO of BeagleBoard.org — a non-profit that promotes education and collaboration focused on open-source embedded hardware and software.
Today, my leadership position with BeagleBoard.org has given me an opportunity to mentor other aspiring young engineers and future tech leaders from all backgrounds. Part of that effort has been getting young women connected to the open-source community and helping them find their way into successful careers through partner initiatives like the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program.
A recent graduate of this initiative is Khushi Balia, who participated in the 2023 GSoC program with support from BeagleBoard.org. A promising engineering student, Balia’s project focused on building an LLVM backend for Programmable Real-time Units (PRUs) like those found on multiple BeagleBoard.org platforms. Leveraging her experience with microcontrollers, she analyzed LLVM and PRU-optimized documentation to replace PRU-GCC with Clang, which is widely considered to be faster and more memory efficient.
Ariane Paola Gomes is another GSoC graduate that BeagleBoard.org Foundation mentored. She helped develop a cross-platform application that makes it easier for entry-level developers to start working with BeagleBoards. The application, which focuses on the configuration of the BeagleBone Black, provided a streamlined opportunity for new users to gain experience with both Linux and embedded systems.
Another participant from the same year, Shubhangi Gupta, built a framework for communication between the ARM and PRU architectures. The goal was to provide a robust framework that would allow engineers to optimize the libraries for their specific applications.
Building a Future of Success—Together
Mentorship made the biggest difference for all three of these participants. That level of support is often an X factor for women and other under-represented technologists to grow and flourish. With support from organizations like the BeagleBoard.org Foundation, initiatives like GSoC, and most importantly the support of each other, we can all develop the skills and confidence required to succeed.
As you’ll find in our forums and discussion boards, an open network of support can make all the difference. BeagleBoard.org continues to foster inclusive, equitable environments, and we encourage young females or any other aspiring developer to contribute to the open-source movement by registering hardware and software projects at BeagleBoard.org/projects.
Together, let’s build a future where women and under-represented populations are a common sight, from the engineering bench to the boardroom. That, I think, is a future we can all be proud of.