Tech, Trust, and Transformation with Paula Paul

Open||Source||Data

On today’s episode of Open Source Data, Charna Parkey chats with tech veteran Paula Paul, exploring her remarkable 40-year journey in the technology sector. Starting at 16, Paula navigated through pivotal tech revolutions and embraced the essence of open source and community. Delve into Paula's world of coding on tape, the evolution of technology, and how communities foster growth, innovation, and trust. Discover the impact of open source in shaping technology and professional paths. Paula also sheds light on personal growth, community's pivotal role in professional mobility, and offers invaluable advice to aspiring tech professionals. A captivating look at the intersections of technology, community, and open source through the lens of an industry pioneer.
Timestamps
00:00 - Intro

05:10 - Paula’s Professional Journey

10:30 - What Inspired Paula to Go Through the Open Source Path

14:50 - What are some of the biggest challenges and impacts that Paula sees in companies trying to derive value?

23:30 - Is the Tech World a Meritocracy?

25:35 - A Shift Of What is a Tech Company?

27:30 - Kids Interacting with New Technologies

31:30 - What Does Open Source Data Means to Paula?

42:50 - What is a Question that Paula has never been asked before?

47:00 - What Advice would you give to the audience?

51:50 - Backstage with Executive Producer Leo Godoy

Quotes:

Charna Parkey

“I think from my side, as the applications we build change, then some of those backing technologies have to. Where databases used to be used by expert-like database administrators and you needed to have like data architects to your data model and you had to do all of these very, very specific things. And now we have this Gen AI moment and all of a sudden all of these specialized vector databases, NoSQL databases, etc., need to be used by an average developer. So they just want an API and it has to work and it has to be fast. And so, over these different moments, different technologies came about or were evolved, but I think it might be the application that's actually driving the change instead of the technology itself opening”.

Paula Paul

“It still surprises people to hear that 90% of any given modern application is open source and then there's 10% custom code that, depending on your company, you own or not. And it just still amazes me that we have these open source projects like jQuery is a project of the OpenJS Foundation and it's in a tremendous amount of our ecommerce infrastructure. But it's a project that's maintained by a very small team of contributors. And, you know, if this were a commercial product, it would be like a $1,000,000,000 company. (...) The piece of work being done by the new foundation to help make sure that we have the healthy web and that it's secure is really important, because people, if I say Log4j, people that remember those days know how important it is to keep security vulnerabilities addressed.

And that's a concern for me, that people don't pay more attention to this. I mean, if you had a commercial software product, you typically would pay 20% a year in maintenance fees. But as many of us know, sometimes you find a bug and you would just report the bug, but it might take years for that bug to get fixed in a commercial release.

Whereas if it's open source, there are people out there who can jump on it. But it's really crazy that there's no funding for that or no public works through the government, given all the dependance and dependencies that we have on these open source assets.”

Links

LinkedIn - Connect with Charna

Linkedin - Connect with Paula