Brenda Nyaringita

General Info

What will be your most valuable contribution to your TechWomen host company?

As an engineer, I take great pride and satisfaction in problem-solving. As such, I intend to understand the various problems my host company is facing, identify one that I am best positioned to help solve and collaborate with my mentor to provide a pragmatic solution to the problem in order to provide value to the company. Through leveraging my expertise in running innovation programs and informed by design thinking concepts, I believe I can offer a fresh perspective on the use of technical tools or on improving a workflow for engineering teams to bring about higher efficiency.

The Top Three Things I Would Like to Learn or Experience During my Mentorship

1. Gain skills in DevOps infrastructure, CI/CD and deployment tools
2. To learn on web frameworks and how to deploy web services effectively
3. Leadership and project management skills to effectively scale a technical or social impact project

Mentorship Characteristic

• Visit an office or attend a site-visit
• Focus on technical skills building
• Identify a short-term project I can work on at the partnering company

Ideal Company Type

My ideal company is one that has products utilizing the DevOps stack, automation of product deployments and containerization platforms. The company would ideally place me in a team where I can also learn or observe Product/Project Management teams at work, so that I can better understand how to scale and release useful products to its customers. The team within the company could be one working on a social impact technical project. I can see myself at a large software company with a friendly organizational culture that values its people and their lives, and which focuses on scaling products.

What are three adjectives that best describe you in the work place?

1. Ambitious
2. Self-driven
3. Intelligent

What impact will your mentorship have on your career and professional path?

My TechWomen mentorship will fast-track my journey to living out my full potential by enabling me to make better contributions in the spaces in which I am involved. It will guide me on how to make wiser decisions when architecting technical products through imparting an understanding of technical products from a large-scale point of view. Furthermore, it will mold me into a better support engineer by improving my skills in troubleshooting technical failures using logging stacks such as ElasticSearch. Moreover, mentorship will position me to mentor my future teams and nurture the problem-solver in them, which aligns with my higher purpose.

After participating in the TechWomen program, how will you leverage your mentorship experience to make an impact in your home country?

I intend to build a Tinker Space for pre-university students where they can be curious, identify problems around them and receive technical support to provide solutions. Ideally, the space will have laptops, internet, electrical components, robotics kits and maker kits. The aim is to enable kids to learn tech skills in a playful manner, and will focus on children whose schools lack such spaces or computer labs. Envisioned supporters are engineers, educators and content creators who can curate content for the students and simplify it to curriculum cards to be followed in doing projects to completion while learning STEM concepts.

Work History

Years of Full-time Work Experience

3

Primary Professional Focus

• Computer operations and/or security
• Database/systems/networks
• Software

Education History