www.womanthismonth.com June 2019 21 Lana Al-Attar is the founder of digital agency Gudjuju.com and also founder and lead of Google Developer Group (GDG) Manama. Please give us a little bit of your own tech background. How did you get started and how does tech help in your daily business life? I have a BSc. in computer science which I got at the age of 19; I got into university at 16. Interestingly enough, I don’t use much of anything I learned in university and all my success in both Gudjuju.com and GDG Manama I owe to YouTube tutorials and online courses. Technology in this century needs to be humancentric, its role is to enhance and assist humans and not replace them altogether. This helps with efficiency, better economy and ultimately makes more time for deeper offline human connections and wonderful online experiences. We craft these every day at my digital agency. What led you to establish the GDG Manama? GDG stands for Google Developers Groups and is a platform offered by Google Developers to support community-run developer groups. The programme was brought to my attention by StartUp Bahrain – I applied online and went through an application and interview process with the Google Developers Groups regional lead. There was so much synergy and many things we saw eye to eye on. What I love about GDG Manama is that it is easily one of the few groups that are not afraid of teaching ALL technologies and not just Google technologies. Also, the community, support and access to resources we get is amazing. We even had the honour of going to Google IO last year and this year, where we got to experience all the new technologies first-hand! Currently we have over 1,600 members, and, in just over a year we have trained over 3,000 attendees on various topics such as web, mobile, blockchain, data science, nano tech, devops, security, iot, machine learning, selfdriving cars, cloud and digital marketing. How long has the group been running and how does it work? The group has been running now for a little over a year, it’s free and open to everyone. We have attendees from 12 years to 60-plus, from all backgrounds. We list the workshops on Meetup, you just register on Meetup.com/ GDG-Manama and attend the topics you like. So far, all our events are for free and even the pizza is on us! What has been the reaction in Bahrain? Phenomenal. Many people have learned many skills, some have won hackathons as a direct result of our training. Some have opened businesses and some even got career promotions as a result of the networking and new skills they’ve acquired. This is made possible because GDG Manama is a safe place for all backgrounds and all diversities to come and learn. We make that clear and try to be as approachable as possible. Most of our sessions have hands-on training for all different levels – we do our best to make it as easy as possible for someone to get started. Do you find the membership has more of one gender than the other, or is it pretty equal? When we started it was very male dominated, but month after month that has changed, to the extent we had a new member say: “I thought this was a tech event, how come there are so many women?” That made my day. Do you think the group can help encourage more women into the tech arena and specifically the development side? Bahrain already has many women developers graduating universities, it’s about giving them the platform to show what they can do and welcoming them to join an active tech community. How do you see the group progressing into the future? This year we will be releasing session tracks for each subject, if you are interested in mobile development or Artificial Intelligence, you now will have more sessions arranged in tracks that you can attend. THE G-WHIZ FEATURE | women in tech
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