Poornima Vijayashanker is an

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...

and

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

. She is also a teacher at various tech hubs in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

such as General Assembly, Parisoma and Hackbright. She has also started Femgineer, a

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

and teaching platform.

Biography

During Vijayashanker's childhood,

electronics Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other Electric charge, electrically charged particles. It is a subfield ...

were routinely "taken apart for fun" at her house. Vijayashanker took apart her first

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

at age 14. The men in her family were all

s, but as a child, Vijayashanker wanted to be a

lawyer A lawyer is a person who is qualified to offer advice about the law, draft legal documents, or represent individuals in legal matters. The exact nature of a lawyer's work varies depending on the legal jurisdiction and the legal system, as w ...

because being an engineer didn't seem "glamorous or exciting." Vijayashanker began to write

computer code Computer code may refer to: *Source code *Machine code *Bytecode Bytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, byte ...

right after high school. After starting college at

Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...

, she changed her mind, deciding that engineering would be "a cool and intense field." She double-majored in

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

and

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

. After graduating, Vijayashanker started work as a research and development engineer at

Synopsys Synopsys, Inc. is an American electronic design automation (EDA) company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that focuses on silicon design and verification, silicon intellectual property and software security and quality. Synopsys sup ...

. Vijayashanker was a founding engineer at

Mint.com Mint, also known as Intuit Mint and formerly known as Mint.com, was a personal financial management website and mobile app for the US and Canada produced by Intuit, Inc. (which also produces TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma). Mint's prima ...

when it was a start-up company, where she was also the only woman on staff. Vijayashanker was instrumental in building software for Mint from scratch. While at Mint, she began Femgineer in 2007, in order to write about her experiences and show that "women can be sophisticated, cultured, and still be engineers, Femgineers!" After Mint was acquired by

Intuit Intuit Inc. is an American multinational business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparati ...

, she left to start her own company, BizeeBee, which is a platform for fitness studios which tracks attendance, revenue and controls marketing for these types of businesses. In 2014, she gave her first

TEDx TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "Ideas Change Everything" (previously "Ideas Worth Sprea ...

talk where she discusses why tinkering is useful. In 2015, she released an eBook, titled ''How to Transform Your Ideas Into Software Products''. In 2015, she co-authored " Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking" with Karen Catlin. Vijayashanker has said that if society wants to see more women in technology careers, then it is important to have more role models for women in technology. She also emphasizes the importance of encouraging women to pursue "hard-core engineering or finance roles" because these jobs are more likely to lead to top positions in the company. Vijayashanker lives in

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

, California.

References

External links

Femgineer
{{DEFAULTSORT:Vijayashanker, Poornima American women computer scientists Engineers from California Businesspeople from California American computer scientists Duke University Pratt School of Engineering alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women scientists