Women in Open Source with Lynne Chamberlain, Denise Schannon, and Katie Gamanji

The OCTOpod: Conversations with SUSE's Office of the CTO

Today, Alan Clark hands the reins over to special guest host, Katie Gamanji, Ecosystem Advocate for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Katie’s mission is to ensure that end users are successful while also bridging the gap between practitioners and projects within the ecosystem. With Linux and SUSE recently celebrating their 30-year and 29-year anniversaries, Katie is joined by two remarkable women in the open source space, who share their contributions to Linux, the challenges they have faced in their careers, and the inspiring stories of how they overcame those challenges to get where they are today. In this episode, you’ll hear from Lynne Chamberlain, President of Regulated Industries at SUSE Rancher Government Solutions, an industry veteran in the federal space with more than 20 years of executive experience. Lynne plays a critical role in enabling open source adoption with a specialization in enterprise Linux, Kubernetes management, and edge solutions to accelerate the pace of innovation within the U.S. government. We are also joined by Denise Schannon, Director of Engineering for the Cloud Platform team and responsible for delivering the SUSE Rancher product. While at Rancher, she has spanned multiple roles, including QA, technical writing, training, and project management, before settling into engineering management. Tune in today to gain some valuable insights and actionable advice from Lynne and Denise!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Lynne and Denise share their experiences of working with Linux and in open source.
• The contributions Lynne has made to the open source community that she is most proud of.
• Why Denise says she is most excited about contributing toward documentation.
• Hear about one of Denise’s biggest challenges: battling insecurities as a doc writer.
• The challenge that Lynne had to overcome: helping her government customers understand open source as a secure, viable product.
• Denise shares her experience of working at Rancher while also collaborating in open source.
• Learn more about SUSE RGS, Lynne’s role there, and how open source factors in.
• Find out how Lynne got introduced to programming, Linux, and open source by accident.
• Why Denise pursued a career in open source and her experience as a woman in tech.
• Denise opens up about how her abilities have been doubted because of her gender.
• Lynne emphasizes the importance of staying true to yourself as a woman in a male populated industry like tech.
• Denise on why she is pleased to see how far women in tech have come.
• Lynne on why she believes that the open source field is open to initiating more women.
• Lynne’s advice for women starting careers in Linux and open source: pave your own way!
• Denise echoes the value of finding your support system and leaning on it; just go for it!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Lynne Chamberlain on LinkedIn

Denise Schannon on LinkedIn

Denise Schannon on Twitter

SUSE Rancher Government Solutions

SUSE

Rancher

Katie Gamanji on LinkedIn

Katie Gamanji on Twitter

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

SUSE and Rancher Community

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021