Speaker

Ridhwana Khan

Ridhwana Khan

Senior Software Engineer at Smile Identity

Johannesburg, South Africa

Ridhwana Khan is a senior software engineer at Smile Identity. She is constantly fulfilling her passion for finding solutions to problems that meaningfully impact people’s lives.

She is also an advocate for diversity and inclusion in the tech space and has co-founded a Non Profit Organisation called Kasi Maths which empowers students in under-developed areas to pursue an interest in STEM. When she’s not writing code, Ridhwana can be found curled up with a novel or booking her next travel expedition.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • JavaScript
  • css
  • HTML
  • ruby
  • Programming
  • d3

Google Women Techmakers

I was invited by Google to do a talk at the Techmakers event in 2019. My talk was as follows:

I choose the change that I want to see

A tale of my adventures in the tech industry and how I choose to no longer doubt myself as a women in tech. I have found my voice, my courage and my confidence. I choose to be the change that I want to see.

March 2019 Johannesburg, South Africa

Pycon Balkan

I did the following keynote for Pycon Balkan.

Expand your toolkit for self-development:
Moving towards consulting in the recent years has provided me with the opportunity to integrate within different clients environments and teams, thus exposing me to the unique set of learnings and challenges that come with each environment.

I’ve found that adapting, but not necessarily conforming has been essential. Challenging the norms, being curious and always learning has been key tools in my toolkit over the years.

I’d like to spend some time unpacking my tools to show you how I’ve used them to twist, turns and fasten the bolts of my journey in order to create a steady and stable structure that has allowed me to grow and thrive within the development community.

November 2018 Belgrade, Serbia

ORSSA Ada Lovelace Day 2018 (2018)

Problem solving

As humans we are placed in complex environments, where we are required to provide solutions to the problems that we encounter on a daily basis. This can be within your career, your personal life, or your business, and we know that many times solving the problem isn’t as easy as we’d like or hoped it to be.

October 2018 Johannesburg, South Africa

Jozi.js

Javascript under the hood

According to Github statistics, Javascript is the most used language today. As new Javascript frameworks and libraries are released, teams are utilizing them across all levels of the stack - the frontend, backend, desktop apps, hybrid apps, embedded devices and so much more.

There are many developers that are using Javascript every day, all day - however, many of us haven’t really delved deep into understanding the internals. Newer frameworks have made it such that developers can build full applications without ever learning about things like the javascript engine, callback queues, runtime, call stacks, concurrency, event loops, and the V8 engine.

Understanding the nuts and bolts of javascript is no longer a requirement to be able to build applications, however, knowing the details assist developers to be able to build better, cleaner and optimized applications.

During this talk, I’d like to provide you with fresh insights on how Javascript works under the hood!

July 2018 Johannesburg, South Africa

RubyFuza

Lessons learned in pursuit of growth

Growth has always been a vital part in ensuring that I lead a meaningful career.

Recently, I’ve been given the opportunity to be a part of a Techwomen program in Silicon Valley, and it has expanded my mind to lessons that have helped me to progress in my career.

I’d love to share my learnings around the value of mentorship, diversity in leadership, the art of storytelling and the gratification of social impact.

February 2018 Cape Town, South Africa

RubyFuza

Building a better programming interface for your application:

We are moving towards an era where API’s are now forming the crux of communication between different applications.

Hence, we need to ensure that our API's follow a good design and architecture, so that integration between different applications can be accomplished with minimal complexity and maximum efficiency.

In this talk, I would like to explore the JSON API spec, benefits and disadvantages of micro services, Rails 5 for your JSON API's, and the tools and workflow that, we as developers, can use to minimise delays when working in big teams, asynchronously, on the frontend and API.

February 2015

Pycon South Africa

Journey through the eyes of a newbie female developer

Graduating from a 90% male computer science class, to an initially 100% male software development team, finally allowed me to realise that there is a dire lack of women in the computer science field.

Entering this industry in a minority invokes initial feelings of the need to constantly prove oneself and one's capabilities – normally this puts one at an immediate disadvantage. However, given the correct circumstances, surrounding environments and attitudes, these adverse feelings can quickly be replaced with self-confidence. I was fortunate enough in my daily working environment to have my opinion given the weight that it deserved.

However, experience has also taught me that the sailing is not always so smooth within every aspect of the development field. Certain environments are a lot less welcoming to women because of the strange misconception that they are going against the norms of society.

As a newbie, within the development industry, one has to be able to adapt and have an open mind to gain unbounded knowledge and learning experiences. The world of development is a polyglot environment and striving to build an ambitious career involves lots of hard work and dedication.

I would like to take the audience on a journey to experience the obstacles, growth and challenges that I’ve faced. I also aim to provide concrete suggestions on increasing female willingness to join the tech industry, and improving co-existence in the development environment.As a developer, my goal is to provide inspiration to capable young women, to fathers who have daughters, brothers who have sisters, and men who have female colleagues.

September 2014 Johannesburg, South Africa

Ridhwana Khan

Senior Software Engineer at Smile Identity

Johannesburg, South Africa