I was introduced to Adrienne Shulman through our mutual involvement with the DevOps community. We had an immediate sense of camaraderie and purpose looking to inspire the next generation of technologists. Adrienne, in particular, is passionate about the need for more women developers. We had lengthy discussions on Slack about different dimensions of this problem.

You see, Adrienne spent many years as an instructor for the Girls Who Code organization. Their mission is to close the gender gap in technology and to change the image of what a programmer looks like and what a programmer does. 

Adrienne and I had some pretty heavy discussions on the continued trend to celebrate "women developers", "women engineers", "women leaders", and even "girls who code". My own journey as a software architect continuously pushing to improve made me post this to Adrienne: if you are excellent at your craft, does your gender or other personal trait need to be part of your title? If we can elevate the focus to be on character and achievements, can we take control of our own adjectives? 

We agreed that the answer is not binary and that the context of the conversation matters. This is how Real Technologists concept and podcast was born. From a passionate Slack discussion.