A Chat with Graça Peixoto: From Fortran to OutSystems (and a few others in the middle)
As a part of our themed month celebrating women in science and raising awareness for the gender gap, we interviewed Graça Peixoto, OSQuay’s Consultant. Graça has been part of OSQuay’s team since day one and has incredible stories to share that we are now sharing with you. Her story is inspiring, and so is she. We hope you like reading it as much as we did, and feel inspired to follow a career in technology.
Tell us a bit about yourself and how you decided to begin your career in technology
Having studied mathematics, statistics, and computing, I acquired some knowledge of "Fortran" programming language at the University. I think that this language was still being used not that long ago in scientific areas. However, in 1974, the Portuguese Revolution happened. And my father thought that besides studying at the University, I should also attend a course that would allow me to have a professional career if the University closed as a consequence of the revolution. I decided to take a COBOL programming course. At the end of the course, I was offered the possibility of a job as a Programmer if I learned yet another language. This time, it was a language more or less specific to IBM machines, RPG II. Over the years, I worked with BASIC to use Microsoft's ACCESS, HTML, and SQL and learned JAVA, a language I liked a lot but never used in real work. Finally, ITUp, OSQuay’s training partner, allowed me to study OutSystems, and with this new platform came the need to learn a little more JavaScript.
“In 1974, the Portuguese Revolution happened. And my father thought that besides studying at the University, I should also attend a course that would allow me to have a professional career if the University closed.”
Can you tell us about your experience in IT jobs as a woman?
I don't really have any specific story where being a woman would have mattered. The fact that I worked in a cutting-edge area, where there were actually very few skilled people, meant that anyone who had know-how and experience was naturally accepted regardless of gender.
Thinking back, I realize that often women worked in development and analysis, whereas the servers, hardware and low-level software was more for men. However, there was no specific choice in the places where I worked.
Only once was I asked a question that I suspect a man would not be asked. In a job interview, I was asked if I intended to have children.
What challenges have you faced as a woman working in IT?
Some of my female colleagues had, let's say, less pleasant situations. However, the fact that I had a college degree, which was not very common in the area, implied that the title Dr. that appeared in front of the name put me in a somewhat protected position. On the other hand, perhaps because I worked with people who were older than me but had themselves started very young in an innovative field at the time, I also felt cared for.
“The challenging situations I faced had to do with the work itself and with technology evolving faster than what our managers were willing to accept, for example connecting PCs to the medium-sized computer we were using or transferring files between those machines and a network server. ”
Here's a story that has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a woman or not, but the challenge was more or less technological.
1999: the users wanted to distribute some daily reports through the net, it was cutting-edge at that time, but the only solution that a colleague had found, was to download the reports in CSV and place them manually in a directory. I already had some experience with these methods that often resulted in altered numbers causing differences between the reports distributed and the ones out of our systems. Meanwhile, an article had fallen on my desk that explained how to create a simple HTML report from an AS/400 report. At the same time, we had started to transfer data via FTP, and my idea was then to send the report that came out on paper to a file adding a line with" <html> " at the beginning and another at the end with </html> and it was done. Send it by FTP to a server, and that was it...
Or not quite...
Firstly, when I loaded it up in the browser, it was all crooked, and the report had a series of columns separated by "|", but they weren't columns. They looked like snakes.
Secondly, the sysadmins swore blind that there was no server with FTP, however, I suspected that there was at least one, the one that received the mail.
So I had two challenges: to learn on my own to write an HTML page with a table and a decent font, now it sounds ridiculous a little static page, but I had never seen HTML; and then, to convince my bosses that there was a server with FTP and that the users had to distribute that information automatically in areas of the factory where there was no access to printers. Also, the reports were too big to be consulted on a 24x80 screen (YES!!! 24 lines of 80 characters each), and that this process prevented them from changing data outside the application.
“The reports were too big to be consulted on a 24x80 screen (YES!!! 24 lines of 80 characters each).”
In the end, I also developed a page that was a kind of menu, with links and everything, from where they could call the reports. The reports were issued from a process similar to Timers and were available daily at 8 am with data from the previous day.
Why OutSystems? How is it different from all the other technologies you worked with?
“Why not OutSystems? It was something new, and I have always been interested in learning new things. Then, I saw Service Studio (OutSystems low-code, and visual development environment) and saw my old wishes come true. ”
I'll explain. When I was learning my first programming languages, COBOL and FORTRAN, both had a first step of drawing the program's flowchart, a more or less detailed graphical scheme representing the program. It was almost indispensable in any classical language before the following step: the painful process of transcribing the drawing to the programming language, writing lines and lines of code with specific formats and tight rules (a drag). For me, once the graphic layout was done, the programming was finalized. I just wanted to be able to pass it directly to the machine, and that is exactly what OutSystems allows me to do.
From your experience, how can we attract more women to work in technology?
“Don’t ask them if they are planning to have children, please!!!”
Seriously, I think that what can attract women to work in tech is more or less the same that attracts men: the fact that there are all kinds of areas of expertise and that there is the possibility to work more directly with pure technology, servers, "little details", but there is also a lot of group work, a lot of contact with professional realities very different from our own, which makes the work very diversified.
Nonetheless, I was a little surprised by the astonishment of one of the people in charge when I mentioned that, in the information systems development area, there were always many women and that this has been a reality for a long time. Just because we don't go much into the servers' room doesn't mean that we are not present in the other areas.
Half of OSQuay’s team are women. Does that change anything in the dynamic of the company?
At OSQuay, I didn't find what sometimes happens in other companies: a separation between the women's and men's group. People get together more by type of interest, of course, the soccer group has more men, and the make up club has women, but it's more due to the theme than to someone being subtly or not so subtly excluded. At a work level, I didn't notice any differences at all. Whatever task is there to be done is done by those who are free and, if they don't know about the subject they will learn it. That's what the others are there for, the OutSystems Community website, and Google.
Thank you so much, Graça, for sharing your experience with us.
Women thrive at OSQuay because of our strong team, flexible policies, and work ethics. Do you want to join our team? Explore our career opportunities.
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