Chapter Lead: Rupa Dachere

Rupa is a software engineer by day, entrepreneur by night and ad-hoc plumber/painter/handywoman the rest of the time, i.e, weekends. She started CodeChix in 2009 after meeting some extremely bright and talented women at ShesGeeky 2009 in Mt. View, CA. Her first thought was – “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could meet with these women on a regular basis, face-to-face, share ideas/projects/work issues etc.?” And CodeChix was born – with 3 attendees congregating in Rupa’s living room, chatting about Linux and consuming homemade brownies, cheese/crackers and wine.

Since then CodeChix has grown to over 1500 members and has chapters in the Bay Area and Seattle/Redmond. She has taken CodeChix from a grassroots group to a CA non-profit public benefit corporation so that she and her excellent core team can bring workshops and events to all women (as well as men in some cases) that want to continue improving their skills and learning throughout their careers and life.

She is an active speaker and panelist and has participated in several key conferences/panels including Grace Hopper, PyCon, VMWorld, NCWIT Aspirations Award for High School Girls, International Women’s Day at Google, OSCON etc.

Rupa currently works as Member of Technical Staff at VMware. Connect with Rupa via LinkedIn. Check out her page here for more details.