Dr. Nutz: Professional Tech Therapist
After 27 years working in tech, you'll need therapy too...check out our episode-in-progress inspired by Dr. Katz, and some news about Dr. Nutmeg's new gig as a web developer.
Welcome back to the Femmebots FACTory!
If you’re a new subscriber that I met at the Latinas in Tech Central Florida event, bienvenidos y hola, I’m Dr. Kat Nutmeg, your hostess and “professional” tech therapist.
JK. I’m not a real doctor. That’s why some people call me “Dr. Nutz,” which pays homage to Dr. Katz, one of my fav animations from the 1990s featuring comedians confessing their “problems” in a therapy session.
In similar fashion, various Latinas in Tech — some real, some fake, but always in the disguise of an animated Femmebot costume designed by AI apps — confess their failures, successes and dreams to Dr. Nutz on her fake “Turing Test” virtual reality TV show (in the format of a therapy session).
Each episode starts with a new Femmbot patient coming to Dr. Nutz after various mishaps like:
Getting laid off
Malfunctioning and looking for upgrades to her aging operating system
Failing to sell a new app or innovation to stingy investors and a fickle 21st century market
During the tech therapy session, the Femmebot describes what her build cycle looked like over the quarter with cutaways that re-enact her often comedic experiences in co-working spaces, at home with the family, and childhood traumas that may have prevented her success this time around the economic cycle.
So far, I’ve managed to:
Assemble and edit shots of “Techlando” to resemble the transitional cityscapes featured in Dr. Katz
Record voiceover and animate Dr. Nutz and her “Debbie Downer Daughter” Femmebot 7.0 — eventually I gotta get them to banter back and forth like Dr. Katz and his son Ben
Edit a sinister but bouncy bossa nova soundtrack to signal to the viewer that something’s not quite right in this animated underworld where Dr. Nutz hosts Fake Ted Talks and her Femmebot “daughter” constantly interrupts with sound bytes from pop culture
Write and rewrite dialogue…
This is what I’ve come up with so far…is it funny?
At some point I’ll stop over-editing and over-thinking it cuz time is tick-tocking on TikTok where I’d like to keep building an audience. If you click on that link, you’ll see Congress got one step closer to banning it in the U.S. this past weekend.
Meanwhile, the second BIG FAT news item to share: I will be volunteering at the Latinas in Tech Summit happening in-person Thursday, May 16 in San Francisco. Are you going?
I’m excited about returning to the place that launched me into this mad tech world. It will be like an unofficial ayahuasca trip to walk around the Mission District, the Tendernob, Ft. Mason, Hunter’s Point, Potrero Hill, the Tunnel Top (if it still exists) and all the old spots where I met my first comadres-in-tech at Latino-dot-com.
Things have def changed since 1999. That’s 25 years ago, chicas…when Neo was still using phone booths to connect to The Matrix (a hella dated movie about tech, if you’re GenZ and haven’t seen it yet).
In any case, I’m hella dated, too because I actually started my tech career in 1997. No one cares about the code I know like PHP and CSS…or the interactive maps I build, or the content management systems I’ve tweaked like DotNetNuke, Drupal and other various platforms that got popular during Web 1.0 and 2.0. It’s VERY EASY to fall behind in this tech race that is traveling at the speed of light. You gotta be CONSTANTLY learning and upgrading and retaining and evolving. I mean…AI can literally build a website FOR YOU. Who the heck would need an ol’ skule web developer like me anyways???
If you haven’t already checked out Gilda Alvarez’s Latinas in Data stats about the Athena Factor, or Accenture’s data that shows the number of women in STEM dips after age 35, you’ll agree that it takes a super resilient gata to survive longer than two decades in tech.
And thus, this is the third piece of news on this lovely Earth Day when we pretend our server farms aren’t causing more climate change than cows farting in an open field:
Your girl landed a web developer gig starting April 29.
Ya. It’s true. In January, I cold-applied for the job via LinkedIn, interviewed with a panel of four people on the IT and communications team in February, and out of all the candidates, they chose me, a 48-year-old Latina in Tech because “I had so much experience.”
Whaaaaat??? After more than six months of interviewing and pitching and dealing with multiple rejections, it’s nice that my unique background matched this organization’s needs when most want fresh Bots from The FACTory who know ColdFusion or R or whatever the new languages are on the market.
Tech companies aren’t exactly falling over themselves to hire an obsolete bot with ol’ skule coding skills, so I am GRATEFUL and #BLESSED to find myself in this position.
I am starting the new gig in one week, which officially means I’ve been working in tech for nearly three decades. Ay ya yay.
How many Latinas do YOU know working in tech, and for nearly three decades?
I hope this makes my pitch and credibility for a Latinas in Tech TV show stronger! Stay tuned for Maria La Gata’s 1920s Style Entrepreneurial Workshop, coming to you this Thursday at 7pm.
Congrats again on the new gig! I’m so glad they recognized the great talent and skills that you’ll bring to their workplace.