From ServiceNow to SQL Injection: A Night Mapping the Many Paths Into Tech

The fourth edition of Calgary BR Tech took place on August 29th at the Platform Innovation Centre, with two talks aimed at anyone trying to work out where they fit in tech (event page). The host opened with a reminder of why the meetup exists: there aren’t many Brazilians in tech here compared with other communities, so staying close, helping each other and networking is how everyone grows.

ServiceNow, and a Community Born From a Comment

Eduarda “Duda” Lyra went first. She moved from law into tech in 2022, has worked as a ServiceNow business analyst ever since, and had arrived in Canada only about a month before the talk. She explained what the platform is: a low-code tool companies use to run IT, HR, finance and other workflows. She also showed how widely it is used, including by large Canadian companies across several industries. Then she went through the careers built around it: developer, administrator, consultant, business analyst, project manager and training specialist. She also pointed to ways to start learning for free, including the Now Learning platform and a free personal developer instance.

The most memorable part was the story of Now Girls, a Portuguese-language community for women working with ServiceNow. She founded it with a friend in March after someone left a dismissive comment on a LinkedIn post meant to help women who don’t speak English. It now has more than a thousand followers on LinkedIn and an active WhatsApp group where recruiters share openings. The Q&A covered which training paths to take and why the System Administrator certification is the usual starting point.

Six Branches of IT, Demonstrated Live

After a short break to fix a livestream problem, Júlio Falbo took the stage. He’s a software architect and tech lead with about 13 years in the field, and he has worked in Brazil, Denmark and Italy. His goal was to help newcomers avoid starting in the wrong area and burning out early. As he put it, he believes “IT is for everyone.”

He went through frontend, backend, DevOps, data engineering, data science and cybersecurity, and showed most of them working on screen. A form failed because it had no backend, then saved once the backend was in place. A pull request was blocked by failing tests before deploying automatically. The audience filled out a form by scanning a QR code, and their answers went through a data pipeline into a dashboard. Finally, he ran a SQL injection attack against his own app and then fixed it.

He closed with lessons from working abroad: do more than what’s expected, share what you know, and drop the complexo de vira-lata, the Brazilian habit of assuming foreign tech must be better than ours.

Questions, Stories and What’s Next

The Q&A went in several directions: why developers hold back from sharing knowledge, testing and QA, freelancing and entrepreneurship, and generalists versus T-shaped specialists. An attendee also shared his own decades-long career journey. The evening ended with an invitation for anyone in the room to give a future talk, followed by networking.

The full recording is below, so you can watch the demos yourself.