Like a lot of tech companies, Splunk’s development organization isn’t a model of perfect gender balance. For a year and a half now, I’ve been the only woman in the dev organization.

Surprisingly, this is not an uncomfortable place to be. In 11 years in industry I’ve worked in a variety of organizations: the now-bankrupt dot-com best known for putting an ad with a naked guy up during the Super Bowl, 2 major marquee names with vastly differing corporate cultures, a security start-up stocked with emancipated-minor hackers. Aside from that doomed dot-com — which had a surprisingly strong gender balance throughout technical roles and a culture blessedly free of gender-based intimidation at all levels — Splunk may be the most comfortable place I’ve ever worked. There’s no creepy tokenism (unlike stories I’ve heard about certain other bay area employers), That Guy Who’s Never Seen A Girl Before doesn’t work here…and as far as I can tell, no one really gets harassed except Amrit.

Perhaps a better testament for the dev culture than my opinion — because, frankly, I’m pretty weird to start with — is that other women in the company seem to be pretty comfortable visiting the dev area, either on work errands or just to take a break from the sales-focused environment upstairs. Frankly I can’t imagine that happens too often in the bay area…and more’s the pity.

Hi! My name is Kim, and I’m the release engineer here at Splunk.

Thanks to my acquisition-happy former employer, Symantec, I’ve seen a variety of startup approaches to release engineering. Most frequently it seems some senior developer has a bug up you-know-where about how the build system should work, and some poor junior developer or sysadmin type person dutifully does the drudge work (usually by hand). At other sites, some very diligent and detail-oriented person creates and executes a process with a great deal of record-keeping and attention to detail but often not a lot of automation. Consistency across different build platforms usually isn’t a strong point.

Here at Splunk, things are a bit different. I called myself the plumber in the title of this post because that’s how I see my job: I create and maintain the plumbing that produces consistent, reproducible Splunk builds across all of our platforms, with as much visibility as I can muster. I see my contribution more as enforcing process through tools — ideally, tools that enable process in a way that is more convenient for everyone than “doing it wrong” — rather than personally pushing all the buttons and scribbling in all the logbooks. And I’ve had the good fortune to come into a culture that encourages this approach.