Women Who Reign: Vida Ha

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — Lucille Ball
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Tell us about yourself along with a fun fact!
My name is Vida. My parents are of Cantonese Chinese ethnicity but were born in Vietnam and fled after the war when my mom was already pregnant with me. My family sought out refuge in Indonesia before arriving on American soil: shortly after, I was born. While my family, including my older siblings, had their Chinese names translated to English, my parents got to pick out two names for me — a Chinese one and an American one. For the American one, my dad picked Vida from a baby book to symbolize our journey from Vietnam to Indonesia to America.

–What celebrities I follow on Instagram:

@amyschumer, @mindykaling, @aliwong Women rule comedy these days — these women are fierce, funny, smart, and beautiful — everything I aspire to be!

What do you do to relax:
Two years ago, I decided to train to run my first half marathon in my mid-30’s. I’m one of the least athletic people you’ll meet — I used ballet and math club as an excuse to dodge any kind of sport as a kid. This seemed like a daunting goal, but I finished that half I signed up for and have done at least 3 more since then. More importantly, running is now one of the things I can’t go without. If you’ve ever thought about running a half — don’t think about it anymore — just sign up for one 3 months out and start training today — it doesn’t matter how long it takes you — just that you finish!

Challenge you’ve faced and how you overcame it:
I worked at Google as a software engineer from 2005–2010, which was a really magical experience for just 2 years into my professional career. In a short time, I went from being a graduate student to running jobs on 1,000 node clusters that touched millions of users. It was amazing, but I was eager to explore life outside of Google’s walls, so I left to work at a couple of startups and saw how difficult it was for the rest of the world to have access to comparable Big Data technology. Hadoop was harder to program, difficult to install, and procuring so many new compute instances was a slow and expensive process. Luckily, there are always people in the world who…