After the band played Miles Davis’ "Seven Steps to Heaven," and an effusive introduction from the head of the school, Window Snyder stands in front of a hall filled with around 800 students at her old high school to receive an alumni award. Once she does, she opens up about how much she struggled when she got here, to Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut, after leaving her mom and her life in California back in 1989. In her nearly 25-year career in cybersecurity, Snyder was part of a group of people who pushed Microsoft in the early days of the mainstream internet to finally take cybersecurity seriously by embracing the notion that security needed to be part of the software development cycle — not bolted on afterward — and played a significant role in developing the first versions of the Windows operating systems that implemented that idea.