Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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Consent-Based Computing
Can’t make me! Possibly not everyone has this immediate reaction to software telling them to do something, like SIGN UP NOW or TRY AI or USE OUR CHATBOT. I do. My day is full of ignoring that reaction and also learning every tip and trick possible to avoid being alerted when I don’t want it.…
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Swag in the year 2025
Trade wars are hard on marketing in a lot of ways, but if you do conference-focused swag, now is the time to worry.
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Bluesky and your brand
Get your account established Watch before you post Remember that this part of the internet is permanent Be kind and human, as well as a brand
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The Ambassador from Ruritania
Being a developer advocate is a bit like being an ambassador in another country. Your ceremonial roles sometimes hide your real negotiations and strategic power.
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Englishes
American Tech English, is, I think, a kind of constructed English, similar to Simplified English. It’s not quite as rigorously enforced as Simplified English, but I am one of its enforcers. I will strip nuance out of sentences, and prioritize simple grammatical structure over fluidity, pacing, or rhythm. If a sentence could possibly be two…
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Lady Conference Speaker: Presenter roulette
You deserve to feel like wherever you’re speaking supports you and your talk. Hopefully they tell you up front what they expect, or send you videos, or give you practice time. But if they don’t, I promise it’s reasonable to want to know ahead of time what will happen.
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Linters and style guides and standards and tests
Consistency matters. Consistency matters for branding, because of copyright and recognition reasons, because you’re investing lots of money into that exact arrangement of letters. Consistency matters for code, because computers are terrible at approximation and “close enough”. Consistency matters for documentation, because human language is really hard and weird. Consistency matters, but it’s wicked hard to…
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Garbage: Solving the last meter problem
The important part is not how far behind someone is, but how well a solution works given their constraints. Can we make an improvement that is worth the disruption?
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Lady Conference Speaker: Story Arcs
The trick to telling a story is to tell people what reward they are going to get for following the story up front, so they are incentivized to follow along.
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Technically Lazy
Conflating code-y and technical means that a lot of technical people who could do the job really well are filtered out based on a lazy habit of thought.