Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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2017 Speaking Recap
This was the year that I got more organized as a speaker. I took up Airtable as a way to track all of my conference proposals, and so I actually have a record of everything I submitted. Summary Attended 27 conferences, spoke at 24 Spoke at 3 user groups, 2 podcasts, 1 video interview, 1…
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Nothing gold can stay
This month marks the end of two organizations that were really important to me, and I want to tell you about them. Alterconf Alterconf was a conference series that happened all over the world. The organizing spirit was Ashe Dryden. She took all her experience with the tech industry, gaming, and conferences, and used it…
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Guest Post: Capital One Developer Experience
I recently got a chance to write a post about API hospitality for the Capital One DevEx blog. It’s always nice to be able to rework a talk into an essay that’s easier for people to refer to.
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Packing, optimizing, and satisficing
I’m off on a two-week trip that happens to be broken by an 18 hour stop at home. (Nodevember, North Bay Python, SpringOne Platform, LaunchDarkly writing sprint). Every couple months, I try to clean out my bags entirely, get rid of the trash that accumulates, make sure that I have room for all the new…
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Talk slides are not a presentation deck
This year, I watched a talk called “I’m Judging Your Slides” or something like that. I watch a lot of conference talks. No, more than that. As if it were my full-time job, which it pretty much is. 25 conferences x 2 days (rough average) x 6 talks a day. Plus recorded talks. As such:…
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Talk write-up: Choose Your Own Deployment
Yesterday, I was in Phoenix for their first DevOps Days.[View the story “Choose Your Own Deployment – DevOpsDays PHX” on Storify] The interesting thing about doing this talk in Twine instead of my beloved Google Slides was how much I had to learn to make it look anything like I wanted. There’s a lot of…
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Why I Speak at Developer Conferences
I don’t write code for a living, and I never have. Developer has never been part of my job titles, and my Github history won’t impress anyone. I think that’s why people are surprised that I speak at developer conferences — next month I’m going to RubyConf, PyconCA, and Nodevember. When I started speaking at…
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Lady Conference Speaker Talk Wrap-Up
I was talking to Bridget Kromhout about her wrap-up process, and she inspired me to a) do a better job publishing my talk information right after I give it, b) talk about my end-of-talk process. So, you have pitched a talk, gotten it accepted, written it, gotten on stage and given it, and answered any…
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Our tools shape our worldview, or Least-bad Confluence techniques
If you have been in a conference open space with me, you know that I make a terrible yuck face whenever you ask me to talk about working with Confluence. I have yet to work with an instance of Confluence that didn’t make my soul hurt. But it’s not really the technology’s fault if I…
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The virtuous thank-you cycle
We talk a lot about vicious cycles, and how it’s easy to end up in bad places because the incentives are all bad, but let me tell you a story. It’s a pleasant Saturday, my family is watching Star Trek: TNG together, and I’m in my home office, working on a side project and slightly…