Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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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…
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Think Globally, Sponsor Locally
Possibly the most exciting thing about my new job as Developer Advocate (there are so many!) is that I don’t have to scramble and ask conferences to fund me anymore. That means that speaker funds can go to the next generation of up-and-coming speakers, independents, and folks who don’t get paid to go to conferences.…
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Writing exercise
As a developer advocate for LaunchDarkly, I need to understand the product in a bunch of different ways – at a technical level to give summaries of how to make integrations work, at a business level to explain how feature flags can save time and money, and at a rhetorical level, so I can quickly…
