Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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Creative destruction
I was making a joke about the fact that I accidentally have two profiles for Open Source Bridge – one is with pink hair, and one with brown hair. Obviously, one of them is the mirror universe me. Probably the one with brown hair. No one with pink hair could be sinister, right? I said…
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The art of deleting
I have a talk where I encourage everyone to be clear on the data they collect and keep. I encourage people to automate deletion so they don’t have to do anything extra. In the original incarnation of the talk, I said that everyone should apply konmari principles to the data they keep, only instead of…
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Lady Speaker Small Talk
Sometimes, I think the hardest part of going to conferences is the unstructured time – lunches and happy hours and sponsored parties. That’s the time I remember I’m surrounded by 2,445 total strangers. And I’m supposed to be networking with them. If I think too much about this, I end up at “what do I…
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Wordstar 2000, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and the moulding of a young mind
Musing about how software changes the way we think by offering us new concepts to integrate.
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The Death of Data: Signal 2017 edition
Twilio’s Signal conference had a lot of great parts, but I have to say I’m really impressed by their fast turnaround at getting video posted. Here is the recording of my talk on data retention, data destruction, and machine learning; Video: https://youtu.be/93ewk2pooAw Slides [View the story “The Death of Data at #signalconf” on Storify]
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5 Years Behind the Mic
5 years ago, I kicked off the conference-speaking section of my career, with this classic hit: So many things about this! Like, uh, I’ve dyed my hair and learned to take my lanyard off and stopped using FrameMaker and Prezi. But also, this core theory is the basis of so many of my talks now.…
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Lady Conference Speaker: Slides
Once you get a conference talk selected, you’ll want to put together the talk. There are speakers who can give entire talks without any visual aids, but most of the rest of us count on having some pictures to look at and prompt us. There are entire books written on slides – I liked Presentation…
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Post on Opensource.com: How to nail a tech writer job inteview
I was excited to write another post for opensource.com: How to nail a tech writer job interview It’s an extension of a twitter rant I went on a bit ago, about how important it is to know certain things about interviewing as a technical writer, but no one is teaching them, from what I can…
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Human Indexing
One of the consequences of cheap storage is that we have no incentive to reduce the amount of data we keep. We believe that we’re going to be able to search for whatever we want. But we are starting to exceed our human capacity to filter the returned results of our searches. Algorithms will help…