Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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Lady Speaker Clothes Crisis
There are about a jillionty articles on how it is difficult to dress as a woman while maintaining standards of professionalism, temperature control*, comfort, pockets, and compliance with the male gaze. This is a post on one specific form of dressing: Dressing to be speaking on stage. Personal style If it’s not something that you…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Now What?
This is the conclusion to my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Hopefully I have convinced you that these fights are worth having, worth putting some of your capital and effort into. But now how do you do that? You can’t fight alone and win. You’ll burn yourself…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Accessibility
This is the seventh fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. We all use computers different ways. Does your software allow that? Here are some ways you can add accessibility with relatively little effort. Take your glasses off. Can you see any of the interaction…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Acceptance
This is the sixth fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Have you shown this product to any actual humans who are like the users? Acceptance is the act of testing your vision against the user’s needs. It’s not about whether the software works, or…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Affordance
This is the fifth fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Affordance is what the interface makes easy and obvious. Affordances tell us all sorts of things about the tiny interactions we have with the world, and with software. Most people talk about the affordances…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Documentation
This is the fourth fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. I’m a technical writer, so you knew I’d get here. Documentation is not a secret! I often deal with product and business people who want to put the documentation behind a login. They want…
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The Seven Righteous Fights (LISA 16)
Usually we think of compound interest as what adds magically to our retirement or makes our student loans last forever. But there is also a compound interest of technical debt, where a project is made harder and more expensive because of early “cost-saving” choices. I think it’s empowering for developers and other people involved in…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Extensibility
This is the third fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. What can you do that would make your product more extensible, more configurable, easier to put into the ecosystem you are trying to serve? I always explain APIs as a sort of Lego connector…
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How to write a lightning talk
This week I was at Write/Speak/Code, a conference designed to teach technical women how to excel in other parts of their careers. It was amazing, soul-filling, and sometimes painfully honest. I was asked to mentor a group of nine women for Speak Day. We had a couple hours for them to write and deliver lightning…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Security
This is the second fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Contrary to what you may have heard, the internet is not actually a series of tubes connected by guys in ski masks. There are bad actors out there, but your product probably won’t attract…