Best practices
Praise is a vitamin
I was thinking about how happy I am when I get the kind of praise I need. It doesn’t make me feel smug or complacent, it makes me feel strong and empowered and like what I’m doing matters and is seen. Which is kind of the opposite of burnout. I don’t think you can entirely…
Using Airtable to Manage Conference Submissions
I know, it’s not a very catchy title, but it is descriptive. A large part of my current job is speaking at conferences and talking about feature flags, systems resiliency, and whatever else I can talk people into. And part of speaking at conferences is applying to lots and lots of conferences. But how do…
Documentation for DevOps: A DevOpsDays Open Space Writeup
I’m borrowing this image from my friends at Chef, because it’s really funny to pretend that it’s possible to just sprinkle on “devops”, something that is about cultural change at every level. At every DevOpsDays I go to (and that’s quite a few), I propose/wrangle/run two open spaces. One is about feature flags/canary launches/hypothesis-driven development,…
The sticker bag
I talked about this a little bit in Lady Speaker Small Talk , but let me expand. I have a bag of stickers that I take to every conference I go to. This week, I leveled up my game from “gallon ziploc bag of significant antiquity” to “bespoke bag”. It only took me a little while to…
Well, that didn’t go like I imagined
The Toggle Talk As a speaker, there are three things I count on to give a talk: Slides Narrative flow Speaker notes My dependence on these elements decreases as I give a talk multiple times, but I use the slides to help me remember where I am in the narrative even if I don’t refer…
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…
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…
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…
Retrograde tooling
We've reached a tipping point in technical writing, and we need to deal with it. The future is not going to involve producing documents, it's going to be producing seamlessly integrated content in and around products, and that means we need to change our expectations around tooling. This is going to hurt, but hopefully in…
Why on earth would developers WANT to write documentation?
This week I was at DevOpsDays Minneapolis, which was an amazing, warm, and inclusive event. There were at least three open spaces on documentation, communication, and related problems, and I didn’t propose any of them! The question the devops world keeps asking, over and over again is, How do I get developers to write anything?…
Upcoming appearances
Velocity Berlin
Minneapolis DevOps Meetup
DeliveryConf