Colored hair has never disrupted my ability to do my highly-visible, public job, either. Almost every form of dress code you can think of is about asymetrical respect – the less powerful person is forced to comply with power’s standards of hair/clothing/expression. https://t.co/yB5RGz9JpD — Heidi from LaunchDarkly (@wiredferret) January 15, 2019 I look like this:...
I’ve been thinking about what I need to be a happy speaker, and what I expect, and what I hope for, and it seems to me like it’s a a hierarchy of needs, like Maslow. This is absolutely not intended to “call out” any organizer or make anyone feel bad. The vast majority of my...
When I was in elementary school, I won a science fair, and travelled to the far-off land of Moscow, Idaho for the state competition. While there, I spent some of my food money on the most magical sticker ever. It was a gleaming metallic unicorn with rainbow colored mane and tail. It brought me joy...
I had to say no to a conference I would have loved to speak at today. I’ve had to say no to several conference speaking offers this year, because it turns out that time, space, and timezones can only be manipulated to a certain degree. I thought about not blogging about this, because it’s a...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...