Dev Advocacy
The Year That Was 2018
A wrap-up of my year’s travel, including links to conference talks, and photos of places I’ve been.
Choose Your Own Deployment
I love the aha moment people get when they grasp a concept. It’s a lot of what gives me energy about this job. Being there to help people see how an abstract concept can make their concrete life better is amazingly rewarding. Because of this, I try to change up all the parts of my talks,…
The Art of Booth
I originally wrote this up as an internal blog post, but I think it may be useful for other people, too, so I’ve cleaned it up a bit and taken out most of the proprietary stuff, and added some explanations. I had never in my life done boothwork before this job, so I was surprised…
“Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.” —Rachel Zoe
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:…
On the Origin of the Speciated Conference
I go to so many conferences! It’s an awesome and amazing part of my job. I speak at them, but I also attend them. I sit in the front row and live-tweet. I attend talks. I participate in unconference sessions. I talk to people in lines, and at lunch, and at the afterparty. I give…
Speaker’s Hierarchy of Needs
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…
Help, I need somebody!
I may have mentioned that I have an executive function disorder. That is the category AD(H)D falls into. What that means for me is that it is often a lot of work for me to make decisions and organize tasks. All of the traits that make me an excellent systems thinker, like holistic views, consideration…
On a jet plane…
I’ve been in Europe for the better part of three weeks now, and I’ll be going home Saturday. As you can imagine, I thought long and hard about everything I brought with me. I never want to take more luggage than I can comfortably manage on my own, up and down subway stairs. This is…
This job is all the best parts of going to college
I used to say that technical writing is an endless series of research papers, and if I had realized that when I started doing it, I might have studied harder at the Java class I flunked. But not really, because the thing I loved about research papers was reading the primary text, and a bunch…
Saying No, or If This Then Not That
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…
Upcoming appearances
DevOpsDays Seattle
DevNet Create
GOTO Chicago
Deliver:AgileAlliance
O'Reilly Software Architecture/Velocity
The Lead Developer London