I have a couple blog posts on conferences, including one on hosting a booth, one on diversity and inclusion, and one on Think Globally, Sponsor Locally I haven’t put together one about what I hope for from conference organizers, though. Disclaimers Every conference, even the massively well-funded ones, is the result of a lot of meetings...
When I started thinking about my word of the year, the image I kept returning to was an object at a Lagrange point. That’s one of the five places in the orbits of two celestial bodies where a smaller object is effectively balanced between the competing gravitational forces of the larger objects. It’s related to...
I don’t know why I thought burnout recovery was a single event. Nothing is like that. When I went on leave, one of the things I did was go to my doctor and get signed up for physical therapy to rehabilitate my elbow, because I have tendinitis, possibly from yanking a 30-pound suitcase off a...
I’m leaving for my first conference of the year tomorrow! It’s going to be awesome. I’ll have my notorious sticker bag with me for all the lucky attendees at DeliveryConf. I don’t remember when I started this, but by now I’ve done 2 talks (Write the Docs and DevOpsDays PDX), and I have a whole...
I knew it was coming. My team knew it was coming. My peers knew it was coming. One of the things we know about developer advocacy is that there is a really high rate of burnout — it’s because we care so much. There isn’t any time that I’m not running a constant background process...
Content warning: I’m going to talk about voluntary and involuntary food restrictions or limits. Conference food is hard to do Pity the conference organizer! I mean that seriously. They need to get the entirety of the conference fed in a relatively short period of time. They need to make sure food is available for people...
In Disney’s Fantasia, Mickey, the sorcerer’s apprentice, enchants brooms to magically do his tedious chore. The problem is, Mickey is only an apprentice and although he can get things started, he is not wise enough to give the brooms an end point, an “enough”. I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot, lately, satiety. (It...
One of the skills that I’ve been learning in this new Developer Advocate position is the letter of introduction, which is a close relative of the sales version (the warm handoff) and the recruiting version (letter of reference), but isn’t exactly like either of them. I think “Letter of Introduction” is actually a little unclear,...
Hey, friends! I, the person you know who cares quite a lot about stickers, am here to say that now is the correct time for you to be thinking about June, which is Pride Month in the US. If you design and order stickers now, you’ll have them in time for all the many, many June...
A wrap-up of my year's travel, including links to conference talks, and photos of places I've been.