LaunchDarkly
This job is undoing me
… in the best way possible. My protective casing of hard-earned cynicism is being rubbed away by all this genuine kindness, cooperation, good culture, and all that jazz. It’s honestly kind of uncomfortable, like molting. You need to understand – I have this hard-ass candy shell for a reason. My first job in technology was…
Teaching and learning
At LaunchDarkly, we’ve been hiring really aggressively, because we’re doing amazing things. (Come work with me!) That means that we are also doing a bunch of training, and I’ve been working on doing the training for our non-technical employees, folks like marketing, design, outbound sales. They’re important to our success and they have a TON…
Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn
Corey Quinn, slasher of AWS bills and frequent conference speaker, had me as the first guest on his brand-new podcast, Screaming in the Cloud. We had a great time talking about feature flags, the all-iPad conference setup, testing in production, and how I feel about technical documentation. And if you’re like me and don’t always…
Guest post: UX Booth
I wrote a 2018 User Experience Prediction at UX Booth. Amy Grace Wells asked me what I thought was going to be a leading theme in UX in the next year, and I said, “better accessibility”. I think that’s both a serious prediction and a hope, because there is never enough accessibility, but I also…
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…
When the cat’s away….
…the mice will self-organize? My manager is on vacation. Like really a lot on vacation. Logged out of Slack, not on email or phone, not showing up for meetings, none of that. This appears to be what he’s doing: And he’s been gone, like weeks. OK, I think it’s 2 weeks. But it is significant…
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…
Shoes and software
I bought a new pair of shoes when I went to New York City the last time. I am trying to find shoes and boots that look good with both skirts and pants, fit properly, and are good for a full day of standing/7 miles of walking. This is a pretty tall order, as you…
Talk slides are not a presentation deck
This year, I watched a talk called “I’m Judging Your Slides” or something like that. I watch a lot of conference talks. No, more than that. As if it were my full-time job, which it pretty much is. 25 conferences x 2 days (rough average) x 6 talks a day. Plus recorded talks. As such:…
Talk write-up: Choose Your Own Deployment
Yesterday, I was in Phoenix for their first DevOps Days. [View the story “Choose Your Own Deployment – DevOpsDays PHX” on Storify] The interesting thing about doing this talk in Twine instead of my beloved Google Slides was how much I had to learn to make it look anything like I wanted. There’s a lot…
Upcoming appearances
Velocity Berlin
Minneapolis DevOps Meetup
DeliveryConf