LaunchDarkly
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…
The virtuous thank-you cycle
We talk a lot about vicious cycles, and how it’s easy to end up in bad places because the incentives are all bad, but let me tell you a story. It’s a pleasant Saturday, my family is watching Star Trek: TNG together, and I’m in my home office, working on a side project and slightly…
Upcoming appearances
O'Reilly Software Architecture/Velocity
The Lead Developer London
Full Stack Conference London
Texas Scalability Summit