Speaking
Conferences, Inclusion, and Money
Last night, I was reading a tweet stream from Nicole Archambault about having to pay to speak at conferences. https://twitter.com/wiredferret/status/1129932920368574464 I self-funded a lot of conferences when I started speaking. I was more-or-less ok with it because I was using them as advertising and connections for my tech writing consultancy, so I treated them as…
DevOpsDays Copenhagen: Every Scar a Story
This was my first trip to Copenhagen, and it’s so cool to see how similar the DevOps community is all over the world. Everywhere I go, we have similar problems, and shared support and caring.
DevOne: Tinkertoys, Microservices, and Feature Management
This was my first trip to Austria, and let me tell you, Linz came to impress. Not only was there an amazing level of production value, the attendees were curious, interesting, and happy to talk to me about all the things a person can do with feature flags. I want to extend a big thank-you…
Book Review: Academic Slide Design by Ann E. Fandrey
This book says “Academic”, but it’s also an excellent resource for the person writing technical/software presentations. We often face the problem of trying to convey really important concepts in a way that serves people who are primarily listening to us as well as people who are reading the slides, either because they don’t speak the…
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,…
“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…
Upcoming appearances
O'Reilly Software Architecture/Velocity
The Lead Developer London
Full Stack Conference London
Texas Scalability Summit