To kick-off our highly-interactive and energetic full-day seminar we explore the source of credibility and how to establish it. We cover strategies for making a greater impact through our writing, including how to escape a pigeonhole, how to preach beyond the choir, and the value of framing your message and yourself as part of a larger public conversation. Participants leave this session with a newly crafted professional bio.

Want to write, but have no clue what you want to say? We’ll challenge you through fun collaborative exercises and design thinking activities to be more thoughtful and expansive when reflecting on your own knowledge, skills and experience. Participants will leave this session with no fewer than 20 new topics that they can blog or speak about.

To kick-off our highly-interactive and energetic full-day seminar we explore the source of credibility and how to establish it. We cover strategies for making a greater impact through our writing, including how to escape a pigeonhole, how to preach beyond the choir, and the value of framing your message and yourself as part of a larger public conversation. Participants leave this session with a newly crafted professional bio.

Even though we all know how much public speaking can advance our careers and increase the visibility of our fellow members of marginalized groups, let's be honest: it's terrifying!!! Especially if you're an introvert or have a social anxiety disorder like I do. In this talk, we'll explore strategies to excel at public speaking and conquer our fears through a series of incremental steps. From vocal variation exercises to video blogging to PowerPoint parties (more fun than it sounds!), I'll share everything that helped me become a public speaker while conquering my social anxiety along the way. In psychology we call this "systematic desensitization". I just call it "lots of small wins over time"!

Whether delivering a status report to a manager or engaging with questions at the end of a presentation, we all face moments when we need to deliver thoughtful, strategic messages on the fly. As with any public-speaking skill, extemporaneous speaking becomes easier with practice--but there are also specific tactics that can help speakers appear (and become) more confident when they need to leave their notes behind.

To kick-off our highly-interactive and energetic full-day seminar we explore the source of credibility and how to establish it. We cover strategies for making a greater impact through our writing, including how to escape a pigeonhole, how to preach beyond the choir, and the value of framing your message and yourself as part of a larger public conversation. Participants leave this session with a newly crafted professional bio.

Git is the most widely used open source version control system. Git, like any language, opens the door to a world of possibilities, including contributing to open source, collaborating with others on projects, showcasing your code work publicly, hosting a blog and so much more! Git and tech, go hand in hand.

"Kate comes across as too pushy and abrasive in front of clients. Maybe she should try to be more accommodating." "Jim can really be a strong driving force when it comes to convincing clients. His confident approach shows clients we believe in what we’re doing." This is an all-too-common example of similar behaviour perceived and evaluated differently based on one’s gender presentation. Does this situation sound familiar? If it does, you’ve probably experienced gendered feedback - a construct that harms everyone and is never fair. In this talk we will discuss how to identify gendered feedback when it’s not so obvious, how it’s having a tangible impact on your career success and how to protect yourself from it while leveraging your peer network.

Sometimes, we want to make changes to processes and habits our team has, but it’s not around the code itself. How can we do that? How do we make changes to the habits of hundreds? Moreover, how can we do this work as individual contributors? Many times, debugging your organization is work that goes undone but can be an effective force-multiplier. This talk will act as a starting guide to making good trouble at work, culminating in tangible tips for how to rebrand troublemakers into change agents.

Salary transparency is a necessary precursor to salary fairness. In advocating for salary transparency, we face three main obstacles - a concern for employee's privacy, social stigma against open talk about money issues, and desire to obscure salary inequity. This talk will discuss some approaches to communicating the importance of salary transparency as well as assuaging concerns about those issues.

What would it look like to save the world - to help people become and stay healthier, to make the world more equitable, to mitigate ecological disaster? How do you craft a career in service of that goal? This talk proposes a strategy for identifying the causes you're passionate about, how to build the skills that will prepare you to work effectively in highly constrained environments, and where to get started. We’ll talk about: Abandoning the savior mentality, Guiding entrepreneurial ambition through user-centered design, The pros and cons of working for-profit, non-profit, and for-the-government, Common technical stacks in the social good space, Looking for opportunities, How to cope with disillusionment, and more! Attendees will leave with a high-level view of the tech for good ecosystem and some advice for how to navigate it, grounded in real world examples.

How can you present ideas quickly and effectively? In this session we’ll talk about the components of a powerful, evidence-based argument; and share a few helpful outline formats to help you put your ideas on the page.

Making a funny remark on your feet in front of strangers is intimidating. Luckily for us, good improv isn't about making well-timed jokes or being the funniest person in the room. For some, learning improv comedy can even reduce social anxiety. Improv for Introverts is a safe space to try out improv through supportive exercises. The lovely thing about these energizing improvised-theater activities is that everyone is expected and ENCOURAGED to have fun and make mistakes. This workshop's activities are specially crafted to focus on lifting the next person up (instead of competing with them)! By the end of the workshop, you'll feel more comfortable with ambiguity and authentically connected to others. You'll also walk away with ways to foster more welcoming environments where you work and beyond.

The reality of domestic violence doesn’t disappear when people enter the digital world. Abusers use technology to exploit and control their victims, meaning that technologists have a responsibility to ensure that users of our products are empowered to protect their safety. How can we prevent people with violent intentions from forms of abuse and control that are digital, such as exploiting online banking software to control a partners finances or tormenting them with smart home devices? How can we recognize points of possible intervention where we might be able to help a user who is experiencing domestic violence? How can we make it harder for stalkers to find their victims? While there’s no simple answer and ultimately no way to ensure our users’ safety in all situations, thoughtful considerations and small changes while designing and building products can and does result in meaningful contributions to people’s safety. This talk will help the audience get into the right mindset for thinking about safety and provide a framework for building technology against domestic violence.

Stereotypes are ever present in our lives. Design stereotypes are no different. Designers sometimes unknowingly design for what we believe is “feminine” or “masculine” in the colors, layouts, and typographic treatments we choose to apply to our work. I want to embrace the concept of gender-neutral design; where we are not designing for gender specifically, but for people all together.

Results of ethical plights make international headlines overnight — from Boeing 737 Max crashes, to 23andMe genetic data sharing, and more. Ethical dilemmas with technology force us to confront difficult a questions: who gets the last word when it comes to making money or doing what’s right? In this talk, we’ll examine why ethics in technology is uniquely challenging to address, how key contributors think about it, and explore how to equip ourselves for an active role in making sure everybody does good.

Online harassment and abuse is a major problem, and when users don't feel safe on a platform, they will leave. In this talk I argue that everyone who is building software for humans has the ethical responsibility to build with user trust & safety in mind. With that perspective, I walk through the framework my team uses to evaluate and develop features, and I give examples of this framework in action. I hope that attendees will come away from this talk knowing why they should and how they can bring the principles of trust & safety back to their own work.

Do you want a fair salary for you and your friends? Do you feel awkward talking about money unless it’s to talk about a deal you got at Target? Do you wish you could just pay someone to negotiate on your behalf? Do you dread the fact that you have to be an adult and advocate for yourself? If you said yes to those questions, this is the talk for you! First, we’ll talk about how you can answer those awkward questions about what your current salary is and what salary your looking for so you don’t get that heart in the throat kind of feeling. Then, we’ll set you up to do the right research for a fair salary because who can argue with data? We will talk about tips and tricks for your upcoming negotiation, but we’ll start you on the right plan to be confident and prepared for the next negotiation. We will finish it off with some real life practice in a safe space and give each other feedback on how we can improve. Let’s start closing the wage gap today!

The most common reason are participants cite for not blogging or writing is "I don’t have time." Lucky for you we scheduled it into this session. Use the outline you created to write a draft blog post and give/receive feedback from your peers.

Do you imagine the absolute worst when it comes to giving a technical talk? Come learn how I gave my first tech talk gone bad, a full 45 mins (shudder!) and yet came out alive after several mistakes. I had all the ingredients of a good tech talk gone bad - Audio/Video fail, nerves, tough audience, challenging Q&A etc. And still managed to come out as one of the best talks at the tech conference per audience voting! You may know what to do at a tech talk, now learn what not to do as I walk you through each failure scenario and how I recovered from them.

We live in an age where more products are using personal data such as facial recognition and location information, and having implications on the well-being and safety of people of color, women, the LGTBTQ+ community, and those with disabilities. This talk is about how critical it is for those of us in tech to build products that put humans first and profit-focused metrics second. It will touch on how the lack of inclusion in the building of these products is impacting our world, and what we can do to change things for the better.

Toxic workplaces come in many kinds, and some are so sneaky you won’t know you were in one until you’re long gone. Abuse survival is like that sometimes. Time in the industry helps give you that baseline, but wouldn’t it be nice to identify these before you have years of trauma to get over? This talk will be going over various ways that workplaces can be toxic, the psychological safety techniques that work to survive them, and how to identify you may be adopting some of these techniques. Knowing you’re in a toxic environment helps isolate the long-term damage, and gives you a leg up in relearning healthier techniques when you get to a safer place of work.

As a software engineer for the last 8 years, I've encountered many technical problems and challenges. The most difficult one? Writing a book to teach kids how to code in Python! I'll give you insights on how I accomplished this monumental task while maintaining a regular 9-5!

Are you working with impact and purpose? Are you solidly attuned on what you're doing month-to-month with your role? How difficult is it for you to track your accomplishments at work? If any of these questions lead to uncertain answers, then you should learn what it means to journal professionally as a dev. This talk will cover my exploration into journaling and its application to tracking my goals and progress as a software engineer. I will discuss how to set up your journal for any goals and how to score on your performance review!

If you are a new open source contributor, you must have been told at some point: "Start by contributing docs to open source projects". But no one tells you how to do it. How do you choose an open source project to contribute docs to, how do you communicate with the project maintainers, and how do you actually write the docs. These are the questions I intend to help answer in this talk. Drawing on my experience as a Senior Tech Writer at an open source organization and a docs contributor to other open source projects, I want to share my process of finding and choosing an open source project to contribute docs to, interacting with project maintainers, and my technical writing process to create useful documentation.

For the year of 2019, I was determined to get over my fears and start writing 300 words every day. A friend of mine created a platform called Write Together which uses a GitHub inspired streak counter to help incentivize writers on the platform to write daily. Now 136 days strong, and counting, I want to share how writing has had numerous benefits for my wellbeing, friendships, and career, and how and why you should start your own writing practice too!

When it comes to accessibility, in the Javascript community we often forget to talk about what it takes to get on the internet in the first place, yet the Federal Communications Commission estimates that 34 million Americans don’t have access to the internet. Where do these people go when they need to check their email, turn in their homework, or apply for a job? To the original open archive for information: public libraries! In this talk we will peer into the digital divide and learn about what public libraries across the United States are doing to support their communities access to the world wide web. We will discuss how hardware constraints, PC reservation software, browser access, and broadband speeds affect user experience and what we can do to help librarians and the Digital Inclusion movement. 

Whether this is your first year as an engineer or your tenth, our origin stories are more similar than we realize. From writing your first “Hello, World!” program, to maintaining your an unruly legacy system, and everything in between, the code we write shapes us. This is a love letter to all the code I’ve written, read, reviewed and (sometimes) loathed. The laughs and frustrations in this talk are shared by anyone that’s ever had to debug a missing semicolon or thought they weren't good enough to do the job they were already doing. The lessons learned are ones I’ve taken with me everywhere I go.

We all know we should be contributing to open source. But if you are like me, actually doing it for the first time can be daunting. I made my first contribution to an open source project this year, and there were a lot of hurdles that tripped me up. In this talk, I will share the mistakes I made in that first PR, as well as the things that I did well that helped me (eventually) get that PR merged.

In a successful software development project, a key challenge is to manage complexity because projects get very complex very quickly even within small teams. Version control is the tool for communicating intent in our codebase over the life time of the project. Rebasing allows us to revise our development history before sharing it with the team. Learn to use Git commit messages to keep track of the intent of your code changes to make it easier to make future changes. Learn how to make using feature branches less painful and more effective. Learn the mechanics of interactive rebasing, how to merge conflicts without losing precious code and how to auto-squash commits. Basically, stop fearing interactive rebasing.

In theory, web performance, accessibility, and inclusive design and development all have similar goals: Provide the best, most consistent experience to all people using the minimal amount of resources. In practice, this often falls apart. Product creators define what it means to be performant from where they stand, which is typically from places of privilege with unseen biases, struggling to find true empathy with their users. Through this talk, we'll examine how to build conscientiously, looking within to resist systematic problems in order to create more truly performant, accessible, and inclusive systems for our users.

"There’s no team without trust," A study on team performance revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety. This session will present keys to enabling psychological safety in your workspace and discuss the following five categories for creating trust in teams: psychological safety, dependability, structure & clarity, meaning of work, and impact of work.

As a manager, your success is tied to the performance of your team, which can make it challenging to recognize your own accomplishments. If you ignore these triumphs, you’re actually at risk of becoming a detriment to those who look up to you and not elevating yourself for future opportunities. This talk will help leaders identify tangible ways to measure and track their progress, as well as demonstrate how they can continue improving their skillsets.

A career path, like any path, can contain bumps and obstacles. But we don't often hear about the stumbling blocks along the way, leading many to believe their experiences are singular and isolated. Learn the best tools for professional progress despite setbacks by discussing strategies, dispelling myths, providing resources and speaking openly about the potholes on the road to success.

For an industry where we constantly need to be picking up new knowledge to succeed as engineers, product managers, designers, technical writers, and everything in between: we're actually pretty bad at communicating with each other. One thing I've been experimenting with lately is using sketchnoting and low-fidelity doodles to complement technical explanations. By adding simple visuals that require no artistic talent, my written content has gained far greater traction than before, and it's even helped me to grow a wider, more diverse professional network. In this workshop, I'll walk attendees through (1) building a visual library of technical subject matter, (2) applying some illustration tricks to make simple doodles look more sophisticated, and (3) thinking about modeling technical concepts in cartoon metaphors for more nuanced storytelling. By the end of this session, all attendees will have the seeds of a new superpower planted.

Work in teams to build a node-powered battle bot and compete to be the *ultimate DIY robot champion.* In this workshop participants will combine cardboard, circuits and open source software to learn about working with hardware. Everyone is welcome, no experience required. Laptop with node installed may be helpful, but is not necessary. First rule of DIY robot fight club - have fun!

When you think about your career, do you find yourself torn between two fields? Traditional companies may make it seem like you have to choose, but we think differently. As “hybrid” engineers, we’ll discuss how we combined our passion for other disciplines with software to build meaningful career paths.

Understanding new concepts and complex systems is hard. Explaining them? That’s even harder. Like anyone in a highly specialized career, software engineers may struggle to convey information concisely, confidently, and clearly to technical and non-technical folks. As an illustrator and former graphic designer, Anna has found that visual art can be the key to both deeper understanding and clearer, more accessible communication. In this talk, we’ll explore why the ability to clearly communicate is vital to mastering complex topics, how to choose the right abstractions to present to a specific audience, and how a different medium can provide a new lens through which to view a familiar concept.

If you you ask the experts how to write ‘good’ software, they will likely emphasize precision and predictability. They may recommend great tools like functional programming, immutability, testing, and type systems — all of which aim to make software more reliable. But software must interact with the real world to be useful, and the real world always presents scenarios software does not account for. You can’t write good software by trying to architect unpredictability out of your program. To write good working software, you must build systems that work well even though they are unpredictable and incomplete. Your code has to describe and solve a real world problem without accounting for all details of the problem. Good software tells a narrative, but like all narratives leaves things out. Maybe good programmers are really just good story tellers. Story telling is a process that we do all the time, including with our personal histories. Story telling both approximates the truth and influences our reality — the stories we tell affect how we remember the past and behave in the future. This has interesting implications for writing software - the systems we design affect and change the nature of the real problems they’re designed to address. And the story we tell in code is directed as much to other programmers as it is to the machine the code runs on. Recognizing the messy, very human nature of writing software teaches us to trust our intuition, and makes us better programmers.

Many people are shy of accepting praise, and highlighting their professional achievements to the detriment of their own career success. The reasons why they are uncomfortable advocating for themselves could be gendered, cultural or societal. In this talk, I hope to highlight the specific ways to phrase your wins, and position your thinking to not get left behind due to a lack of perceived value.

Getting a team together, and don't want to try the traditional ice breakers again? Get to that Psychological Safety by get-ZINE to know you! This workshop will guide you through the process of using this zine for you and your colleagues to know more about eachother, and get to some understanding for establishing awareness and trust.

One of the really great things about learning to code is that so much of that learning can take place online, on our own time. If video is your thing, you know what a powerful medium it can be. You have something unique and interesting to offer whether that be in the form of a conference talk, blog posts, etc. Share it through a screencast! This session walks though the basic steps to help you design your own screen cast. We’ll cover some options for basic equipment, software, distribution, and lots of tips to help you develop and deliver the best content you can.

I took a sabbatical in October 2018 after a very difficult year, both personally and professionally. I stopped working and traveled by myself for three months, during which I started the slow and deep process of healing. This talk (which might feel more like poetry at times) aims to share some wisdom I have gathered on this journey -- that this industry, this world, wounds us and that we need to heal and transform ourselves in order to transform anything else.

"Don’t trust HR," is something you hear a lot, and with good reason: fundamentally, the role of Human Resources is to protect a company's interests. (I should know: I used to work in HR before I became an engineer!) However, there are situations where the company’s interests and your interests are aligned, where involving HR might be a good idea. How can under-represented technical workers leverage Human Resources to help our teams and ourselves? In this talk, I'll explain the different types of HR folks you're likely to encounter in the wild. I'll share some principles you can apply to understand whether or not HR can actually help you, including real world stories from both sides of the table.

We all know about self-care in the abstract. That it's good for us to find work/life balance in an increasingly multi-tasked world. That it's something we all need to be doing more of. However in reality many of us don't pay attention until it's too late. We burn out under a burden of high expectations and low self-esteem. And we struggle to break the cycle of stress and sustain the path to recovery. This is a talk about my ongoing journey - from recognizing symptoms to proactively creating tools and design patterns to help me navigate the stresses that impact my physical and mental well-being. I will start by unpacking the science of stress and it's connection to self-esteem. I'll then share specific strategies I use to combat key issues in my life, and provide analogies and design patterns that can hopefully motivate others to create self-care toolkits personalized to their needs.

What does it take to have a 10- or 20-year career in tech — or even longer? We could talk about the hard work and technical skills, mentoring and collaboration, and privilege that can be involved. There’s one big way we can increase the odds for all of us, though, and that’s to organize. From #talkpay to unionization, you’ll learn about the skills and tactics that will give us the opportunity to continue our tech work in the healthiest way over time.

GitHub Learning Lab (https://lab.github.com/) helps people build real-world skills by completing fun, realistic projects in their own GitHub repositories. Instead of a traditional tutorial or webcast, GitHub Learning Lab is an app that provides a learning experience you can actively participate in. You’ll learn by completing issues that are opened by a bot in a GitHub repository. After you finish tasks, the friendly Learning Lab bot will give you advice and helpful feedback. This presentation and hands-on workshop will introduce you to existing Learning Lab courses and gives you the tools you need to build courses that will help others learn too.

Do you have a great team & a great mission but don't understand why the pace of delivery is so slow? Architecture & tech stack is only one part of the story. I believe high performing teams need four things to be effective: Mastery - The skills & knowledge needed to do a great job, and a clear path to get to the next level. Autonomy - The space to figure out their own solution to a problem & how they want to work. Purpose - A clear sense of direction, and the knowledge of how what they’re working on fits into the big picture & helps their team succeed. Safety - A team that is afraid won’t take risks or experiment, a team that is afraid of finger-pointing won’t learn from mistakes. In this talk I’ll explain why those four things are key to teams being successful and give examples of how I’ve turned teams around by fixing the lack of one or more of them. Attendees will leave with practical examples of how to diagnose & change their teams.

Are you frustrated with meetings? Do you struggle to manage difficult personalities? Do you feel like you spend hours talking, but never reach a decision? These are all problems that can be solved with facilitation! I have been training and practicing facilitation in my company for the last several months and have seen the benefits it can bring. In this talk, I will share with you the ways that facilitation can transform your meetings to improve efficiency, outcomes, and happiness and will give you some techniques for how you can start to practice facilitation in your work.

No one cares more about your career than you. Whether it’s your first job, or you are an experienced manager we all report to someone. Our managers can’t help us get where we want to go if we don’t talk about it. Without speaking up, your manager is flying blind. This talk will highlight how you can manage your boss to better the daily communications, and guide your long-term career planning.

Ever wish you could make a deck appear like a magician? After writing your talk, the next step is making a presentation slide deck, which may feel like the most difficult trick to pull off. If you’ve felt stuck staring at a blank screen not knowing where to start, you’re not the only one. This talk will reveal resources and tips to help you get unstuck (hopefully!) and prepare you with the knowledge to improve your efficiency in crafting decks when you need them. Learn simple guidelines, design principles, and tools to elevate the user experience for all your audience viewers offline and online and help build confidence in preparing them for send off from a conference A/V guru's perspective.

Becoming a parent is a big life change. Being the first person to need parental leave at a startup makes it feel even more daunting. This talk walks you through steps you can take to educate your company about what leave you're entitled to and shows how you can own the situation and take control. This talk is for anyone who works in startups who is thinking about having a baby (or adopting one!), is currently expecting a child, or just wants to be an ally in the workplace for soon-to-be parents.

Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t ask a tech question at work because you were scared people would think it was dumb? 
Well, you’re not alone! In this talk we’ll examine our reluctance to ask questions in the workplace and how the stereotype of the 10x superstar developer is driving us to second-guess and devalue ourselves as developers. We’ll explore the roles that psychological safety and debunking stereotypes have on nurturing creative and supportive spaces in tech. Come find out how asking your dumb question helps make that happen.

Modern humans aren't great at risk assessment. We often blithely ignore things that could harm us, and are intimidated instead by things that are factually quite safe. This has vast implications for all aspects of our lives, including our careers. In this talk, we'll explore root causes of fear and anxiety, and discover how we can work to deliberately rewrite our "instincts", redirect our worry toward what actually matters, and channel it into productive outcomes that make us safer, happier and less stressed.

I entered the tech industry from a nontraditional path. I felt as if I was alone during my journey. I constantly felt overwhelmed by the idea of entering the industry as a black, female, self taught, developer. Growing up, I was told I had to be twice as good to get half of what they got. This nontraditional path broke that idea, and I struggled with finding a way to overcome my own self doubt. I searched for help. I tried to find people who would get this feeling, people who looked like me and struggled with some of the same issues. I quickly found several local communities that focused on supporting, uplifting, and empowering women (queer, cis, trans, nonbinary). There were all of the things I needed, but it still didn’t feel right. Between their marketing, the way their program was structured, to the way leadership ran the organization, nothing about the space felt like it was made to support me. This space wasn’t made with me in mind. I decided to keep my head down and learn what I needed despite feeling alienated in this space. These experiences opened my eyes to how easy it is for organizations empowerment strategies to turn into harm when they’re not focused on protecting the most marginalized individuals in their community. To me, getting community right was simple: create a space where the most marginalized people feel safe, and this space will be safe for everyone. As an individual, this is what I tried to do whenever anyone needed help on their tech journey. At work, during events, and in online communities, I became the person that would drop anything to help someone that was stuck in their tech journey. Little by little, I saw what type of organization people needed. I saw the gaps in the market, and I knew I had the empathy and skill set to build it. That became the birth of Tech By Choice. Tech By Choice became a way for me to fix all of the things I saw broken. A way to build a community for those who felt left out. I went through the stages of building the team, creating the mission, finding our values, and doing the neverending legal paperwork to create a nonprofit organization whose goal is to authentically support all underrepresented groups, at all stages of their journey.