what's going on y'all hi everyone I'm so excited to be here with all y'all I'm so excited for this event uh we got some people already in the chat waiting so that's fantastic I love all these comments that we're seeing in here do me one favor right now in the chat let us know where you're joining in from we already have it looks like over 70 people watching this and this is growing fast let us know where in the world you're joining us from to be completely honest and let us also if you can what
tech stack are you using what do you use to develop with with that being said Ria go ahead yes thank you Danny I would also like to know like what is something that you're most excited about for this event while you're joining this event and by the way to start with welcome to International women's day San Francisco 2021 Summit I am your host for the event and I'm riia I wear a couple of hats I'm a women hi makers Ambassador for San Francisco chapter I am a gdg organizer which is Google develope
r groups organizer for San Francisco and Cloud San Francisco chapter I'm also a senior software engineer at Quizlet and I do a lot of things other than being geeky um if you don't know about women take makers program or gdg programs let me just give you a little bit about that women take maker programs are is a program which is specifically designed to provide visibility community and resource for women in technology and Google developer groups that program aims to provide Technical Training on
emerging Google Technologies as well as to provide a safe environment I have been with gdg and women Technical Community since 2013 so it has been a long time since I've been a part of this community and let me tell you this thing two years ago I organized an international women's day event back in Sal Lake City and that event literally changed my life like the person who you are seeing today is so so much different than what I was two years ago I had no idea how to um how to be a public speaker
I had I was like I had no idea how to ask for what I deserve I had no idea that I could write a blog post or you know I I was like so naive in my career that when I was getting underpaid I didn't do anything think about that I didn't like I was going through a rough phase in life and it was just so hard and these communities actually helped me navigate through difficult situations in my life it provided me a safe environment it provide I'm literally like at this point I would say that I'm reall
y thriving because of the support that these communities have given me so if you're not a part of women hick makers chapter or if you're not a part of GD chapter right now please please please do a small Google search and join your nearest Google developer group chapter and be a part of women hick makers community and I really hope that like the two years ago that even changed my life I really hope that this event today will change your life and help you move forward in your life maybe it could
be like you're creating a new creating a new game using JavaScript or maybe you're writing a new blog post now or maybe you you finally got rid of your imposter syndrome or you found a path to leadership or maybe I'm attending your next live streaming event or maybe you have found new ways to sketch note and sharing your creativity with everyone or maybe you found many other ways to get into Tech yes all these topics are covered today and we have amazing speaker lineup I really hope you have fun
and you enjoy this thing before that I also want to highlight a quick note that we are going going to follow a strict code of conduct that is specifically mentioned on our website as well um please be nice to everyone we are we are all here to share our knowledge to learn from each other and speak up if you hear or see something please reach out to me personally my email address is just my first name last name at gmail.com or I can be reached on Twitter or you can tag us at gdg SF on Twitter gd
g San Francisco on Twitter I'm so sorry for saying the chat I'm wrong but yeah please let me know if you if there are any issues we'll be moderating the chat we'll be we'll be there for you we want to make sure that this is a safe environment for you too moving on I would like to thank few people and few organizations who really made this event possible and first of all like I always do I want to thank me because I am amazing and I matter and I'm so excited that yes like I'm doing this thing for
myself so I really want to thank me for showing up today and I want to make sure that you also thank yourself that you have made this so far in your life and you showed up today second thing is I also want to highlight and give a special shout out to Google developer groups North America Community Karina kubra and Danny Danny has been really amazing and so so so much helpful to me in the entire duration of organizing this event trust me like with everything that's going on in my life and with t
he of Danny this event was really possible because of him and you know like you might find this like funny but just like yesterday evening or yesterday afternoon I reached out to Danny saying that man the event is tomorrow and I have no idea how to even host a live stream event because I have never done that I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing right now and Danny was so humble so quick to respond and like we jumped on a call in 15 seconds like 15 minutes and then Danny literally helped me
set up this event so really thank you so much Danny for being an ally and for helping me putting this event together to be completely honest you've echoed a lot of things that I feel I absolutely love meetups and events like this and to be completely honest with you if it wasn't for free educational events like this I don't know if I would have ever made it into this industry having valuable speakers like on Cubo Ali spel Paris Athena and the rest on the the roster actually donating their time
to be here to help to uplift and educate that means the world not just for me as a human being but for our community because not everyone doesn't have the luxury of going to a $20,000 Boot Camp or $100,000 year college so having resources like that help lift up our entire Community together and if it wasn't for those resources I never would have been able to learn I started on freecodecamp.org I love that website I'll talk about it till the day I die probably that gave me my entry weight into th
is field and because of that I went from frying chicken in the gas station to I work at Google now and I'm I'm beyond ecstatic about that the possibilities of educational events like this and your community supporting you it's worth more than gold in my opinion so wherever you are in the world type in gdg in your city name see if there's one there if there isn't type in a neighboring City if if it's not there you may have the opportunity to start one for your community and bring resources suppor
ted by Google for them so check that out highly recommend that one other thing I want to give a highlight to we have some incredible incredible partners and sponsors for this event I really want to highlight plural site plural site amazing company amazing educational content and we are giving away six memberships to plural site at the end of this uh event tonight not only that scrimba scrimba has a very interactive platform some of our speakers even have courses on there definitely definitely ch
eck out scribo we are giving away five one-year long memberships to scribo today not only that we also have veral skills verel skills is transforming the way boot camps work not only that veral skills and unlike a $220,000 a year a three-month boot camp they literally have a $149 $149 monthly fee for the boot camp where you get Hands-On training par programming sessions and questions with actual software Developers so highly highly recommend that and we're giving away three six-month memberships
to their platform as well but not only that we're giving away some more udemy courses because of course can't can't be wrong going with a couple udemy courses but we also have some of our amazing speakers donating some mentoring sessions with people that win it I can't even begin to stress how incredible this is going to be I I'm I'm blown away I'm Blown Away by everything that we're able to make happen I'm blown Blown Away by everything that we're able to do and I'm Blown Away by you even bein
g here with us yes thank you so much and know that I I love mentorship so much that in the last one year all of my growing has all of my growth has actually come from mentorship I have so many amazing mentors at work in my life like at outside work and they really help you grow so I really hope that you stick to the end of this and like be a part of this thing like enjoy this as much as you can we really really hope that you love this session um moving on I would like and really thank you so muc
h for spending your Thursday with us moving on I would like to introduce our next speaker um so yesterday when I posted about the event in my office chat I was told that the the best comment that I received was like I love Ana's building Javas script game videos and I'm so excited to see her and so it is my honor and it's my pleasure to introduce you to Ana who is such an amazing course creator on YouTube and I absolutely love all the YouTube content that she has created over to you Ana hey ever
yone oh my God what an amazing I love the energy this is H such a great starting off so well I'm really enjoying it so far so thank you for that amazing introduction uh for those of you who haven't heard of me my name is Ana Kubo and I am a software developer from London I know a lot of people are sharing your Stacks so I'm going to share too uh the stacks I use at work on a daily basis are react xjs uh and graphql those are the main ones that sort of come to mind but my channel is much more div
erse uh we do stuff like seress functions um and uh a lot of more interesting things that I can't share with you I'd love to share with you but keep your eyes peeled uh in my personal channel on my personal Channel I do Focus mainly around teaching JavaScript primarily by teaching how to make lots of games and we'll go into why that is important in a second um so yeah let me just get sharing I usually do everything um you know much more refined so bear with me uh doing stuff live is still sort o
f new to me share screen okay all right sharing screen and let's do it okay so for those of you who haven't heard of me uh here are my links to YouTube and Twitter now what we're going to talk about today is we're going to start off with some story telling and then move on to unlocking the power of functions through games and then the computer science methods you can learn through games so stuff like recursion and then move on to algorithms we're not going to be doing a deep dive into these as I
'm not sure if uh everyone is uh or what kind of level you are in your learning career or if you are specializing in JavaScript some going to be really meta about it so that everyone can follow essentially so story uh everyone knows how the power of stories stories are super powerful we learn stuff through them when we're young and I think that they are perfectly applied to learning how to code for example take this this is great if something is true increment something uh and then add a a value
to an element's text content it's fine right but you're not really going to remember this it's sort of boring in a way like you don't really get much what's going on um and if you can't really put into context you're never going to remember this as a young developer if especially when it comes to this right you know you're working with arrays array this remove that add something else like it's it's it's fine but not really as powerful as perhaps this so this is exactly the same if you look at t
his and that we're essentially saying if something is true so for example in this we're talking about Game of snake for those of you who might have already got that if the first sign is true so if your current snake's head contains an apple then you want a bunch of stuff to happen but this is already a lot more memorable in my opinion we're applying a story to the code and that is why I get passate I get so frustrated when I see tutorials which are like this I mean I think I think it's it's fine
but I think without the storytelling you're never really going to learn something which is why I do that that in my videos I really apply that storytelling to code you know like I would have never thought the two go together storytelling and code but hey uh okay so here we go if we think of a game of snake we can see that oops if we look at this one thing we are saying that if the snake head contains an apple then we remove the Apple we make the tail so we add another class of snake to the tail
we then record how big that uh current snake is we generate a new Apple we add one to the score and then we display the score for our user and then we speed all up so these are two exact pieces of code that do the same thing but how much more readable is the one on the right it's it's yeah it's not even comparable so moving on to that we're going to go on to unlocking the powers of functions and another reason why I like to teach games through sorry coding through games it's just because it's s
o much more powerful we really get to um explore the power of functions throughout to do this I have a comparison for you let's go with option number one so option number one is building a portfolio so let's say we built this portfolio we buildt an HTML CSS and JavaScript the only JavaScript that's really going on here is for the toggle okay so we will toggle this with this simple function right here it's a function that says toggle function and all we're going to do is add a class list of show
okay so there's our one function it does one thing a portfolio doesn't always I mean it can be a little bit more complicated but in general most portfolios I've seen are pretty simple and it would involve a little bit of JavaScript like this enter snake so we have already seen how much happens in one function nine things can happen happen in one function so already when you're Building G a snake it's already getting you're already practicing um JavaScript in a lot in much more detail you're alre
ady thinking about everything a lot more which is why I think building games is uh maybe a step up from building a portfolio obviously being a building a portfolio is still great but when you want to take things to that next extra level I really do recommend messing around with games and next we have have another game mind sweeper so we've looked at building portfolios with one function we have a game of snake which in my example one function does nine things and now we can also learn uh compute
r science through making games so like in mind sweeper to do this um we are going to be using recursion I mean if I read this out to you right in computer science russion is a method of solving a problem where Solutions depend on solutions to smaller instan of the same problem it's a bit like yeah great but what does this mean like how can I use this and um I think the best thing to do in this situation is to show you this explanation that I've made like this is just sort of like for fun okay um
but let's do it ah hey kodat how's it going oh hey Ana all good here how's your video doing very well thanks just teaching of these guys from computer science I think the audience has a question for you what ission well in the least amount of words recursion is a function that calls itself until it can't anymore that calls itself that's right ah you mean a little bit like this here we have an ice cream and I don't like this ice cream it's too small in fact I know the exact ice cream that I want
it is blue with a flower on it this is my base case now I can apply a function to this to check for my ice cream in say the next five surrounding shops if this ice cream is not the exact one I want we will keep going to the recursive case of the function meaning we will check the five stores of those five stores we just checked until we find my ice cream and I stop throwing a tantrum so that was a simple explanation about what recursion is all about let's have a look at it in code here is how w
e will be using recursion in order for our so as you can see we have gone from reading about recursion in this one line to understanding a little bit more about it just by this by by talking about how we're going to uh find the base case of our uh mind sweeper game and then we start building it out by applying this code to it so I just think um sometimes when reading something like this it can be really hard like to understand exactly what's going on and it's not really until you start building
the game using things in practice that you really understand what uh a computer science uh method really is which brings me on to my next point so we've covered recursion by the way for those of you who don't know how to play mind sweeper please do give this um a watch in your spare time it is a really fun video that I I'm really proud of it uh especially because I do think that I cover recursion um quite well and then of course we do actually get to using it in the game if I just show you over
here hold on this is a quite a good animation that will show you exactly what is happening in so that that logic that we just applied we're going to apply it to the game check square but also we're going to be check squ SES on the board once again we will then apply the click function to each Square we have just checked causing the squares to appear to Fan out like this until so once again ladies and gentlemen that is recursion and that is what you can find when building a game of minder the nex
t thing that I want to talk to you about that is also um something you can learn from building games is algorithms so where were we so we've covered recursion mind sweeper um yes I showed you this through the video we can also apply recursion to the Mind sweeper game by literally meeting the base case by Fanning out so the base case would be the number the next thing that we're going to look at is algorithms and these are really fun uh I also have a few videos to show you for this uh the you you
can learn the two one well some two of some of the most popular algorithms so dep first search and breath first search by building mazes so for those of you who perhaps haven't heard of depth first search and breath first search before I think it's best to actually go to the uh Wikipedia examples for this first that first search is an algorithm for traversing or searching trees uh or graph data structures and you start the root node and you essentially uh explore as far so here as far along eac
h branch before backtracking so you're searching for something in your tree and if you don't find it you backtrack and then you start again PR first search on the other hand so again you're searching for something in your uh data structure in your graph data structure but instead of going all the way to each branch you uh explore all your neighbors okay so again a bit of Fanning out I'm going to show you this by these awesome I don't know whose YouTube channel this is but I'm going going to cred
it them because um these are so much fun they're actually really relaxing to watch so once again Deb first search ladies and gentlemen and everything in between um we are searching for something so we are finding something in our Maze and we are going to use the algorithm of Deb first search to find it and it looks like this so if you remember what I said we are going to be going to to the end of each branch and then if we hit a dead end then we go to another branch and so on okay so we're just
going and then retracting going and retracting this is uh One path finding algorithm if you do have the time I would suggest building this out yourself it's super fun and the other path maze finding maze maze Pathfinder that you can use when learning how to code when understanding algorithms is of course breath first search which is the one that BS out which checks all its neighboring notes and it looks a little bit like this so once again we are going to put something on the maze that we want t
o find so there we are and there's uh the point that we want to find and again we are searching all our neighboring so we are Fanning out these are two once again really popular algorithms that you might be quizzed on in uh an interview and so on I know I have been in the past and what better way to learn it is by creating your own Maze and really understanding what uh both the algorithms are all about so yeah here we have um again just a comparison of the two algorithms I feel like reading this
in the way it is now I mean it's great you can get all the information but until you really get your hands dirty and try coding uh one of these mazes or one of these games that include a maze like this you're not really going to grasp concept um that well so yeah that's just a little bit of advice to you from me and uh my years as a software developer and that's it that brings me to the end of my talk um if you do have any questions or if you do want to check how I made some of these games like
the mind superer game I also have of course other games like Pac-Man which does not involve the Pathfinder but there is an opportunity to I guess uh put in that Pathfinder if you want and a lot of other fun uh tutorials that you can code along with me as well going to stop sharing my screen honestly that was pretty damn awesome um we're already getting feedback that people loved your method of explaining how to use JavaScript in a way that um let me remove this Banner for a second uh that expla
ins JavaScript in a way that they probably haven't thought about it in a in a certain sense and I don't think when people think of JavaScript all the time they're thinking about you know um ways that they can interact and bring gaming into it and I think that's a really interesting take on how we can use JavaScript and we got some people dropping some questions right now um that we'll ask and the first question is Anya how long have you been coding for um I've actually been coding since 2014 but
I haven't been coding I've hav been coding professionally for a few years um so I'm a full stack software developer here in London working for uh a relatively big company um I will be transitioning to becoming a content creator fulltime however which is for me uh as well as creating more courses for scrimba I'm going to be joining free C Camp so yeah really big changes that's fantastic yeah so one question okay I I was really worried I was rushing through everything no no that was really awesom
e so I guess one question I have is when you're approaching your projects like for example like the mini sweeper or the um the Doodle Jump game that you did like what is your method like your methods of like saying okay I want to create this thing how do I even approach this project what are steps that you're taking in that respect to um code these things out yeah definitely I think it's important to first off decide how you're going to tackle it in terms of breaking stuff up into little compart
mentalized boxes which is why I think functions are also quite powerful you can really think about like what's going to happen here what's going to happen here what's the next point and that is something that I've I guess set out thinking is in like how I'm going to attack this game but you can also see it in my code my code is very sort of compartmentalized in that way um and I think that's what makes it more readable too so if you are going to start coding your own game and come from it with a
really fresh perspective as in like you know not using a tutorial just going like I'm going to do this then really think about like what are the stages that need to happen like one by one like you know like I said snake eats Apple then what happens and then what happens I'm breaking it up in in that way so yeah get a pen and paper out honestly that's my method as well to be completely honest um we have this question here Anya any advice for a beginner self-taught programmer learning JavaScript
uh yes I do okay so this is something that I think I didn't do at the begin beginning um I actually I mean I'm talking like quite a while ago now when I learned JavaScript but I actually just started watching tutorials and using mdn um which is my sort of like go-to was sort of like a second thought which now I'm like oh my God that is like the Bible refer to andan as much as you can H for those of you who don't know that's just a place where you know you can really um see everything that JavaSc
ript has to offer because I was watching tutorials I guess I didn't really make it didn't really click that all of these methods that I was using um were stored somewhere and I could see other options that are available to me um which is why in my tutorials I would say this is not a madeup thing I did not make this up I did not name this this is a JavaScript method just because that's what I sort of struggled with at the beginning um to sort of differentiate what's sort of offered with JavaScrip
t and what isn't so definitely refer to the document mentation mdn is mine uh my my go-to of choice and the same for every framework actually um going forward 100% I love that because I don't think enough like tutorials ever put enough stress on refer to documentation instead of another video tutorial like you can only get so far with the video tutorial without doing additional research so I I love that you reference that uh we have this good question here from Mato uh do you plan which games ca
n be used for data structures or you realize it later when you can use a special DS or algorithm um to be fair when I was doing mind sweeper that one sort of came to me afterwards and I was like wow this is so cool I get to practice this while doing recursion um just because what I was doing just happened to be recursion but I did read a really good book prior to it which is why I think I sort of recognized what it was for what it is for what it was if that makes sense and it's uh God you know I
think I have it here grocking algorithms it's so good it basically takes all the like most popular algorithms and and visualizes them with these little mirr cats and it might sound ridiculous but I really understood what these algorithms were by reading this book it's amazing uh I really recommend it um grocking algorithms that's what it's called uh if you want if you forget then just hit me up on Twitter and I'll I'll remind you awesome we have this uh really good question here can you suggest
the main things to learn in JavaScript to get strong fundamentals yeah for sure um I think my go-to as well obviously functions uh are like number one but then mapping for each that is stuff that's quite powerful especially when you move on to libraries such as react uh you use them quite a lot um those are the sort of main ones that come to mind in my in my personal opinion that are sort of like the most powerful uh classes as well um so yeah definitely cover those when you are learning I mean
there is quite there's quite a lot but those are the ones that stick out for me um and then there's of course like stuff like slicing push pop uh just array work stuff too so this this is a really good question that I like a lot that I want to ask right now uh what keep what kept you going when you started learning in 2014 to 2021 like seven years later right what kept you going on that path the entire time well I was actually working in finance at the time I was a broker in the commodity marke
ts and it was fun it was good um it was definitely good money I guess but I just wasn't passionate about it at all and my Escape was sort of like self- teing myself building websites for friends just you know like simple HTML and CSS stuff and it was just an escape from sort of what I had thought at the time was quite monotonous and really allowed me to express myself creatively um and sort of help out friends too so I really enjoyed that I actually built my own e-commerce website from it too ju
st sort of messing around with the HML and CSS as well at the beginning I really didn't know that much JavaScript at all um so it was just sort of like making these little projects uh following tutorials and so on and then yeah just taking the plunge and quitting Finance to do it sort of professionally and learn JavaScript and then Frameworks soon so I got a question for you yeah so I know you're about to transition positions and you're leaving your other one so I guess one question that I have
is what is a problem that you're trying to solve in 2021 and how are you going about doing it um I guess one of the problems that I really want to solve is I don't think there's and this is just for my personal opinion um I use graphql quite a lot at work and I don't I think personally I don't want to offend anyone if they work a graphql it's great I love grq but I think um the documentation can be quite intimidating and quite hard and I want to produce more uh information around it and really m
ake it easier and much more I guess uh beginner friendly um so that is something that I want to focus on later in my channel that's my personal sort of goal I really want to help people understand that and perhaps um be sort of the go-to person that if you do have any questions around it I can totally help you out uh that's sort of like my own personal goal um and yeah just reach out to many people as possible um Inspire them to go on their own Journeys Inspire them to you know really take the p
lunge like I did it took me way too long to make the plunge into finally leaving my job that I wasn't enjoying and becoming a software developer and like it was just my own head getting in my way really nothing else I love that and I completely agree with the uh graphql documentation I think it's extremely daunting especially for a beginner trying to get into it especially because I think a lot of people talk about it on like social media and they're like oh this is something that I should look
into and they look into it like I'm never touching that again like that's not happening so I think making that a very seamless transition is an amazing goal that's gonna help a lot of people um we have this question here uh if I load okay any ideas for someone who's switching careers when I'm applying for the first tech job and with it I guess we can ask this second part question which is do you have any advice for building unique projects to build your portfolio yes um well I guess the first th
ing that I would say is definitely Network as much as possible so you've already made that step by being here building that Network and Community is so unbelievably important I can't tell you it really makes such a difference I think um a lot of hiring today uh doesn't have to be done just by you know like people applying on LinkedIn people like to get if you attended like maybe an event um obviously now in real life is a bit more difficult but you just build that Rapport and part of the intervi
ew process is jelling with the team as well so you've already got that part down if you ja with something and you're also interviewing the company and the other person right the last thing you want to do especially when starting out on Tech especially as a developer like even if you love the company if you're getting bad vibes from the team and you don't feel like you can like rely them or ask them for questions like just just don't don't do it it's you're just going to make your life so much ha
rder your learning curve is going to be steeper um so that is one thing that I would suggest go out do the networking scope like interview the team back to see what they're like because that is um that's really important and then yes of course build up your portfolio get on the GitHub create some projects try show range in your projects try so something unique we all love a to-do list but can you give your own spin on it perhaps um just to show your personality as well if you're into fintech bui
ld a dashboard that handles payments use a I don't know like a payments API or an open banking API open up like a like an account or something and try mess around with it see if you can make transactions I think that's quite a good one um yeah so that there's one there's one idea for you but I think as long as you incorporate your personality and what you're interested in into a project uh the interviewer or the person receiving that GitHub will be like oh okay well I'm actually learning somethi
ng about this person and make the read me as like full and uh documented as you can like when I've received or as a team we've received people's um you know submissions to become a developer maybe from more Junior role I think what the ones that always stand out are the ones with a read me that you can tell someone's been like oh I'm going to really go to town and document everything and explain things or say like I could have improve improved this or this is on my to-do list I think this would
make the app better or even if you couldn't do it be like I try to implement this but didn't work um just because documentation at work is like something that we talk about every single day like improve the documentation improve update the documentation um so don't treat that as just like a side thing that you're going to worry about later because it's really not so one question we've had from several people so I'm just going to put one comment that should cover them all it's are games appropria
te to place on your portfolio what about games that require a download do you have a solution for that I think GES are definitely appropriate to place on your portfolio like I said um in my examples from the portfolio number one and the gamer snake number two it it's just shows so much more logical thinking um and so much more like uh I guess like a way of thinking that is very uh sought out for and sort out for in the development world so I think games are more than appropriate uh games that re
quire downloads I'm not quite sure what you mean by that do you mean probably like mobile development like apks and iOS oh yeah I mean if it's like a mobile like something built for an iOS or Android app then yeah I think that's that's even better right it just shows that um you know that tech technology so yeah uh we got this question here and this will probably be like our last one what clients side te technology should I learn for being a full stack developer react node.js or anything else uh
I also depends where you are in the world by the way but I can tell you from a London perspective I guess the stuff that's at the moment sort of um I guess in is react graphql typescript um those those three uh again it depends where you are if it's a small project I think learning about using servess functions quite in right now as well and might be quite impressive um and then of course if you don't want to do view you've got like sorry react you've got View and angle too so it's really um it
's up to you I think you've given some extremely valuable advice and I think the chat is definitely reacting to that in a very positive way one thing that I want to say is if you aren't following Anya let's fix that mistake today and follow her on all social medias uh we are huge fans of Anya and I thank you so so much for even doing this we've gotten feedback forms from your talk and it's almost exclusively five stars out of five stars people are in love with what you dropped today so thank you
so much for being a part of this thank you for donating your time and I know you have an insanely busy schedule so thank you for even being a part of this event thank you Ana thank you so much for having me it's been really fun um so I really appreciate the invite too thank you so much Ana for having for doing this for us thank you no worries all right bye bye so that was pretty incredible I think we both agree that we are both fans of Anya and we will always be fans of Ana everyone that's in t
he chat thank you for hanging out with us I see the numbers keep going up up and up and not a lot of people are leaving so that we must be doing something right I'm going to take that as a really good sign and just to let you know like we have have six more talks after this we have what is it like 30 giveaway prizes to give away today not only that you get to hang out with Rio all day today not only that you get to see this gorgeous smile pretty much for a good portion of the day today so you ca
n't go wrong there right but honestly I really love the interaction with the chat because not only are you guys asking incredible questions for these speakers but you're also communicating with each other this is a perfect time utilizing that chat to colle elaborate on the ideas that you hear these speakers dropping and really seeing like is this something that you know is good is bad do I love this do I hate this what is a different perspective utilize this chat throughout this function drop yo
ur information you know F follow each other if you have similar names outside of this I don't think you can share links on YouTube so you kind of uh pigeon hold in that area but what I will say is honestly thank all of y'all for hanging out and without further Ado we have the amazing the incredible Donar car him so excited everyone thank you so much for having me this is incredible like International women's day international women's month International women's year International women's Century
this is how love it love yes for for those that don't know like I'm such a huge fan of Donna I'm being calm cool and collected on the outside but on the inside like I'm screaming you have no idea but Donna is incredible I've known Donna for a little bit of time now we've done a couple things when I say she's about to drop some fire I know she's about to drop some fire so that further Ado I'm not GNA hold it up anymore Donna sakar hello everyone thank you so much for having me here today I am go
ing to attempt to use streamyard which I use like every day of my life so You' think I'd be good at it and Danny and Ria can we see this okay uh just let me know if we can't we can say okay just if you can just press that hide button on that Bottom bar at the bottom yeah okay there you go there you okay you think after a year pandemic I know how to use things by now but not so much okay so now we're we're moving on to the real talk portion of the program okay this is when we can let go of our ba
dass selves for a few minutes and just kind of be extremely vulnerable at least with ourselves and please drop answers into the chat how many of you have ever felt like there was a mistake stake in a process somewhere and you got to where you are by accident so that can be school that can be College it can be Community College it can be a boot camp it can be just phase in life it can be a job just be very honest with yourself how many of you have ever felt like that so it turns out that it's a r
eally bad process if they let in all of the people who feel that way by accident in fact processes don't have a 70% failure rate which is about how many percentage of people feel like that all the time I've been in this industry tech industry for 20 years it'll be 20 years this year I know and to this day I completely feel like an imposter I've worked at Microsoft for 16 of those years I'm decently senior at this point but to this day I feel like I do not belong in this industry I got here by ac
cident this is my mentor we're looking at a picture of my mentor whose name is Sanga Sanga is the vice president of crown castle which is an internet connectivity company in New York before she got this job she used to head up the Excel team many of you know what Excel is it's one of the most used Financial spreadsheet software things on the planet now she's right now in this picture holding a patent for some pivot table formula thing in Excel so I'd gone to talk to her like sing I was year five
I said I don't think I belong in this industry I think I got everything I've done I arrived here by luck it was just luck and being in the right place at the right time she laugh at me laughed and left and said ah do you know what this is and I said yes it is your patent for pivot table something hard and she said I have no idea what this is used for I know how to write code to build it but I have absolutely no idea what those Finance people on Wall Street use this for I have no idea this feeli
ng of you don't belong here it's completely normal so of course I did what any good engineering mentee would do which is I completely ignored her said no you're wrong what do you know you don't know what's going on in my head I am definitely an imposter and I don't belong in this industry so I did a bunch of research and it turns out that a bunch of people we know suffer from debilitating impostor syndrome this is first of all not a woman thing it's not a man thing it's it's a human thing it's v
ery much a human thing and it's not a newcomer thing it's also a thing they call it the CEO's disease because when someone first becomes a CEO they're absolutely convinced that someone made a mistake in the nomination voting process and they got there by accident so few years ago maybe five years ago I was at Grace Hopper which is the annual conference for women in technology it is a huge conference I think this year it was 18,000 people the year I was there and charl sanberg was giving one the
Keynotes now think what you will of Cheryl she is one of the most well-known people in this industry so she gets on stage and says I do not belong on the stage giving you this keynote and everyone's confused like Cheryl you're a billionaire also CEO of Facebook also CEO of LinkedIn or not LinkedIn um of lenan and you have started this whole plan B movement option b movement and she said I don't belong here because I don't technically have a computer science degree many of you have computer scien
ce degrees many of you work in coding jobs but I don't do that so I to this day feel like I got here by luck and Circumstance not because of my skills and that was such an eye- opening moment for me that this person who is so well known doesn't not actually believe she belongs in this industry so Seth godian is one of my favorite authors he writes all these great books on marketing and audience and stuff like that like tribes and the Purple Cow and just very interesting books and he wrote an art
icle a few years ago that said uh whenever one of my books come out by the way every one of his books is a New York Times bestseller everyone he said whenever one of my books comes out I'm convinced the New York Times can take up take out one of those ads you know those big huge full page ads when you did something really bad and that ad is going to say Seth godine is a hack he should be run out of New York and his book should be burned he said I'm convinced it's going to happen every time becau
se they're going to figure out I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about third one Howard schelz before he got weird Okay so let's think about a time when he's inventing Starbucks not when he's doing weird stuff he said I got advice from he used to sell um copy machines like Xerox copy machines door too he's a poor kid from New Jersey and he got sent on a business trip to Italy and saw all these adorable coffee shops where people sat down and drink coffee he thought why don't we have this
in the US so he pitched the idea to a friend the friend said that's a great idea you should do it he said I can't start coffee shops I'm a copy salesman with the p not with the FF his friend said Howard you'll figure it out he said I felt like an imposter starting Starbucks my entire career and now after you know 30 years he probably has a clue but so many people feel like this and it is so common now after a whole bunch of studies I realized imposter syndrome is kind of like a common cold 70%
of people experience this at some point or another now it's not a permanent thing it doesn't stay with you all the time but it does come and go and it tends to show up whenever we're in a unknown situation now I've been in tech industry for 20 years but I also have a bunch of other Industries I am a published auor of fiction and non-fiction I used to write books for teenagers fiction and then now I write books for early career people to do things like overcome imposter syndrome and built your br
and Etc I have been an engineer at Microsoft for 16 of those years I specialized for a long time in Windows development so things like the operating system but also Hollens which is the augmented mixed reality headset I'm a public speaker I speak on stages all over the world I think I've spoken in 36 countries and on the side I also have a fashion company called Primadonna Studios I run this full-time and across all of these industries I am convinced that I do not belong in any of them and at an
y moment someone is going to show up and say you do not belong here why are you here so I would love for you to drop a yes in the chat if this is you if these statements resonate okay there's a mistake in the process and I slipped in under the radar I'm not as good as the people around me this one gets lots of hands oh that good thing that happened it was dumb luck I was in the right place at the right time I say this all the time all the time and then my favorite any minute now someone's going
to point to me and say you are so not qualified to be here like a guy with the clipboard was going to show up point to me and say this I'm convinced so if you look at the chat there are many people who are convinced that they're faking it and these are people who we think are very legit very very legit the people who tell me that they feel like they're faking it I am stunned by because these are my mentors and role models and sponsors and champions they're people I've looked up to for years so a
fter looking at this for a while I did what any engineering person would do which is I'm going to come up with a framework to solve this problem once and for all so I've come up with this spell okay and the spell varies from step to step from issue to issue but the latest issue I'm wrangling with I've refined this into nine steps to banish impostor syndrome and I'd like to share that spell with you right now all right ready one what are you feeling unqualified to do and what are the realistic ex
pectations so I'll tell you my story that I'm dealing with right now I have dyslexia I was diagnosed about 5 years ago before then I just thought I was a bad reader honestly that's what I thought was diagnosed during an eye exam of all the times so uh maybe a month ago I was hosting a big conference for Microsoft um it was called Microsoft ignite it we hosted in studios on campus and then it streams to people all over the world there are millions of people watching this conference and one of the
things I had to do was read from a teleprompter now for a dyslexic person a teleprompter is a complete Nutter nightmare because not only do have words moving around but they're on a teleprompter moving around in front of your face so I came up with this sketchy hack to read a teleprompter to read a teleprompter which is I got the script um I put it into a rich text file I put it into one note I had one note do a read aloud into earpiece so it was a sketchy heck total sketchy heke so I just docu
mented this on LinkedIn and then what happened people start reaching out to me to give talks on accessibility all kinds of people reached out companies organizations salespeople they said Donna I loved your sketchy hack do you mind giving a talk on accessibility to our organization I'm sitting here like I don't know anything about accessibility I just have a sketchy hack to solve my own dyslexia people are like oh you know you're a dyslexia expert or you're an accessibility expert and I'm thinki
ng no no I'm a software engineer who knows windows and low Cod development really well I'm not an expert so I am feeling unqualified to be an accessibility expert and the question I had to ask myself is what is the realistic expectation are they asking me to talk about global policy and all of this or are they asking me to share my story I don't know so then I have to dig in a little bit okay first let's talk about the why why are you doing the thing you're doing whatever you're doing right now
that you're impostering about or have imposter about why are you doing it what do you lose out on if you don't and will you be better off if you don't do this thing so I could technically tap out of this whole thing and say no sorry I don't talk about that topic I only talk about imposter syndrome or Windows development or low code development that's it accessibility is not a topic I talk about what will I lose out on it turns out I'll lose out on a lot of learning there are over a billion peopl
e on the planet that we know of with some sort of disability now dyslexia is what we call a cognitive disability there's many other kinds that we think of when we think disability there's visual disability like being color blind or low vision blind hearing disability like being deaf or heart of hearing cognitive are things like learning disabilities as well like dyslexia as well as autism then there's speech disabilities Mobility which is you know spinal cord quadriplegia arthritis which I also
have arthritis um and the neural neural disabilities such as um mood disorders anxiety Etc so these are just the people we know these are the people who've been diagnosed think about all of the people who live in say Asia or Africa or the Middle East or Latin America where people actually don't talk that much about disabilities it's not especially they don't talk about mental health and cognitive disabilities there's so many people that I can learn from there's so many topics and research out th
ere that I can learn from but if I just tap right out because I'm scared then I will never learn about the things and I'll never learn about more ways to hack my own so I do miss out on quite a few things so once I've gotten over the part where I don't want to do this I realize actually I do want to do this I just don't know how to do it and I don't know how to overcome my fear now it's time to break it down this is exactly like coding you get a huge code problem you're thinking okay what do I d
o you break it down you break it down into individual chunk siiz pieces and like write out the algorithm so which parts of this whole thing give talks about accessibility which parts am I qualified to do so out of everything that you're doing there's parts that you're qualified to do because you have done them before so for me in this disability thing I break it down and say okay I am qualified to build Tech yep I built my sketchy hack I'm qualified to give Tech demos yep I can demo my sketchy h
ack if you ask me to demo it I can in two minutes I am qualified to speak in public I do it all the time I've done it for 10 years I am qualified to share my own stories like these are my experiences I can share them however using whatever words I want and I'm qualified to share other stories when they tell them to me and I'm able to share them in their voice with their experience these are all things I do for my day job so these are things I am able to do the next part is the less fun part this
is the part that actually causes the impostering which is is which parts are you not qualified to do it's good to even just acknowledge that I Donna am not qualified to be an expert in accessibility policies and principles and rules and you know edicts I have no idea what they are there's a thing called wag which is the web accessibility guidelines there's all sorts of guidelines I don't know about any of them I've never studied this I've never worked in this field two I'm not qualified to give
talks around the best practices around accessibility I don't know what they are I know from mine but that's probably not the actual way for a dyslexic person to read a telepromter I'm sure there's a real way I don't know what it is and I'm not qualified to use the right terms there's a lot of sensitivity in this area and we want to be inclusive sensitive and just gracious and kind so do I know the right words to use absolutely not so these are things that I'm not qualified to do it's not a huge
list it's like three things right and the things I am qualified to do is a bigger list so okay cool now what next is think about who is qualified to do what you are not okay so three people who I can call on all right one is Microsoft's Chief accessibility Officer Jenny Le flurry she is a friend and a mentor and a wonderful person just an incredibly helpful person who teaches without shaming so this is one of the gifts that she always brings second one is our friend Jessica refuse she is a lawy
er turned accessibility uh partnership coordinator so she is a lawyer she knows all the right terms she knows all the policies everything I'm bad at she's good at and she is very very good at telling people use these words use these phrases Etc the third one is Margot jofy she leads accessibility for Verizon and she's on social media doing a lot of advocacy for disabled people for people with disabilities she is a huge advocate fan role model in this space and these are all people I'm connected
with who I can reach out to I can ask questions to without feeling any sort of shame or anxiety so once I know who is qualified then I can ask them how do you learn how did you learn what are the best ways to learn so I did I asked them and everyone gave me stuff to read everyone gave me articles I learned about inclusive design I learned about accessibility design principles when I say I learned I am learning I'm in the process so I learned about all of these inclusive design things where you d
esign for someone with a disability and it actually applies to people who do not have a disability but they may be in a situational place where they will use that Tech anyway like the example I'll give you is urgently um something like captions was invented for and with someone who may not be able to hear who may have you know deafness of various sorts but now lots of people use captions people who may not speak the language like when we're watching foreign movie or if this this talk I'm giving
is in English and someone might use captions who might be from another country and may not speak English as their first language second one are for people who have trouble focusing having captions on really helps them focus on what people are saying and third one might be for just someone who you know is distracted by various things going on and they just would prefer captions so they can pay attention to numerous things or they might be watching the talk on mute my sister's golden doodle just a
rrived so so I'm learning a lot about inclusive design and hi hi hi mad I love you too I love you too hi everyone okay um now here is a resource that they all gave me to learn take this accessibility fundamentals learning path from Microsoft you can find it at aka.ms SL accessibility DF fundamentals anyone can take it it's completely free you learn about all of these accessibility tools that are part of Microsoft Office and windows and such I found it fascinating I learned so much I felt far les
s stupid after taking this so once I learned like all right how can I do some small experiments Microsoft is a company where we really focus on experiment and learn culture and we have this big hackathon every summer called one week so this culture of experimentation is a thing and I figured okay rather than me giving talks on accessibility how can I do small experiments to see how my message is landing so one I moderated a panel on neurodiversity I invited people who have V various neurod diver
gences dyslexia ADH h d autism to a panel and I asked them questions I said tell me about your neurod Divergence tell me how it manifests tell me about some of the um challenges you face tell me about some of the tricks hacks advice you have for others by listening to others who have lived with this and their hacks I learned so much and I learned that the way people tell their own story is their Story and there's no wrong way to tell your own story so I first moderated a penel then I spoke on a
panel this was just last week last Friday um I spoke on this panel talking about just my dyslexia story I shared my hack I shared some of the things I've learned about dyslexia some of the tools that exist in the world Etc just shared my story but it was very very freeing to be with these two other people who are actually experts scha and Michelle and scha has lived with hearing loss her whole life and then Michelle is leading all of this inclusive design for financial services so she knows a lo
t about this topic it was really really cool to be amongst these experts but not being expected to be an expert in what they're talking about the third thing I did was do a solo seven-minute talk this was scary um so I wrote a seven-minute talk on why building assistive Tech helps not just people with disabilities but for everyone because originally one note wasn't Des designed for people with disabilities but people with disabilities use one note a lot because it's got the immersive reader that
reads stuff out loud to you it's got a whole bunch of learning tools it's got um this thing where it spaces out the letters so it makes it easier for a dyslexic person to read the letters so I wrote a seven-minute talk I wrote out the talk track and I sent it to Jessica who's the lawyer at Microsoft who focuses on accessibility she read it she gave me a bunch of notes and said use this word not that one use this phrase not that one this is a great example Etc so I gave the seven minute talk it
will debut at our Microsoft ability conference which is next Wednesday Thursday which is ability is our big um conference focused on inclusive tools so it will show there but I had a video crew who listened to the whole thing and said yep that sounds great so guardrails lots of guard rails and the next thing I'm going to do is give a solo access ibility Tech demo now I'm not ready to do this yet so I'm still trying to figure out what that Tech demo looks like and then practice in front of the ex
perts to make sure that I'm doing the audience Justice rather than teaching them things that are wrong so it comes down to what advice would you give a friend we are amazing at advising other people we are so bad at taking that advice so think about what advice would you give a friend write it down do that advice don't get creative don't do different advice just do the advice you'd give a friend and the advice I'd give a friend is don't be scared because you don't know go do the experiments lear
n from experts get practice and kick your ass out of your comfort zone Donna because it's the only way you're going to learn about this thing that you actually care a lot about plus learning about dyslexia coping mechanisms will make your life so much easier so much easier so that's the advice would give and another thing I've started to do is share my personal story I'm sharing a hair with you today I will continue to share it on stages I do have a fashion line it's called primadana Studios our
mission is to get banned from New York Fashion Week for a variety of reasons but one of the things I'm doing is experimenting with accessibility in my company I added alt text which is captions on images to all of my all of my pieces on the website as an experiment to see what will happen and our SEO went up by like 200% so originally what I put on the website to help my friends who might be blind who might be looking at my dresses actually just help search engines find my product better so it
just drove home this point that I'm convinced of which is businesses who focus on accessibility make more money they have better profits they have better products they have more customers and people just have a better feeling about these businesses so that was a life tip about focusing on accessibility but back to all of you you got this our tribe of imposters are here with you you are not alone in this world and I highly recommend that you form a textable tribe with other people who tend to imp
oster and kick yourselves out of your comfort zone because it really really does help to realize you're not alone there was so much ask for this talk that I actually wrote it into a book called The imposters and Vanishing spell and it has a whole bunch of stories from my life and friends like 20 friends who contributed stories to this so if this is a topic that resonates with you this book might resonate with you thank you so much for being here thank you so much for investing in yourself and th
ank you for supporting this amazing Community go forth and do the thing thank you thank much Dona this was amazing EX is so much important to us as well like last night I was freaking out because I was like we need to have live caption for this event accessibility matters a lot and so one of my friend from India he was helping me like we had we were like setting up like figuring out all the different ways in which we could we could add like live captioning on YouTube and since this is my first l
ive streaming I had absolutely no idea how to do do this so at the same time like big shout out to my friend snay for helping set up uh live captioning for this stream it's really amazing it's really really cool and live captioning makes such a difference just if someone is watching things on mute which I realize I watch so much on mute so much on mute so it was very very fascinating how accessibility features I believe should be available to everyone because you never know how people are going
to use them exactly very very interesting 100% agree with that um okay thank you first of all thank you so much for this amazing talk I saw the comments people are really inspired and some people are like this is something new that they learn and I'm so so excited uh to have you here we do have some questions if you have few minutes cool let's get started oh sorry guys we pulled the same question so the first question is from Angela what are what ways are there to make things accessible for user
s with neural disabilities like depression and OCD as a developer hi Angela thank you for that question I am in fact not an expert and I have to get okay with answering in that way um I'm still trying to figure that out um right now I'm thinking we need things that are more Focus mode because one of the things I realize because I FOC I struggle with attention um when when I'm coding if there's anything going on I am distracted immediately I'm like what is happening what is happening so I'm tryin
g to figure out how to have more Focus mode how to be off L mode otherwise I'll get distracted by something as simple as intellisense honestly because I'll start typing and something will pop up I'm like what is that and then suddenly I'm down a rabbit hole and then I get really mad at myself for going down a rabbit hole and not focusing so Angela I am not sure but these are these are topics that I really want to learn more about there is a great topic by my peer called programming with accessib
ility by uh my peers name is Rory pretty and he may you may want to watch that talk it's out there you can find it many times but he is someone who has lived with disability his whole life and he's been a Dev for you know 20 something years so he may have some very in interesting insights around Dev tools that might help you but I'm really hopeful to be able to answer this question in about six months looking forward to that thank you of course um we have go ahead I'll pull it up this time cool
thank you go ahead so Jay asked how do you constantly correct or address yourself when you find yourself essentially unlearning previous perceptions when creating accessible tools yes this is a very very good question um as you heard throughout my talk I go back and I correct myself a lot a lot because we say certain things because we've said it forever and the best thing to do is correct yourself in real time the best thing is not to ignore it and act like it um for example here is one mistake
that I make all the time I say a dyslexic person says and that's actually not the best way to say it you say a person with dyslexia I did not know that I didn't know person with it's called PWD person with disability phrasing so I say I'm Donna I'm a dyslexic person so I say no that's wrong I'm Donna I am a person with dyslexia you know this is so and so they are a person with blind or deafness Etc so I correct myself in real time because then I just practice it just practice saying those words
over and over and I do it out loud so that other people realize that it is completely normal to not know what you're doing on day one it is completely normal and the accessibility Community the disability Community is actually very kind and very forgiving when you've built trust when they understand that you're trying to learn and you're learning in the open which is terrifying I could go offline for for six months and just bury myself and learn it but I realized then I wouldn't learn from every
one else I would just be learning from Reading papers which is not a good way for me to learn works great for many people but reading papers and watching videos alone without having conversations with people like all of you is not how I would learn and retain this information so I'm learning in the open I'm going to mess up millions of times millions of times but I believe that will also encourage others to not be afraid to learn and practice out in the open you know I love that and not even jus
t with like disability but it just inclusive inclusive speech in general has been something that I've been working on a lot and like one thing that I still mess up on and I try to catch it every single time I like I've made it a habit to say hey y'all for everything like y'all is my go-to now and it works because I'm in Memphis Tennessee so I'm in the South I can throw y'all in wherever I want now but like instead of using something like hey guys which was so normal for such a long time in my li
fe and and like I still mess up once in a while I try to catch it as often as I can but you know it's just replacing something that you know one thing that I always say is like I'm completely ready to be wrong any day of the week and I'm completely ready to change my stance on something once given the information because I grow through those moments I think the people that are stubborn and they stay in that kind of mindset they're never evolving with the times and especially as a developer that
is probably one of the worst mindsets to have because our language change all the time not just our speech but our development languages as well yes absolutely because I'm an old C++ and and when I mean old I mean yes in age but also old school z++ like the way I learned it was 1998 z++ is a very different language now also no one uses so I I had to change just language I had to be become an expert in C and Java all these things still objectoriented but still focused on you know operating system
s and like end to endend stack things but I have had to learn and change so much so why wouldn't I change my language um another thing I learned recently which is fascinating is sign language each country has its own sign language so it's not based on English American Sign Language different than British sign language did you know that no I just learned it and the way Global Tech conferences do sign language is use a thing called International sign which is like a mish mash of different sign lan
guages that's made up for like a global community and it's called a a person who does sign language interpretation is called an interpreter not a translator I learned all of this last week and I've been saying sign language translator for my entire life and people are like that's they were so kind not to correct me all these years but actually it is an ASL interpreter or an is interpreter a b SL interpreter so mind blown thing I learned and now I will never forget it so it's just learning in the
open I'm I'm a huge fan of learning in the open I think people should and they should share because yeah it's terrifying but it's a really good way to bring others along with you and you know Danny you do this so much where you say I learned to think about JavaScript and I told everybody and you know that's why so many people follow you because they know that you were giving them the real deal you're not giving them like the Instagram filter version of being a Dev you're showing on me took me 1
2 hours to debug that semicolon problem or you know whatever it is so really really I'll even tell you there's been so many times where I've been so confident something like oh I'm making this tweet like this is definitely going to help somebody out this is a concept that I I own and I know this and like I I've taught this concept before like I got this send out that tweet and like 15 messages like hey that's we don't do that anymore that's outdated that's habits I'm like oh man okay let me go a
head and delete this or I'll say you know what that was a really great moment for me because that's one of the best things about development in my opinion why I love code reviews I learned through those as long as it's very good constructive criticism I will take it and run with it it's just you know you try to anti-troll something and someone somewhere is going to find something to leech on to and that's just the internet you just got to be ready for that but honestly I think it's uh it's fanta
stic to learn that way because I learned different techniques to do things that I've never known and I will say probably in the last year alone because I've only been on Twitter for about a year the last year alone I feel like my development has increased probably tenfold because of the different things that I've been able to expose myself to that's right and that's really I find the best way to learn is from others who have lived in experience and who are living in it who have lived in experien
ce but who are also living in it day-to-day so this this kind of growth mindset mentality really really does help people totally boost their careers I I find people who learn in the open and share to have these astronomical career growths that people who kind of go off and it ties up with what Ana was talking about last hour which is have a portfolio of projects develop in the open but have them be authentic to you um like all of my sample projects are all around Fashion Design right and there's
very few people who do fashion design Windows apps like there's probably zero and everyone is like hey can you do a tech demo about your fashion company I'm like yep it's real-time data it's my data so I can share it without getting big trouble and I have real business problems to do demos around so huge fan of learning in the open big big Donna this was incredible you are incredible your speaking style has spoke to everybody there are still more questions definitely reach out to her on Twitter
she's phenomenal on it and one request that we have from a couple people can you link your slides on your Twitter so that way they can come follow you and check those out as well definitely I'll throw them on the slid find her on Twitter and she's gonna link all her slides thank you Don I apprciate be safe bye moving on absolutely incredible wow I like I loved everything about that talk one thing I will say so I talk about imposter syndrome a lot I love that she talked about that and the one th
ing that I've come to realize kind of recently is if you have impostor syndrome it literally means you're doing something that you haven't exposed yourself to you're doing something that's taking you out of your comfort zone and when you do that that is a moment that you're probably going to be in growth like right now I can tell you like in my new role at Google like the impostor syndrome is in Saye I've worked with I'm working with some people right now that like they could code circles around
me they know more way about all this Tech and this is all brand new to me but more times than not when you're in that moment of impostor syndrome you find out that you're growing you're becoming better and you're probably on the path to a raise somewhere because the stagnant stay comfortable when you're doing a little bit extra and you pushing those boundaries that's when you find out how far you can really go so I love that she talked about that she gave great examples and accessibility someth
ing that we all need to be paying attention to now and I love that that was the highlight as well into her talk yeah I I totally agree with this even like if you if anyone like looks at my Twitter feed from like two hours before they even started I was suffering from imposter synd and I was like oh my God I'm so much freaking out I don't know if I can do this live stream and I'm going to screw it up so bad I at the end people will make like memes about me and I'll be bad like I'll be famous for
like things which I don't want to be famous for and all the I'm like having all those thoughts come in my mind but at the same time you should know that you need to take the first step after that there is no stopping you so take that first step now and I really hope that Donna's talk really inspires you to like get rid of your imposter syndrome take your first step and at the same time learn more about accessibility and let's make the world a better place for everyone without further Ado one of
my favorite speakers like ever we've done a couple events together together now is joining us the incredible Ali spido Ali what's going hey how's it going I'm so excited that was such a great talk last uh with Donna yeah absolutely and to be honest your talk right now you're going to be literally giving like gems of advice you've built this incredible blog that has views that companies would pay to and kill for and you're going to be sharing like some of the best tips in the industry to make tha
t happen um without further Ado I'm going to give you the floor I'm excited awesome so I will share my screen and then I will go into speaker mode always fun I I feel like they are always moving things on me awesome well I'm going to be talking about developer blogging which is something that has changed my career in my life and so I'm really excited to share my learnings with you all so what we're going to talk about today is how to start my story so that you know where I'm coming from and why
I'm giving this advice we're going to talk about what works and how to pick a theme for your blog then we're going to talk about the content itself we're going to talk about how to pick a topic how to write a post itself how to create solid content that is going to help other people and then we'll also talk about how to get people to actually read your content so whether that's social media or crossposting or using search engine optimization so my journey from zero readers to a million in about
a year and a half of blogging it's what I'm going to be telling you about today so I started this blog back in 2017 and it was called on learning new things and my challenge for myself was every week to learn something new write a blog post and write a demo on that thing it was a ton of work would not recommend would not start there at all but a project froze for myself I wanted to tailor my learning I was transitioning into doing a teaching role instead of it being a full-time software engineer
anymore and I wanted to expose myself to new technologies and so I wrote my first blog post which was pure CSS art and I got 36 views which at the time I thought was so many I honestly thought that nobody would read it whatsoever I posted it on medium and was like oh my goodness like people are actually reading this I embarrassingly had a fashion blog back in high school and nobody ever ever read that and so 36 views to me felt like a huge number of people reading at my first post and then my s
econd post was on this relatively Niche frontend programming language called Elm and it was actually kind of about how I didn't love working with Elm and I was a little salty about the learning process but I learned I wrote about those Reflections and how it was difficult for me to learn and that one got more views 262 and then I found this website called dev2 which looked like this at the time it did not look like this anymore and I became part of their community and slowly my blog post getting
more and more views so I wrote 12 blog posts as part of this series on learning something new each week creating a demo with it and then writing a blog post on that and then I quit because it was so much work that I was taking on I had put this huge expectation out for myself to meet and I wasn't able to do that and very understandably so but it made it so that I wasn't going to Vlog anymore and then that summer I moved to Connecticut I did not know a single soul and so I decided to try somethi
ng new I was working with mainly new programmers I was teaching at a coding boot camp I was like What if I was writing to them what are the blog posts that I think would benefit them and also my past self I grew up in the middle of nowhere I started coding when I was 19 I dropped out of computer science because I thought I wasn't very good at it and so I was like what are the articles that would helped the past version of me to overcome impostor syndrome to learn these technical topics that I di
dn't feel comfortable with to explain them all in a friendly way and so that was my goal with this the blog is for the alley of a couple years ago and all the people like me and these posts ended up taking off so I was writing them from a deeply personal space and talked about building a portfolio and people were reading it like wild I had 25 tips for new developers which got like 70,000 reads pretty much immediately and as more and more people were reading my blog posts at first it started real
ly positive but then it also got negative as well people saying mean things about me on the internet being a publicly visible woman and having to navigate what life looks like as that and so I got a lot of comments on Reddit on Twitter Etc about my posts and about me more specifically and so I definitely struggled with that and the more negative piece of it but I'll come back to this in a little bit and talk about my tips for dealing with that negative side of blogging and being out there and be
ing in public so I then in 2019 changed it up a little bit as well and just put a new shell on the blog changed it to we learned code instead of Zena programming which was a spin on Zena python which is a poem that I highly recommend that any developer reads uh it's a really really great mantra for what you should be doing with your code so read the Zen of python but we learn code was a little bit more clear so I went with that so this has led to multiple jobs for me and was actually my main sou
rce of income for a long time and so it has been something that has changed my work life my professional life but it also has changed my personal life in a lot of ways as well I've made so many friends I've traveled across the world to speak at conferences just as a result of this blog uh right now I lead developer advocacy for AWS amplify and being a developer Advocate doing this and writing and creating content is a huge piece of my job so I'm going to talk about why you should also Vlog so I
talked a little bit about me the rest of the presentation is about you so first off to write the post that would have helped the past you you struggled with something I'm sure while learning to program whether that was something technical or that's something a little bit more personal like impostor syndrome and so write that post that would have helped the previous version of you how did you overcome that problem for present you to learn new things that you can set a challenge for yourself to le
arn something new and write about it and teach back to the community what you learned and it can be a great motivator especially if you're working in an environment where you don't feel challenged every day and then you can establish yourself as an expert for the future version of you's career and I can really attest to this that people take me seriously on things that they frankly probably shouldn't and people are willing to have me talk at things like this about vlogging and so you establish y
ourself as this expert and it really helps and on a selfish and a less selfish note not just from a personal perspective you can make new friends and teach as well so you're giving back to the community that built you and I think every developer is community taught and I'm no exception to that and so you're teaching that back to the community and giving back what you got so I want to put a disclaimer before I give all this advice that you do not need to follow all of this by any means you can be
as serious or as casual about vlogging it is totally up to you and all of that is valid be reasonable with yourself set reasonable goals don't be too hard on yourself and writing one blog post is so much better than writing zero blog posts so if you get something out there even if it's not perfect that is a okay and something that I'm still working on getting better at myself so first off how do you name a Blog so naming things is really hard in programming naming a variable but it's also hard
outside of that so there's some options here you can blog under your own name a lot of people do this um like kenty dods has his blog as his name you can come up with something fun or witty like Dan aboff's blog or Emma bastian's blog they both have fun names I think Emma's is uncompiled and Dan's is overreacted so you can come up with something like that my one piece of advice for you is to think about SEO when doing this so make sure that you're not going to be competing with a bunch of other
folks for Search terms so classic example of this is Gatsby if you search for anything related to gatsbyjs without the js on there you get all about the great gatsy book and so make sure that you're writing something that will be findable when people search for it um I would also think about whether this is something that you want to scale Beyond yourself or just for yourself and if it's just for you personally to write about the things that you care about and to grow your career using your name
is awesome but if you want to maybe add other writers down the road you might want to think of something fun and witty but thinking about it I've changed my vog name a bunch of times and you can too it's perfectly valid so the next thing to think about is your target audience and the idea here is to come up with your ideal reader I like to have one person in mind because it feels very personal be to be writing to that one person who's that one person that you want to help that could be the past
version of you that could be uh one of your students if you're teaching people that could be your Junior developer co-worker could be your senior developer cooworker just think of that one person that you want to have in mind when you are writing your post and how will you write it in a way that will appeal to them if they are somebody who's been programming for 20 years you probably don't have to explain to them what a for Loop is but if you are trying to write to Junior developers you're prob
ably going to want to break down jargon so that they feel familiar with the terms that you're using so having this one person in mind really helps that process the next piece is how you pitch yourself to your audience so you don't need to be a 10x expert on anything there were like all these 10x expert or 10x developer memes on Twitter a while ago so that's why I use that but why are you writing about why what you're writing about is it something that you work on at work is it something that you
just think is fun and interesting that you want to learn more about is it something that you've taught other people what makes you right about this thing and why do you care about it people really like stories and so you can integrate them even into technical content for example I have a blog post about how writing a sodoku solving algorithm in college like me me want to give up and completely shot my confidence and then I wrote this technical blog post as an well I guess I was an adult in coll
ege too but like further removed from that process and talking about my story and how it was much simpler now and how to do the sodoku solving algorithm and integrating my story into it people like those it catches them and hooks them in you can even write blog posts about your story learning how to code or anything like that so the next piece is coming up with a topic for a blog post um think of the three problems your audience has and write posts to solve those problems so for example I write
to mostly beginner developers so beginner developers struggle with what to learn so there's this world out there there's 800 different JavaScript Frameworks that they can choose from navigating that world is one of the biggest problems that they uh face another one is how do they learn technical things they're probably struggling with that then the third thing is career advice how are they going to get their first developer job think of those problems that your audience had empathize with that a
udience and then write down ideas based off of those three problems and I would advise you to have a concrete Topic at first for your blog and so become the go-to person on a more narrow topic maybe have a challenge for yourself so that you're consistently writing and do research on other people's blogs like what's working what do you enjoy from their post what do you think is good and what do you think maybe isn't as good and you can mold your own content based off of that and think about a yea
r from now will you still have enough to write about in this topic or are you taking on too much too soon and something that I really stand by is writing down blog post topic ideas when you have them not when you want to write so I have a trell award that I have like hundreds of blog post ideas listed on and I choose from that instead of trying to brainstorm a topic when I actually have time to write something I find that that helps a lot because it's really hard to put yourself on the spot and
think of a good idea write then and there instead have a list that you can come to there are also different types of content so you can blog on your own site or you can use a site like hash node or Dev to what I do is I write on my own post on my own blog and then I cross poost so you can add something called a canonical URL which doesn't make Google think that you're plagiarizing content which it would without it and then you can post to sites like hash node and Dev without any hits on your SEO
or anything like that so I really like doing that um other types of content that you can do or video podcasting or more there's so many different types of content then thinking about a blogging platform so I would not build a blogging site yourself until you know that you like it you can spend like years building the perfect blogging platform or even rabbit hole into building a framework for vlogging don't go down that road first put up a couple blog posts on a site like dev2 or hash node or me
dium make sure that you enjoy this and this is something that you want to do long term before sinking all the time into creating a site and then once you do I love nextjs that's probably the one that I would most recommend right now but if you like view then next or grid some um there are others as well even like jaal or WordPress think about hosting prices though so static sites are pretty much free to host whereas something that has a back end will probably charge a little bit to host so I alw
ays use like next sites because they're static then making time for Content this is a question that I get all the time is how do I actually prioritize doing this and make time in my life for it and my advice is that everybody's life looks dramatically different so I can't give you a true answer but what I did when I was starting out is that I would on Sunday afternoons go to a local coffee shop and whenever I was there write my blog post for the week and I had this habit of going there and every
time I sat down in my seat at that coffee shop I would know to write and so that really helped me and blocking my calendar out to priority I time for it is something that really strategically helps another thing is that you can use batching which is where you do like tasks like tasks all at once and it makes it so that it flows a little bit better so if I'm recording a YouTube video for example I normally record like three or four at once get in the flow of that and then maybe do a different af
ternoon where I edit all of those uh YouTube videos so that's one idea if if you're struggling with the time so let's talk a little bit more about what to write about getting started guides people love guides for getting started with a topic you can also create demo projects and break down what goes into that demo come common stumbling points so things that you struggled with when you were learning something new um as well as something that you Googled and couldn't find an answer to like we've a
ll been there where we've Googled something over and over and over again and all the stack Overflow answers are from 10 years ago and no longer work and so write that blog post that would have helped you when you were Googling that you can even just tell stories of a bug that you fixed at work or your story of getting into Tech another thing that you can do is ask around so you can post on Twitter what's a blog post that you'd like to see from me or something along those lines you'll get great i
deas from your audience something that you can also do if you don't have an audience is you can go to a site like Reddit or Kora and see what questions people are asking in like the programming category and put those down as topics that you want to write about don't worry about being 100% unique and revolutionary I think people worry that they are going to be writing about something that's been written about and that their blog post won't be valid because of that and I think that that's not true
I wrote a intutive react post which is my most read post of all time it has a couple 100,000 reads on it and that's a topic that's been covered over and over again there are so many experts in the react World but I still wrote about it and people still really liked it and it resonated with them and maybe my teaching style worked for somebody but those other posts didn't and so you can still write about these topics even if they aren't brand shiny new to the world of programming I said this one
already but write down topics as you think of them not when you're trying to write have some sort of notebook or trell board or something along those lines where you have blog post topics written down in a list that you can pull from and another common question is am I experienced enough to write about the topic and my answer is always yes that you can bring different perspective to a topic no matter your experience level on that topic so if you're a beginner you can talk about being a beginner
if you are an expert in it you can teach those cont steps back you can talk about your learning process all of these things so even if you feel like you're not qualified you probably are I would though say that you should qualify in that blog post like this is something that I am learning or this is something that uh is new to me so that your audience knows what to expect from the post another tough thing is coming up with a title for the post but be catchy and honest so clickbait doesn't tend t
o resonate super well with developers but give a good representation of what's in the post make it something that people do want to read people like numbers and titles which is kind of funny but lists worked well for that reason I'm not sure psychologically why that's true but it is uh talk about the problem that you're solving don't be boring and jokes are good so I wrote a blog post about link lists that used Ariana Grande thank you next and so that's an example of something like funny that yo
u can do for a blog post my writing process looks like this I brainstorm different topics so I have them listed out for me on a board that I can come back to and pick from each week and then I do keyword research so I look up what Search terms people might use in order to get to my post and you can use different tools for this uh like ahfs is the really popular one for professional type vloggers but then there's also uh keywords everywhere which is a Chrome extension and that helps but this is m
ore of an advanced one I wouldn't worry about this one up front then I write my demos so I write any code that's going to go into the post I would do a super rough outline then I fill in the headers and revise over and over and over again the first blog post is never perfect never something that I would want to put out in the public but I come back to it and keep adding things that I'm missing uh editing things out that aren't important Etc I also use two tools in order to make my reading more u
nderstandable to people so the first is grammarly which checks your grammar and also your tone which I really appreciate and then the Hemingway editor checks how easy your post is to read so that's a really great one as well the last thing that I do is add in multimedia so so I use canva to create uh assets for my posts so embedded images cover images things like that uh catches people's eyes so some advice here is to break up walls of text uh people don't want to read an essay if it's just a bu
nch of paragraphs the readership probably isn't going to stay around so add in images add in codes topits lists visualizations and break it into sections so have different subheaders that your text falls under and write to your audience so we talked a little bit about creating an audience and how to Target them you should write to that audience and then add in the why and where to learn more why is this thing important to learn why did you learn about it also important also site your sources don
't plagiarize anybody else's content and if you learn from somebody else plug their article in there it makes you look more credible to say that you're not just coming up with this from scratch and it gives uh reference back to them and gives credit to them for writing their thing that helped you also make sure to run your code samples and what happens if you mess up it happens to everybody I've published typos so many times it happens to everybody not just you so the last section that I want to
talk about is how to build an audience and my advice here is to don't just rely on one source so you can have different social media the first one is Pinterest which works really well for non- Tech bloggers it's a little bit harder for Tech bloggers uh Instagram Twitter Kora Reddit Hacker News all these are great places for gaining readers and I have some advice for getting started on Twitter because that's a big part of my growth so I started out like having zero followers on Twitter and what
I did was I participated in these Twitter chats Dev discuss and code newbie and they tweet out questions and that you can respond to and so that made me feel like I could respond to them that I wasn't just tweeting out random things and then I made goals for myself so I added to my to-do list every day to have two non-promotional tweets one promotional tweet of one of my pieces of content and a post tweeting about somebody else's work it's great to create relationships and stuff with other peopl
e too make tweets skimmable so add spacing to them and emojis so that people can look at it and get the content in it kind of stands out on their timeline and hashtags can kind of work at first but if you actually notice this most viral tweets don't have hashtags I would be kind of a minimalist and use them to hashtag Events maybe but not just putting them everywhere and also it's a two-way street engaged don't just go in One Direction I'm going to skip a little bit over search engine optimizati
on I will tweet out these slides after so you can come back to this but here's some advice for uh standing out on search engines and again I'll tweet these out and skip over them for now the most valuable thing that you can have as the content creator is an email list you own it and there aren't algorithm changes you can have what's called a lead magnet which will make somebody sign up for your list and I personally wrote a eBook for this and then people will subscribe for your email list in ord
er to get that lead magnet and then there a couple different providers that you can use for an email list so I use convert kit which is really a fancy one I wouldn't use that one unless you're like more down this road but tiny letter is a free one to start out with butter down button down allows markdown MailChimp also has a free tier so those are some ones that I would recommend for getting started I talked about crossposting as well but you can post to dev2 and hash node and your own blog as w
ell it'll get more eyes on your post and you can also build up HST hype for a post that's coming up by sharing sneak peeks tease that something coming and also using some branding another thing is consistency so putting content out at the same time weekly or something along those lines will allow people to keep coming back for more at that time so consistently see looks different for everybody and I'm not super consistent at all but it is something that you can think about when you are writing a
nother piece is dealing with the haters and the weirdos that come from being public online and it's rough don't be hard on yourself if you have a difficult time navigating it everybody does everybody who has to deal with this still struggles with it find a support system who understands what you're dealing with you can also like screenshot responses to them and delete it and not send it but just be patient with yourself know that it is is difficult find people that can support you through it ano
ther thing is monetization and this is a little bit more advanced as well but you can start something like a patreon you can add ads to your site you can add sponsorships you can create a product and Market that you can also do affiliate links as well so those are some strategies there and here are some resources for learning more so we have a ladybug podcast episode about this which I'm one of the co-hosts and then I also have a blog post about this as well and again I'll tweet all this out aft
er but start with one post and share it with me so I'm as sple on Twitter and social media and then I am on wearn code.com as my blog and Alis spit. is my portfolio o Inception thank you so much uh this was really helpful you know what when I think of it the first blog post that I wrote was actually not technical but it was actually um so I went to Disneyland and I met so many cartoon characters that the way I took photos with them it actually turned out to be to be a wedding story so my first b
log was on media about how I had a fairy tale wedding with a Mickey Mouse and that was only like two years ago so yeah it's that's awesome that's so much fun I love that yes it's like you just need to take a step back you just need to write your first blog post and then it will really help you get started and you really need to know like how to and this I'm so glad that I got to hear from you today because it's my personal passion that I really want to get more started with writing blogs and wri
ting more about technical stuff because I know that how much other people's blogs have held me in my life in my career and I want to give back to the community so writing blogs is really amazing and it's a great way to give back to the community yeah for sure for sure it's amazing for other people but it's also so helpful for yourself like even just putting down in words something that you've learned helps that stick for you so much better than anything else and yeah yeah like having to explain
something to somebody else is pretty much the best way to learn something yeah definitely um so okay the chat is completely fing up right now and there are so many amazing comments and questions for you do you have a few minutes oh yeah yeah yeah for sure cool let's bring some questions so Francisco asked how to connect blog post content to your podcast and vice versa I do them both but usually they're not connected oh this is a great question so there's a couple things that you can do first is
like the content flywheel which is repurposing content and this is something that I do a ton so I'll write a blog post and then I will create a YouTube video on the theme content and then I will repurpose that into like an egghead Style video and maybe even a conference talk if it's a post that people really like and so reusing the same demos over and over again and using blog post as like an outline for YouTube as well I personally always link like the YouTube video within the blog post because
different people learn in different ways and so some people may resonate better with a video than they would with blog post and vice versa so I always try to link between them um the other thing is that uh you can always have like links from your blog to your podcast and vice versa that's what I do just because ladybug podcast I work with other people on it and so it's a little bit separate from all the other stuff that I do and so I do put links in my blog post to those podcast episodes if the
y're relevant but outside of that I do kind of keep them separate that's exciting yeah I think oftentimes I also try to like keep things same but at the same time it's there's so much you can do um so other question we have is like what's your best STP to find the time I find my time outside of work is always in conflict with wanting to write and wanting to learn and I know like time management is really hard when there's so much you can learn and there's so much you want to share yeah for sure
so I would say here that everybody's life looks really different but I wouldn't see wanting to learn and wanting to write in opposition to one another I would see them as reinforcing one another so uh potentially while you're learning taking notes and then repurposing those notes into a blog post down the road I think that that will really help reinforce year learning and make it so that that information sticks harder within your brain and we'll make it so that you can really like keep learning
and keep sharing with the community so I would say they don't have to be an opposition to one another think of them as one and the same yes that's a very goodful advice so you have mentioned like hash notes many times but also like you should have your own site how do you feel about using note on your own domain as they offer that as well yeah yeah yeah I think that's a perfectly valid path I personally like having my own site as it scales just if you want to do anything with uh like creating a
business out of your blog at some point it's usually easier to do that if you have your own site for that that being said I started with dev2 I did not start on my own blog and that's what I recommend to other people as well is like don't put the time in to build out that platform before you know that you enjoy this absolutely there's the one question that I have like and I've been thinking a lot about this thing whenever I think of writing a technical blog is that there is already so much conte
nt online and they have like that content is presented in such a nice way I often feel that maybe um I'm plz their work or how do I like get rid of that fear and like still go ahead with writing that blog post I know you covered a bit about that in your talk but are there any like specific other steps that you have done or like have you also felt the same any time yeah for sure for sure what I would say is that you have a unique perspective and a unique way of explaining things and that will res
onate with somebody and even if it doesn't resonate with somebody it helps you to reinforce your learning and so the first person to write for is yourself like I use my old blog posts all the time in order to look at my processes for things or to reference how I did X or Y and so your first reader is yourself and I would always keep to that like if even if nobody reads a blog post somebody still benefited from it and that's you and so I would say to definitely steer clear of plagiarizing I would
reference other people's posts and link to them if you can and bring your own unique perspective to things maybe write your own demo or uh explain things in a way that really makes sense to you or add your own personality to it yes just just be you just show that that's you who is writing the blog post that is really important and you're unique you don't have to copy anyone else you don't have to pretend that you are not yourself you just be you just show just just be you that's that's the whol
e deal even when writing a blog post and even for me like I have seen that often times like if I'm working even like at work I'm working on a project and if six month months later someone is asking me anything about what I did I don't remember so even I go back and like look at the documentation and try to figure out like what happen so I'm pretty sure like if you are writing blog post it's going to help you so much more than you can imagine so go for it awesome yeah one more question probably u
m kenes is asking like if you is is it more valuable to a hiring manager for a new Dev to have blog post social media content or to have more projects on GitHub or in your portfolio it's difficult to figure out which one to St uh spend time on and figure out a balance between those two yeah for sure so I actually am a hiring manager and have been at a couple companies in the past so what I would say is that have those projects on your GitHub but then write a blog post about that project so talk
about your process talk about the tools that went into it talk about the pieces of code that were tough and tricky that you used because that's going to show your communication skills to that hiring manager which is so important as a developer having written communication skills will really demonstrate your abilities and your abilities to work with other developers and communicate your uh ideas to other people on the team as well and so that would be my piece of advice is to repurpose these thin
gs take your content from GitHub your projects write blog post reflecting on those projects thank you so much this was really amazing and I saw some comments around like they were not interested in writing blog post before but now listening from you and hearing you talk about how to get started that really inspired them and I'm so so glad like I your blogs have helped me as well in the last especially like in the last one and a half years when I'm like trying to grow and like figure things out a
nd I'm like oh my God I don't know how to do these things and then I refer back to blogs and things like that so thank you so much Ali for joining us today and for volunteering your time really appreciate you here for sure thanks for having me yay okay thanks bye bye okay I really hope that this was helpful to you and I really want you all to like use Twitter or use this chat to tell like how much you love this event and how how how do how are you going to write your next blog post moving on I w
ant to produce someone and kind of like Al let me explain that this is so much of my personal goal like after organizing events for so long I'm so much interested in leadership and knowing more about leadership but I have no freaking idea how I can even get started into leadership I if you would ask me like what's my next step I would say that well right now I'm a senior software engineer and I want to be a manager or I want to be a leader in the future but I don't don't know what to do so I'm r
eally excited to introduce Jennifer who is going to share how to create your path in leadership over to you Jennifer thank you so much happy to be here today with you all just one second here I'm going to share my screen with [Music] you o we're moving a little bit ahead so as R stated my name is Jennifer Ponder um happy to be here with you at the international women's day event hosted by women Tech makers GD San Francisco um and this particular talk is near and dear to my heart uh taking up spa
ce create your own Pathway to leadership and Tech and really I want to share with you my perspective on my journey and technology and some steps that I took to create my own Pathway to leadership and hopefully this helps you in planning your pathway to leadership or even transitioning into your firsttime role and what this could look like for mapping out uh your leadership pathway As you move along so my name is Jennifer Ponder of course I'm from Atlanta Georgia I am the technology director at c
ommon Council Foundation also a national PR director at stem Atlanta women over our emerging Technologies program also you can find me working very hard in the technology Community as well this is something I've always been very passionate about giving back uh I work with young girls in middle school and high school as a board member for score Incorporated which is a nonprofit um organization that helps girls to learn software development also I am an Atlanta chapter lead for talk Tech Associati
on black women talk Tech in Atlanta as as well as I lead on the black technology mentorship program and I am a volunteer teacher assistant with Microsoft teals program so when I'm not doing all of that stuff uh some of my favorite hobbies once I'm back out uh after the pandemic I haven't been traveling but I love to travel I love to scuba dive one of my favorite things to do and learn about new tech tools you know as a a technology person and in leadership you're always learning and always growi
ng so uh keeping a breast of all the new technology tools so just a quick agenda for what we're going to go over today in this talk what does taking up space really mean you know when we think about it you know you can think about it as a definition but really want you to dig in deep today and think about that we're going to expand how to take up space in Tech overview of leadership roles in Tech if you really just you know we've probably kind of seen what an engineering manager does or we you k
now we're pretty much managed by engineer managers but really just the day-to-day how to create your own lane in Tech also how you can be a leader in the community and creating your leadership impact road map so where do we start what does it mean to take up space so we can think about this as a definition of hey to feel or occupy a space but really in this in this setting I want you to think about taking up spaces you get to choose so you get to choose how you take up space in your career path
you know what does that look like for you what are those what are the steps that you're taking also recognizing the validity of your voice and knowing that you need to own every room that you are in you have value to add in every space that you're in everything that you're currently learning uh that you're doing as far as getting into internships apprenticeships you know you deserve to be there also activating the courage and fearlessness to pursue your own goals and in your own way so we all kn
ow when we're starting out as developers you know we're going through the studying of code problems you know we're hitting the books we're doing the data structures you know looking at algorithms Big O notation we're getting ready for our our whiteboarding uh our code tests and our technology interviews but beyond that there are additional things that we can do to plan our own pathway and our own career and that's one of the things that I found out on my journey uh along the way in addition to u
h the steps the the additional steps in getting your first software developer role so here's a quote that I like by Shonda ryes I always think that's the most important thing to feel like you belong in every room you're in and this is really important because you have to know everywhere that you go no matter if it's virtually I know we're in the virtual space now during the pandemic uh but you belong at these meetups if there's something in technology that you are excited about you're happy to l
earn about react hooks or JavaScript you know anything you know that you can jamstack you know anything like that join those meetup groups join those webinars you deserve to be there you know and I think this is really something critical that speaks to um really our positive selft talk and really how we move about in our day-to-day Journey that propels us forward into leadership so how it started versus how it's going right we've seen this all around the internet but I I look at this as a progre
ssing thing of decoding how to take up space so overcoming impostor syndrome we all have seen this we all have been there you know where we felt like I don't know if I can measure up I don't know if my my talk is good enough I don't know if my code is good enough to be submitted you know I I just I'm not sure about myself you know we can't think like that we have to stay positive through challenges you know challenges are going to come you know if you're you're doing you know your journaling you
r affirmations you know positive selft talk is really going to help you get through because we all know in technology there are going to be so many projects so many things deadlines that we have to move that we're coming up against and we definitely have to keep going so we want to do that also owning your achievements you know never shy away from what you've done I'm sure if you look at home right now you have several certification certificates on your wall you have certificates that you have e
arned also you've probably done some of your own public speaking if you and if you're not just taking that first step to sign up for your first talk you're well on your way so please make sure you're owning your achievements and you're never downplaying what you're doing don't compare yourself to others you want to make sure uh that you're not doing that just because everyone's journey into Tech is different and everyone you know and that's what makes this so great because everyone has a unique
story uh not everyone has a traditional pathway in the technology so you want to make sure that you are really owning and valuing your particular journey and not comparing yourself because you can get lost in that very easily also maintain a growth mindset so you want to continuously make sure that you're doing things to stay on that growth mindset and path you know to propel you forward that's really how this is going to work out really well for you in the end also recognizing the validity of y
our voice and experience you know confidence with courage one of the things that and if you have not ever heard this before a lot of times women we will have you know all the certifications we could have eight to 10 years experience or either five to six years experience and sometimes not feel that we can go for a certain job that we want a leadership role but a guy you know because we all know we need more women in Tech we definitely do there men are outnumbering women out here and we definitel
y need more uh but a a man who may have zero experience or one year experience you know there could be a leadership role and he'll go for it you know women I think sometimes we will second guess ourselves and we definitely don't want to do that we definitely have the strength to do what we need to do also too another uh thing about this find your support system I know early on starting out in development that was something very critical for me um and when I started out one of the first groups th
at I joined that I'm a member of is women who code uh women who code Atlanta and this was really critical for me I went to a lot of meetups went to code jams every week I really stayed locked in and really found a group of friends uh people that we could support each other uh through different you know interviews different code test and that's going to propel you along the way that's going to be really important also showing up and standing standing out and this is not to be in a sense that you'
re being arrogant about yourself to stand out but this is really getting noticed you know really show up in these places where uh you can find Opportunities you know if there's a way for you to you know show what you've learned you know show some code you know really do a talk really teach someone or Mentor someone you really want to do that and sharing your goals with a mentor also helps you know talking through different steps because there's some one out there who has a similar path or has be
en where you want to go and they can really steer you in the right direction and that really helps you to think through your thoughts and what you want to do so that's very important so taking up space what this can look like as an individual contributor of course we're going back to the sharing knowledge again you know if you're on YouTube you know doing twitch streams really sharing a coding Project online you know coding take a impact doing hackathons you know there's so many ways to get invo
lved in the community to code with folks either you know on a domestic scale scale or globally it's so many ways to connect with folks online now and do different discords that's really helpful and also creating quality products and features you know if you're able to make features at home or put together some code that could be released for a startup that's really really very valuable also in leadership how you can take up space leading teams local and globally you know this will offer you a lo
t of experience and also to ways to hone your leadership skills you know for me I've LED teams on the domestic side and globally right now I lead a team of 25 developers so that takes you know it it's a a lot to do and it's a lot to learn and how you grow but it's a very rewarding thing to do to be a able to you know lead people effectively and also have the End Business result be successful also executing with vision and strategy in mind so you know we want to keep in mind that we are really ke
eping the organization's goals in mind but also too that we're learning along the way and also managing technical requirements that's going to be a lot of our time you know with dealing with the day-to-day projects and overall goals and how we deal with that so these are some of the things that I think on the individual level and in leadership ways that you will be taking up space and also these will be things to think about as you move into a leadership role and and build this out for yourself
so what will your dream leadership role look like in Tech so as I stated before I know when we're first thinking about when we're first starting out and we get our software development role where we're going through the coding test you know we're we're practicing we want to make sure our whiteboarding skills are good you know if you're and even if you've had experience in ux design and you're building out your process with mockups and wi frames you know things of that nature too and even on the
product product management side you know thing of gathering user stories and building requirements you know all of this takes prep preparation but here's some leadership roles I wanted you to think about um you know as a tech lead you know technical lead is a software engineer guides the technical vision and execution of a software project you know they may or may not have direct Reports most of the time you know they will have a place where they can go to gain mentorship if they want to manage
folks but usually this is a way for them this is that middle of the road role just before you get into a engineering manager role usually more experienced than their peers and shows great leadership and potential you know really a standout you know if you want to be a Tech lead I've done the tech lead role and I was able to do some great things you know Mentor folks really stand up and show the projects that I was working on so this is something if you have not thought about a tech lead a a good
role to think about along the way to get you started so engineering lead and engineering manager and again depending on the company that you're at and the size of the company you may have an engineering lead and you may not or you may have an engineering manager so these can be interchangeable so this role the engineering League you know may have a small number of direct reports about two to three could be more than that just depending on the size spends about 80% of their time on Independent c
ontributor of software projects and about 20% on people management so basically it goes back to the coaching again and Leadership skills a training role for an engineer manager opportunity so this is where you can really get in show your skills and really effectively home own you know communication skills you know really getting into what I call you know this is the point where you really got to show up you know really show what you can do as far as leading people effectively but also making sur
e that you're producing great uh software products engineering manager this role entails being responsible for the team and their products projects this role can have up to 10 director reports depends you know again on the company it could be a little more but this is normally a good start for engineering manager team career path growth and business growth that's very important and also an engineering manager is responsible for business deliverables technical debt of course and code standards so
you're going to have a little bit more here that you're going to be responsible for as an engineering manager so a technology director so this is an executive role that is often in charge of development and QA functions he or she is typically typically reports to the VP engineering responsibilities include setting the direction for an engineering department to being in charge of an entire engineering organization also directors are also responsible for setting or approving policies establishing
Department guidelines and managing a budget and these are all things that I do right now as far as building technical infrastructure and making sure that we have you know the best infrastructure in place and moving us to innovation always want to be innovating as a technology director and helping your organization to move forward so some of the things that you know I would say as a part of what I've done on the day-to-day that has helped me you know really just having great communication skills
you know really having great active listening skills as well and the ability to learn a lot you know keep learning because we all know in technology what you've learned probably two or three years ago technology changes at the speed of light so we always have to make sure that we're continuously learning uh that's the software Trends any new technology um that is is coming out we have to stay a breast of that to keep our organization uh moving at a a successful rate of pace so seite executive l
eadership and what that can look like and I know we've heard about CEO CIO but have we heard of the day-to-day what they actually do and we know they manage companies but just to give you a little more insight here you know a VP of Technology you know this is a Senor executive role with a broad range of responsibilities you know typically the VP manages are the managers and directors and in some cases they can be the face of the technology department just depending on the company in smaller orga
nizations sometimes the VP of engineering may have some Hands-On coding duties you won't find that too often but that has happened so did want to put that here uh just in case because I have seen that to happen and larger organizations VPS are focused on higher level duties and that coding of course and responsibilities can include long-term Technical and product strategy of course building out that technical infrastructure again setting policies and defining processes establishing relationships
with vendors and you will find this typically at larger companies um and I have done some of the same thing as far as building relationships with technology vendors uh building out your technology portfolio this is really uh something that is critical depending on again the size of the company CTO Chief technology officer I'm sure you all have been familiar with the word uh with the acronym CTO at larger companies CTO are responsible for improving the technical foundation of the company at star
ted the CTO may be a self-de deponent technical co-founder which I have seen that happen in some cases the CTO is responsible for Complete product development and developing technical product vision and being the face of the company's technology so one thing I will say about CTO what I've seen if you have about five to seven it even could be about eight years of experience as um in software development that could be from a startup to your traditional corporate job it was not hard to find a CTO r
ole you know long as you can show those leadership skills show those technical skills you know you do have to have some experience under you uh but they really want to see that leadership even if you started a company yourself you know dayt day on The Daily now we have folks that are you know at youngest I tell you you have young Entre R preneurs out here 18 19 even before College you know starting uh their own company so if you're you're thinking about starting your own company or um this is so
mething that will really get you noticed for a CTO role if you want to move into that you know if you have um if that's something you aspire to do because they can really see that you have leadership skills that you led your own company or LED your own Department um so that will help you o CIO Chief Information officer so the CIO is an operation oriented executive cios work on setting strategy and direction to enhance the company's internal infrastructure and Technical operations also responsibi
lities include implementing employee software tools internal communication technical infrastructure process control access control employee network cost management integration of Technologies across business units so the CIO pretty much you know as well they may not have just a role just looking at all the software processes but they do have a large amount of their work that goes into the technical infrastructure as well but this is just a role you can think of additionally to because I know a l
ot of times in uh technology leadership talks I have seen not too much around Chief Information officers but they are important you know they are important as far as policy Building Technology infrastructure you know these are all leadership executive leadership roles that will make your organization work so let's look at steps to initiate your pathway to leadership in Tech so these are have been some ways that have helped me along the way steps that have helped me to gain different leadership r
oles in the community and also uh for a a career path role so building a pathway to leadership and Tech you know basically stepping up help your peers by providing feedback so if this is something where you're looking at pull requests you know doing code reviews pair programming you know provide feedback help them with their code you know this is something that your manager May notice you know a mentor in the community may notice about you you just never know who's watching you know volunteer to
present on Project updates if you have you know as developers we all know we have standup so on standup if you want to volunteer project updates or in your agile team Sprint time you know in in delivery of updates you can do that propose updates to your team workflow or product release plans offering to help with code reviews these are all things uh that will help you building relationships now this is something that is really important I know we hear the word all the time about networking netw
orking networking but one of the things that you want to make sure that you're doing as well within your organization is start building good relationships with everyone engineering managers ux designers tech leads and product managers you know this is the tech core technology team you know outside of developers you need to be able to have a discussion with everyone uh you know move on a plane of Cross organization because there's going to be some deliverables from each side and you want to make
sure that you all have a great communication uh great relationship there because you never know when a leadership opportunity may come from another side or there could be something that you're interested in like if you're a ux if you're an engineer and you like to do ux audits that was something that I like to do usability is really interesting to me so if you want to sit with the ux strategist or the ux manager one day you know build that rapport because you never know a opportunity where an op
portunity can come from from that side as well assisting others with projects of course and facilitating workshops so if you like to do different code labs and share different projects this is something that you can do at your company you know where you are or even when you start a different uh internship or apprenticeship you can do lunch and learns you know really talk to your manager talk to your supervisor about leading these for your team and mentoring other developers this this is somethin
g that I did first starting out I would have folks to reach out to me because I love to help you know we all know in Tech it's not a one-size fit all and it doesn't come with an instruction manual so you know I really wanted to make sure I got the most out of every opportunity that I had and I was willing to help others and that's one of the thing you always want to make sure that you're giving back in some way now mentorship can come in different different forms you know I know that we're all s
o busy and we have so much to do sometimes mentorship could look like just reviewing somebody's code help them with a bug you know if if it's that or if it's you're mentoring them for six months to a year if you feel that's right so you know you have to do what works for you but just to let you know mentorship can come in many different forms um you know as far as jobs are concerned or Community is concerned so growing your pathway to leadership and Tech you know show strong problem solving abil
ity that's one of the thing that's very important in the technology industry most jobs you got to be able to solve problems so you want to always make sure you're building on that if you feel that you don't have a background in Tech that's okay you know but you want to make sure that you have those problem solving skills you know build on that you know if you don't because that's going to be critical you have to solve problems um in the technology industry keeping skills sharp to build on the hi
gher level architecture and becoming one of the strongest Engineers on the team so one of the things that you want to make sure that you're always doing uh to become a strong engineer and stay that way is you want to make sure that you're staying up on technology learning you know anything that comes out you know always take the time to be able to test you know really make sure that you're staying on top of any changes any updates because we all know that technology changes uh as I stated before
daily and also to you can find within your support group as I stated before I'm a member of women who code women women in technology there's so many other groups you know there's so many folks that you can learn from to help you become a stronger engineer as well there could be something that they're doing well that you may need help on that you know building that Community that's another way for you to become a strong engineer uh just because it it takes a community you know you you can't do i
t all alone and it's great when you have folks to go with you so I think that's really helpful there and ownership you know be accountable for what you're doing you know if there's any mistakes that you've made own up to those you know that really goes a long way with your manager or your supervisor you know not really putting blame on o other folks um you know being a self-starter owning a piece of the business or the product you know that leading you know if you want to take on a project or a
piece of the business and say hey you know what I think I can make this work I want to build the MVP of what this feature or what this product is going to do let me take this on that looks so good to your manager that looks so good to your team lead you know that really shows your leadership skills you know and you probably wouldn't even think that's a leadership skill of you just taking on a project and saying Hey I want to do this part and I wanted to build a team around this just really stepp
ing up that really helps you to stand out so expanding on the pathway to leadership as far as communication is concerned clear communication of requirements and deadlines to the team that's going to be really critical for leadership having the ability to break down complex technical jargon or problems to simplest terms and this is this is really important because when you're working with other teams outside of developers who you know you understand the software development um talk you understand
the technical jargon but someone who's a business analyst they may not or if you're talking to customers there are some smaller software development shops or if you have ux design agencies where the customers may not understand certain technical words but if you're able to cross communicate and really take that technical jargon and break it down to the lowest terms to make it really easy to understand that's going to take you a long way and being able to motivate your team so the communication
that you're doing the active listening that you're doing being able to do all of this this is really going to motivate your team because you can Comm communicate with them in several ways you can get through the to them in several ways and mentorship of course this is really really big being a team player offering pair programming sessions again you know code reviews lunch and learn presentations this is really helpful when something on the team if there's something you want to lead on say for i
nstance there's a user story or a different project that you have and you want to show a better way to go about solving a problem you can just ask your manager or your team lead you know or your direct supervisor hey can I put on a lunch and learn for our team or for our organization that will help you to stand out as well and participating in open source project so I'm sure you all know and if you don't know about October Fest that's every year you know where you can contribute to open source p
rojects do pull requests and all that that's really fun I've participated in that in the past years so it's really fun to get into that and really help others with doing you know open source software and really contributing to open source software for the community and a lot of companies have open- Source software so that's something that's really important so leading in the community and this is something that I've been very excited about and since day one getting into Tech the community has be
en very important and the community has been very good to me so I I love to give back volunteering this is one of the things I did first starting out you know teaching others how to code pair programming you know help Community organizations build their technical infrastructure there are some you wouldn't believe how many you know nonprofit organizations or just small companies small business owners who need your help you know reach out to them if you want your first role in Tech sometimes I kno
w it can be really hard when you don't get your first software development role right out of a program or you don't get you know your first ux design roll out of a program but you can create your own opportunities for yourself you can continue to build your skills but if there's something you're really great at you can help a community organization or a small business and gain that experience you know become a mentor volunteer for leadership roles with meetups and local organizations that's one
of the things I wanted to do early on so when I first joined I know um this was a long time ago girl develop it I wanted to work on on their social media one of the things for me I am a person with communication skills digital marketing skills I started out in PR and Communications before getting into Tech so I was always a person interested in technology as a kid through high school and even in college and I built websites for my friends in college and I knew I said you know I want to do this d
igital marketing thing but I kind of love building websites for my friends and they thought it was so cool and they would come to me every time for that but one of the things I wanted to do I started out building websites for local organizations and then I started to go to meetups to help me with any other features that I needed with front-end development and I just started to volunteer to do talks volunteer to help folks you know who needed help to do things so this was something that was reall
y exciting for me building projects for nonprofits so so that's again something that's near and dear to my heart helping nonprofit organizations you know reaching out to help build a website there are some you wouldn't believe there are some nonprofit organizations who do not have a website or they don't have the most updated website you know reach out there's websites you know idealist.org where you can find organizations in your local area that you can help if you want to gain experience um al
so you can find these several different sites you know I know they have uh different local ones in your area definitely you can Google them of course you know Google is our best friend uh developers when we're looking for something but reaching out to these folks even if they're on Twitter on Facebook or even on LinkedIn that's another place where you can find them ux designs conducting a usability audit for the website so we all know if your site is not is not used user friendly who's going to
really use it so I this was something that was really important to me usability and folks easily accessibility offer accessibility assistance as well because we have to think about we want to make the internet inclusive for everyone you definitely don't want to have a website that you can't use or if someone is you know visually or hearing impaired or anything you don't want to have that where your website uh is not offering value and help in assistance so you can offer assistance there introduc
e new technical tools so if there's a productivity tool that a nonprofit they don't have and it could be something small like slack like Kenley you know reach out make sure that they have those you know if you want to be their technical product specialist that's definitely something that you can do and you can put that on your resume you know to reach out and help them with that and lead on technical product delivery as a product manager Apprentice so I know we have you know folks who you know s
oftware development maybe your jam in the beginning but then you want to go into more product management product delivery and working with customers and Building Products you know you got to be able to solve problems so if you can find a nonprofit that needs to deliver a technical product and you can come on to the project in the beginning and offer your time that's definitely a great thing to do to get you know notice for a leadership role or a full-time you know product management apprenticesh
ip role or product manager role building projects for local startups so other than nonprofit startups who are starting out you know some startups are at different stages other than you know beta and Alpha you know I know it it's different for raising funds at different stages but just starting out you know reach out to startups who are looking for new Talent you know this is a way that you can get an internship an apprenticeship or a full-time role you know show them your portfolio and speak to
your experience and the value you can provide this sometimes can get you hired on the spot sometimes it can get you a leadership role on the spot depending on how you're able to talk about your experience and the projects that you're able to show let them know your career goals to align work priorities so you definitely don't want if you want to be a ux design apprentice and you are you know not even doing that you know and they have you looking doing paperwork so you definitely want to align yo
u know where you are if you want to do software engineering let them know that if you are you you want to specialize in front-end development or backend development let them know that and let them see the projects that you've done even if you're full stack and I know I'm a full stack developer but please make sure you are upping your priorities and letting them know uh because that that will get you placed and you can show you know the projects and activities that you worked on and it's better t
o specialize it's a it's good that you can do everything I'm not saying that you shouldn't be multifaceted but specialization is really going to help you in the long run as well with your expertise and how folks reach out to you for roles and different opportunities uh in your specialized area so and also too this adds additional technology experience on your profile so working with nonprofits working with startups you know volunteering this all adds experience uh for your profile for to get see
n for a leadership role so public speaking you know building your presence as a thought leader technical talks about coding languages of course ux accessibility mobile app design agile scrum if you're interested in any of those or you want to specialize you can definitely do talks related to your specific area around those facilitate workshops code labs and design labs and be a moderator or panelist so these are things that I have done in the past you know you I have placed myself with general a
ssembly in Atlanta as a local partner I've done public speaking on their panels uh in New York and also San Francisco and here in Atlanta just through reaching out just through keeping that communication you know again this all goes back to networking and building those relationships but don't don't be afraid to put yourself out there really let them know the type of talks that you've done no matter who it is if it's a Meetup if it's a certain organization that you're really interested in reach
out to them let them know what you're interested in if you have a talk already together or you want to give your first talk you know that's one of the things I always say if you're not comfortable speaking at a large conference or Summit start speaking at a local Meetup that's one of the things that can give get you noticed and also you can get great feedback to build on your next talk so that's something that really will help you so let's look at how to create your leadership impact road map an
d this is something that will let you know you know on your journey and and this you may want to look at creating once you're ready to you know once you're in a leadership role and even move into your next way so this is something that was that has been helpful to me you know leading self building effective leadership skills for success and I I look at this as in you know what leadership wisdom has I gain looking at the experience uh from my background experience moving forward to now also to le
adership rep reputation basically what do people know me for in the past and what they've known me for right now how I've been able to lead teams my leadership influence and also communication you know active listening to gills again this goes back to how do I lead how do I motivate teams you know just really making a list of these things what I've been able to do also leading others you know prepares managers to achieve lasting results you know this is where you can really build and take a look
at how have you led others in the community how have you led others at work what are some of the projects that you worked on and take some key pieces out of that and this you can use this as well as pieces in your resume also leading managers so if you've had the the opportunity or if you will get the opportunity to lead managers you know this strengthens your ability to manage complexities and collaborate across your organization to achieve results so think about the projects that you worked o
n you know at your company and if you have not you know this is an area where you can put that once you get to that point also leading a function so not really calling a function in uh our code based but this enhances your ability to lead while balancing short and long-term projects so I look at really short and learn long long-term projects to break it down granular to a function you know what did I do in this moment how did I lead in this moment um and what did I learn during that function so
this is something that helps me I write a few steps down about this and really connect the dots sometimes it's a word cloud for me what did my team what did we go through what was our Sprint session like you know and do a retro after to see where we effective in reaching our goals in that function so this helps you as well and leading in organization so this goes to you know if you want to be in that CEO CIO role CTO maximizes personal leadership skills to accelerate an organization's commitment
and vision how are you doing that what are you doing to drive your goals forward to reach the vision and also o lead your company you know these are all important things when you want to build your leadership impact road map and this is something if you feel free to screenshot this as well this will help you you know as you're jotting down ideas and you know this is at different steps so if you're at leading yourself right now that's totally fine no it does not matter where you are in your jour
ney you know once you start to lead others and manage others you can definitely write down your ideas for each side of the um each side of this so I thought this was something that was really cool that I put together that helped me at each step of the way for my leadership goals so I just wanted to share some resources with you feel free to screenshot these on leadership roles explain you know and also take meetups and Tech impact you know again um one of the things that was critical for me star
ting out and what made me want to do this talk you know uh in 2019 women H code released uh they introduced their first leadership fellow uh fellowship program and I was one of the first leadership fellows for the front-end technical track so it was a lot it was so much to learn it was such a good program and it was great leading the community uh that I'm still connected to very closely um also to this was one of the things just everything that I learned during that Fellowship is something that
I took along the way and wanted to create this talk that has helped move and Propel me forward as well that experience so I hope this is helpful for you all um look out for you know groups such as Cod 2040 women in technology with there's so many other um groups that you can get involved in on Meetup as well meetup.com is very good for that look in your local area for any of your you know startup uh websites and things like that I know we have startup Atlanta here in atdc and and local places wh
ere you can get involved please do that um that really helps to get involved very early and this is how you can get in touch with me I'm on Twitter at J Ponder 77 and also I'm on LinkedIn as Jennifer Ponder so really excited and really happy that I can share this talk with you today and I look forward to seeing you all online okay thank you so so much Jennifer this was really helpful for me knowing that I also want to get into leadership and one of the things that I have been figuring out these
days is like what are all the positions that I can get into because I don't I don't have anyone who could like tell me or like there's like no such person in my life who is into leadership and so it is so difficult to navigate and like figure out like oh there is that kind of position as well but I don't know what skills do I need and this insightful talk was really really amazing and I'm so glad I got to hear from you um if you had to minutes we have like a couple of questions and also sure ple
ase not that Jennifer has also volunteered for a 30 minute session 30 minute mentorship session with her so if you are interested please please please fill out the feedback form you can talk all things about leadership and so much more uh thank you so much Jennifer for doing that I do it yeah so bringing up the first question um such an insightful talk thank you Jennifer how do I advocate for or promote myself as a PhD grad transitioning to Tech yeah I would say to start out make sure that you a
re really um if you don't have LinkedIn please get on LinkedIn and network with folks you know really share what you're doing make sure you're promoting yourself on your social media uh Twitter is one of the best places I would say for the technology uh I I tell you the technology uh folks on Twitter is it it's like no other you know um Tech Twitter so make sure you're doing that promoting yourself there you know join things for PhD and and Tech related type things because you never know who may
have you know a PhD and Tech that's helping you even if you want to move from somewhere uh move from your current um role that you're in right now over to Tech so you just never know make sure you're always you know hashtagging you know Tech Twitter women in Tech something there's always someone out there um be sure to always again to just join look on meetup.com join local meetups uh also talk to folks you know whenever you're seeing folks doing talks and different projects feel free to reach
out to them sometimes now I I will say you know sometimes you may not always get an answer don't get disc discouraged by that you know be persistent you know use that perseverance that you have and keep reaching out you know if it's not the right time right now that's not going to say it's not going to be the right time in the future so definitely don't get discouraged if you don't hear back from folks move on it's definitely so many people in the world you you just won't be able to have enough
time so yeah those are some of the starting out things that I say you can do thank you so much for sharing that and also like since you mentioned a lot about public speaking as well I want to encourage everyone that if you ever want to get started into public speaking or anything you can also reach out to your local G community and we would be absolutely happy to have you definitely I can I will concur with that because uh women takech makers Atlanta I did one of my first virtual reality uh talk
s with women Tech makers Atlanta uh if you all don't know I specializ in virtual reality software development so uh react VR was one of my favorite things at the the time and I just love doing all kind of talks and things on projects that I worked on so shout out to women Tech makers Atlanta yes really shout out to all the women techmakers Community yes definitely one one last question before I let you go how do you balance and knowing that it's such a difficult time and Leadership is also like
kind of sometimes scary how do you balance your own mental health when things are stressful in society and as a leader you have added responsibilities so how do you figure out a balance between them I think the balance is knowing how to turn things off you know sometimes you just got to tune into yourself so if it's you know hey I'm not going to be on social media today or tomorrow or I may take three to four days off it's just knowing how to put yourself first and just knowing like hey I need a
day off today is the day where I'm going to work on this really pace yourself also too keeping a journal that's that's been really helpful for me too to know um what I need to do to move to the next step so just know how to unplug and put your priorities you know where they need to be on yourself if if you want to prioritize your help definitely don't feel bad for prioritizing your self-care uh and your health whenever you need to yes I always say this to myself as well like I come first and th
en everything else comes so you I need to prioritize me first if I'm good everything else will fall into place anyways fine it's not going to work out for anyone and I'm going to screw up more things than ever yeah I think that time you definitely want to unplug make sure you're getting enough time because if we are burnt out if we're not great who else can we be great for so definitely we we got to make sure that we're uh on an into to ourselves even if you want to take yourself out shopping on
e day or get yourself a nice uh smoothie or something do something that that's well for you because we do a lot of work in the technology industry and some days it can be challenging and we have so much going on to manage uh but it's definitely great work that we do but you definitely want to make sure you're putting yourself for first definitely okay thank you so much Jennifer for spending your Thursday with us and thank you so much for sharing more about how to get into leadership this was rea
lly great Les session for all of us thank you yes definitely great to spend the day with you all I hope you have a great rest of the day and a great International women's day event here I hope it's amazing I had a great time with you all thank you thank you by byebye bye moving on I know we are all so much excited about live streaming and knowing that you know what like today morning and since I already shared before the event like I was so freaking freaked out like I don't know how to do live s
treaming and this is my first one and I was like man maybe I should have heard Aisha speak about getting started with live streaming before doing this event but I'm so glad and I'm so happy to have you here Aisha thank you so much for doing this for us and like helping us get started with live streaming if you don't know Aisha know that she's an amazing Community organizer and she organizes two conferences as far as I know and there would be more probably but like title of comp and self conferen
ce you should definitely check them out and over to you Aisha all right awesome thank you so much I'm excited to be here so yes as Ria mentioned in here I'll go ahead and take these off since I'm the only one here now but as Ria mentioned I am one of the organizers for title of comp which is a new musical Tech conference uh and the idea there is that it's basically the same kind of information that you would get from any other Tech conference but all of the presentations are going to be in a mus
ical and or theatrical format so I'm very very excited about that and that is going to happen in tandem with self-c conference which is a more established conference uh that is also going to take place here in Detroit but that's just sort of a a very Community centered event we try to be really intentional about doing half technical talks and half people talks so really talking about teams and and growth and you know all the things that make us human as we are working in TCH so yes I love I love
that I've seen so many uh theater kids fellow theater kids in Tech as I'm building this conference it's a lot of fun so I'm here today to talk to you about live streaming which you know you're all familiar with now because at the the very least you have been here for this conference today uh and you have participated in the chat or you've taken in what the speakers have had to say um this is something that has become a pretty big part of my life I am a senior developer relations engineer for Ne
w Relic and streaming has become part of my job which is interesting it's not something that I necessarily would have guessed would happen even a year ago that said being on camera and teaching and speaking has been part of my career basically since the beginning pretty early on before IID even worked professionally as a developer I was a teacher I started out teaching at a coding boot camp and I started building courses for Treehouse and other platforms and I started I started streaming on my o
wn though though that was largely me singing karaoke online and so and I've you know done lots of online meetups tutorials all kinds of things and that all has led up to me becoming a streamer for my job so here's the rundown for what I want to talk about today we're going to talk about why you might want to stream and hopefully that'll give you some guidance in figuring out what it is that you want to do the purpose behind your streaming we're going to talk technology and hopefully take some of
the decision fatigue out of that process we're going to talk about building content and how you might want to structure your streams so that you have a plan and we're also going to talk about Community which will be sort of a little tour of twitch I will note you know clearly we're here on YouTube YouTube and so there are other platforms that you can choose for live streaming but twitch is the one that I'm most familiar with and so that's the one that we're going to be focusing on today all rig
ht so let's talk about some avenues for broadcasting here are some of the types of things where you're going to be using very similar skills so thinking about why we're streaming so you might do something like a video podcast where you are recording episodes to be released later uh you might be recording for a learning platform so thinking about building out a curriculum and then releasing the releasing that curriculum in small parts um online conferences so something like this where you have a
lot of control over your situation you can you have your talks and then potentially uh you have a Q&A afterwards and then something like webinars so this might be something that you do for your own business or for the company that you work for where you are where you have your content and you may or may not be communicating with the people that are watching your stream or your content so think about why do you want to stream for me I really really love that it provides me an opportunity to inter
act with people in a little bit of a different way I I do have more control than I might have in an in-person classroom or at a conference before last year but I still have that feeling of community I'm still able to connect with people and even make friends through twitch and I really really love that about streaming it makes learning new things and communicating about them a lot more fun for me so I want to talk through a quick start a quick start guide to streaming which will hopefully like I
said cut down on that decision fatigue for y'all so we're going to talk about a few different types of things that you're going to need to figure out before you get started but these are less complicated than you might think so we've got equipment we're going to talk about space and we're going to talk about software and I will have recommendations for each of these things so that hopefully you can get started there and then build build build up on it later so first up talking about computers a
nd video now there we'll talk about content a little later but there are a few things that might be more difficult if you are just jumping in with whatever computer you've got uh for example these days I'm streaming on my work laptop which is a MacBook Pro and it's really not made for that um I I have an external GPU that is allowing me to stream on my work laptop but I actually built a PC for far less money and I was able to and I was able to get going you can absolutely just buy a computer if
you don't already have one um work within your budget um if you have if you have a computer already uh you should be able to get started but you might have uh degraded quality of your of your video depending on what the specs of that machine are now all of that to say your video honestly is less important than your audio in my opinion when you are streaming there is it again it depends on what you're doing but you can in my opinion you can go without a camera at all at first there are plenty of
very successful streamers who do this um and they just they just don't show their face that is part of and that's part of their content and so you know that's a decision that you are going to have to make for yourself but if you're not comfortable on video or if you don't feel like you have it in the budget to buy a mic or buy a camera that's okay start without one choosing a mic though I think is more important and I encourage you to think a little bit more carefully about how you go about gett
ing started in terms of audio uh and I like I said I have suggestions so think about your budget what what can you comfortably afford this is not a scenario where I'm going to say you know buy the most expensive microphone that you can because if you don't know how to how to mix your audio you know that's probably not going to be that helpful for you um but buy something that you can comfortably afford and it's totally fine if you need to start with whatever with whatever microphone is built int
o your computer also think about the type of content that you're building so are you going to be recording other people in the same room so for example are you about to start a video podcast with your roommate cool that might influence the type of microphone that you choose what are your long-term goals do you see yourself building on this over time um to Ali's point about blogging later this is where I say you know get started with something small and then figure out if you like it try it out a
nd see how you feel and then think about the available space as well do you have a place in your house where you can where you can work on this do you have enough physical space to have you know the microphone setup that you have in your mind that is uh something that I personally strug with I've definitely had to rethink some things based on the amount of space that I have left in my house uh and so that's definitely a consideration now broadly there are two types of microphones that you are pr
obably going to choose from and that's USB and XLR so your USB is the the USB that you're probably used to seeing and attaching you know different accessories to your computer the benefit to a USB microphone is its relative Simplicity lower up front cost and the portability um for example I have a USB microphone right here and all I have to do is plug this in straight into my computer and it does what I needed to do now that is in contrast to an XLR microphone which generally speaking this is no
t always true but generally speaking you're going to have improved quality longevity and flexibility meaning that you can swap different parts of your setup out uh to fit your needs but that's probably unnecessary and overly complicated if you're not already familiar with audio equipment if you do choose an XLR mic there are other parts of your setup that you're going to have to include to get this to work this microphone is not going to is not going to just plug straight into your computer beca
use it has um it's attached with a mic cable um just like you'd see at your favorite karaoke bar and so you're going to have to uh set it up so I have there are two other devices that this that this microphone is hooked into before it gets to my computer it's a lot um so you're getting started I definitely recommend going with something like this first microphone so my first mic that I used for streaming was this blue yeti and it is actually literally blue but the company is called blue and this
is more than enough for most folks uh this microphone that I am using right now is my fancy work microphone and it was uh thankfully I did not buy it so like I said if you if you buy something that you are comfortably able to afford that is probably more than enough some optional accessories that you will probably see if you are uh looking around for microphones that you truly do not need uh but may improve the quality of your audio are a pop filter which will cut down on any hissing or popping
sounds in your mic a boom arm which you can attach to your microphone and that's going to hold your mic in position and you can you'll find varieties that will rest either on the desk or the floor this one in particular is actually uh clamped to my desk and then a shock mount which is going to lessen the effect of movement or vibration on your microphone one of the nice things about that is if you do have something if you do have your microphone on your desk uh and you're you know typing a lot
or you're moving things around on your desk that might be helpful so considerations of space you want to the at the at a base level something that everyone can do is if you do live with other people let them know when you're streaming if and we'll talk a little bit about scheduling later but if you do have a schedule make sure that everyone in the house is aware of that schedule and that you are reminding folks when you get started streaming I live with three other people and so I try to be cons
cious of letting them know when I'm going to start streaming especially if I have a guest on or if I know that I'm going to be recording and using that footage later soundproofing so there are plenty of products that you can buy that are specifically for soundproofing a room or dampening the sound in a room but you can get started by just filling up your space with soft things blankets or mattresses or whatever you have around uh will help deaden the sound so that you don't have um so that you d
on't have an echo coming through on your stream so your home studio setup can evolve over time you can start off with whatever your existing workspace is that's totally fine lots of people literally bring recording setups into their kitchens and do cooking streams uh you could you could get started in a closet or a small room to focus on getting a really clear sound you could do DIY soundproofing like I said with the blankets or the mattresses you can do actual soundproofing with uh like boards
that you would attach to the wall you can even go as far as buying a portable recording booth that um that's maybe that's maybe a little much for most folks getting started but that's something that you can do down the road the point here is to let your voice Shine by far in my opinion the most important part of this is making sure that your audio sounds decent uh the the main reason that I will click away from a stream personally is if one the streamer is silent for too long and two if when the
y do speak the quality of the audio is bad if there's a ton of extra noise uh or if it's difficult to understand them because their audio is garbled so we've talked about equipment we've talked about our space but let's talk quickly about software as well so you may or may not want to record your streams this is going to depend on what you're doing with them afterwards um twitch you can set twitch to record your streams they're called vods and those vods will be saved for varying amounts of time
depending on um whether or not you are a twitch affiliate or partner but you can also record them for yourself and keep that original on your computer that just depends on the amount of space that you have available uh for streaming though and you can you can definitely get you can definitely get software that will do both of these things for you you want to look for something though that you're going to be comfortable just jumping into I personally use OBS studio and that's something that I ca
n just I've set it up the way I want it I can jump in I can click a few things and I can hit start streaming and so you want to find something like that that is going to work well for you um I use OBS Studio because it's really really extensible and it's free uh but you could do something like right now we're using streamyard and so if you want something that is a little bit more builtup and will streamline the process um of constructing your views for you that might be something to look into es
pecially if you're planning on doing events or having a lot of people come and join you on your stream streamyard is really good for that so let's talk about the content itself we kind of talked about how we might get set up to create this channel but what are we actually going to put on it how are we going to connect with an audience so think about who that audience is I've got three sort of sample audience members here we got Benny beginner who's an aspiring developer we got Melissa midlevel w
ho is an engineering manager and then we have Khloe client who is a small business owner uh we want to think about what these people need and once you have a community that is coming back to your streams pretty regularly you can ask them straight up but if you're if you have someone in mind that you're trying to benefit then you want to think about ahead of time what are the things that they need Benny beginner that might be tutorials like getting started with various types of technology for Mel
issa it might mean that she wants upskill training or a focus on computer science theory for a chloee client then she might want she might be looking for solutions to specific problems that she's running into in her business so then what are your learning objectives how are you going to meet those needs for Benny maybe that means that you're going to provide fundamental skills that are going to improve his chances of being hired for Melissa maybe it's new information that you that she can take b
ack to her team and for Chloe maybe that that's helping her balance self-sufficiency with a need to work on these problems she's running into with her business and so you've defined who this audience is what they need how you can meet those needs and now you can say okay knowing all of that this is the kind of content that I'm going to include on my Stream So for Benny that might be tightly scoped Project based lessons with public repos so I've planned ahead of time I know that I'm going to do t
his project on stream and I'm providing supplementary materials for my viewers so you I've actually seen people run entire boot camps through twitch uh if any of you have heard with uh heard of learn with Leon he has a really fantastic Channel where he works through a whole boot camps and is really supporting uh supporting students really really thoroughly um and has built up this wonderful Community around that stream around that channel for Melissa mid-level you might do professional developme
nt content maybe a video podcast as an example I do a Thursday podcast type stream where I talk about tech education and I'll have guests on from different parts of the industry to talk about really amazing educational efforts that they have that they have worked through or uh talk about work that they've put out so for example I talked to un of ail a few weeks ago about about using music and humor to teach technical Concepts uh she is actually part of the inspiration for title of conf which we
talked about before this musical Tech conference she did a presentation called tail call optimization the musical uh bang bang Con in I think 2019 and it was phenomenal and so I had her on this this sort of tech education podcast to talk about how that sort of approach to teaching can make for more effective lessons and then for Chloe client you might do something like a library of bite-sized videos to socialize new features and help with troubleshooting one example of this which is not bite-siz
ed but that does this really well is uh learning with Jason Jason langor does these really wonderful sessions with people from all over the industry where they will talk through and code through different concepts or products and they always provide this really wonderful getting started type Vibe for all of them uh and so all of these are really different takes on how you could build out your content on on a stream if you do decide that you want to record your stream then you want to really try
to focus on clean clear recordings I have a few tips for that which I take from uh filming like acting courses when I was a kid first is a slate so especially this is especially important if you're doing your own editing again if you can afford it and you know that this is something that you want to really invest in I would honestly suggest hiring someone to do this but if you're doing your own editing um one thing that I suggest doing is a slate Swish and clap so by slate I mean that you want t
o get a sense for the noise levels the ambient noise levels in your room and adjust to that by swish I literally mean when you feel yourself getting a little bit dry take take a sip swish it around particularly getting the water between your teeth and your lips and that will make the sound a lot clearer as it comes out of your mouth again if you're editing yourself and you make a mistake if you're recording mind you and not streaming then uh you can do a clap or a or a snap some indication that
you can easily see when you're going back and looking at the through the audio uh that will tell you when you messed up and that will make it a lot easier and faster for you to find those little missteps another thing that we want to be sure that we are keeping in mind through all of this no matter what kind of content you're working through is accessibility so we want to make sure that we are including captions and I I will tweet I'll tweet this out or I'll send it to the organizers something u
h but my co-worker uh Rachel wman has a really great blog post about how to set up captions in OBS um but we want to make sure that as best you can you are providing captions that are synchronized with and equivalent to your spoken content so you know the best thing to do is going to be a live caption a live captioner so a real human that is that is captioning your content as you're speaking uh you can also do automated captions and that will as long as you're speaking clearly that will get you
part of the way transcripts are also really important if you're going to especially if you're going to be releasing your content leader so a lot of people will read transcripts instead of watching or listening to your content and so if you're going to provide that you want to include additional descriptions of things which brings me to the third accessibility tip that I have which is blocking you want to try you want to try to avoid pointing on things pointing at things or saying things like and
over here and as you can see because not everyone can see H you're you want to try to describe what you're talking about rather than relying on your viewers being cited and with that I say don't be like me and I have a screenshot of a very very cluttered desktop with lots and lots of screenshots on it actually so U make sure that you are as much as possible clearing out your desktop or hiding any embarrassing nonsense that you have on your computer and again I say let your voice shine but I mea
n this in a few different senses it's important for your channel to reflect you as an example I regularly sing during my streams I incorporate my love of musical theater into the experience of watching my channel you um behind me I've got a series of window cards which are posters that I got from different Broadway shows that I've been to through the years and that really like colors my my channel we'll talk a little about a little bit more about that as we are going through this next section ta
lking about building community so we're going to talk broadly about scheduling interaction with your viewers and moderation and that's going to close us out so for this part we're actually G to go I'm G to break out of my slide deck here and we are going to go on an adventure so the first thing I want to talk about is scheduling this I'm showing now my uh my twitch schedule on Mondays I do a stream at noon this is this is all in my local time so I do a language learning stream uh at noon on Mond
ays I do a rust homework I call it rest homework stream at 3:30 on Tuesdays I do teaching with Aisha which is the sort of podcast that mentioned before on Thursdays at 3 p.m. and if somebody wanted to look and see what regular streams I had they could go to my channel they could click on the schedule Tab and they can see what I have planned for the week if they're interested in past streams you can go back and you'll see the streams that I have actually done if as the streamer you can go to your
stream manager uh and this is actually what I do when I'm streaming like I'll keep I'll keep my stream up I'll make this I'll zoom in a little bit here so this is I'll either have this in my view or I'll have just the chat which you can pop out I actually don't know how to put it back so that's just going to disappear but you can pop out your chat and bring it over to wherever is more convenient for you if that's all you want to see you can also hide your number of viewers your followers your s
ubscribers all of that you can hide that from yourself as you're streaming it does make some people nervous to watch the number of viewers as they are presenting that can be that can be really nerve-wracking and if the number is really low some people uh can get really self-conscious about that and so you can absolutely just choose not to look at it as you're streaming the other things that I think are important in this view are uh your activity feed so your activity feed will show when things h
appen during your stream or at all just related to your channel so I can see that in the past few minutes a handful of people have followed me so thank you to spar SE laminated toast Elemental bites and Lam 98 I'm gonna try so when you are looking at that and keeping an eye on the chat and the activity feed you can you can incorporate that into your stream and that's part of that interaction piece you can keep an eye on the chat in order to in order to make that stream more approachable and more
and more engaging so the other thing I want to point out is channel points so I mentioned that I sing on my stream a lot and I'm gonna pull I'm GNA bring my chat back here for a second so Channel points are something that your viewers will accumulate twitch it's something that your uh users or your viewers will accumulate on Twitch as they watch you live so your channel Point rewards are things that they can redeem those points for and hello to the Diabolical as well so most of the ones here ar
e just the default Channel Point rewards but I have one that that is specific to my channel it's called serenade so you can redeem 800 Channel points on my channel and you can request a song and I'll sing a few bars of it and that really makes that really makes my stream like that much more mine it makes it more um more in tune with my personality you can also use those you can also use those built-in ones to your advantage like hydrate Ah that's all you have to do is close it and the chat the c
hat will come back into its little spot here on the I I was about to say on the right side of the screen but you can actually move the different panels around um based on what's comfortable for you the last thing I want to talk about on this on this view is rating uh so when you finish your stream I highly recommend rating another another streamer and what that does it'll is it'll take you and your viewers into another Channel that's currently live uh and it'll sort of just continue things along
lots of people will play Twitch in the background and this is a really good way to make connections with other streamers but it's also a way for other people to find to find those streamers that you think are doing really cool things so I've readed the the Diabolical a few times and because I think that what he's doing is really great and I think that his that he's really building a very warm welcoming community and so I'll take my viewers there because I think that you know he's gonna take car
e of them um which brings me to categories so I typically stream in the the Science and Technology category and if you're planning on doing coding streams that's probably where you're going to want to be but you can you can absolutely and I'm I'm chuckling because I can see the chat going on I wna be where the repos are I wna pull them commit them push them I love it I love it but your category is uh important that's sort of like it's sort of like being in a community for a framework so like I k
now a bunch of folks in the react community and you know we support each other and we do each other's events and that sort of thing sort of similar with categories I am really working on finding folks that I really enjoy in the Science and Technology category and working on supporting them and being part of their Community as well the I want to talk quickly about moderation settings so there are some built into twitch so for example I have hyperlinks blocked so nobody unless they're a mod or a m
oderator can post links in my chat I do that as a precaution I really haven't run into too many issues but it's important to know that that's an option there are also Bots that will Auto moderate for you in order to add people as moderators and I have a lot because all of my team members are mods on my channel um but you can go to your community and then roles manager and you can add folks as moderators and that will give them that'll give them some additional Powers uh it'll let them mute or ba
n people from your channel in case there are Bad actors uh who come to try and you know detract from your stream but you can give other folks the ability to deal with that on your behalf and as you as you start to gain more and more viewers that becomes more and more difficult to manage yourself so I definitely recommend having at least a couple of folks who are willing to be in the Stream most of the time when you're streaming uh think really carefully about what's acceptable in your community
and then be really tough about enforcing that be really consistent think about it like a code of conduct at an event like what are the what were you what would your expectations of that event's organizers be and really hold yourself to that don't be afraid to ban people from your channel so these are some of the links that uh again I'll I'll be happy to share the these later uh and please do reach out if you'd like to talk more about this stuff you can find me on Twitter ATA Blake that's a i s h
a b l a k I am I blog occasionally at aisha. codes and I am Aisha codes on Twitch but thank you so much y'all oh and let me put my headphones back on okay thank you so much Aisha for doing this I I still wish that I should have seen this before organizing this last night even in terms of accessibility like I couldn't like work on like putting things together for this event and then yesterday I was like freaking out like oh my God I need to figure out close captioning I need to do this thing I n
eed to send like links to all the speakers and set things up and send emails and whatnot and I was like so scared and I was like reaching out to other people for like asking for guidance because like I have never done this before I don't know how to do this so this was so great and to be honest like I'm like little bit afraid of like twitch and all these things and I'm like oh my God what if people will see me on Twitch do I really want to like show my face it's so hard to get rid of that fear s
o I have a question for you personally like how did you got rid of that fear of like oh my god like people will see me and like how did you just start twitch like live streaming how did you get into that yeah that's a great question so I will be honest and say I did not have that fear ahead of time I grew up I grew up on uh in theater and enjoying the stage and I actually feel far more comfortable like singing performing than I do speaking on stage and so that helped a lot I actually got started
streaming doing twitch things which was a karaoke game that twitch uh helped to develop and so that was most of my streaming for a long time I think it's helpful it's really really helpful for me personally to have sort of moles in the chat so I'll have my boyfriend join my chat or my friends and having them there talking to me makes it feel like we're hanging out that's a really good idea I should ask my friends to join all my events now I just like tell them that you have to join there's no o
ther option exactly that would probably help yeah and you can do that with your content as well so if you decide you know you wanna you want to do a like coding heavy Channel you can just invite people in to pair with you and then you have someone to kind of Bounce things off of you don't have to come up with all of the conversation yourself you have a friend there who's just a friendly face and you know that can that can help as well yeah that's really interesting thank you so much for that als
o people know that Aisha has really volunteered to donate her like 30 minutes of her time for for a mentoring session as a giveaway so you should definitely fill out the feedback form and get a chance to talk to Aisha and like be mentored I'm pretty sure like this's so much that AA can share knowing that she is a community leader she organizes so many conferences and she has been doing this for a really really long time you should definitely uh reach out to you should follow her on Twitter she's
Aisha Blake and on Twitch she's Aisha codes please do that thing right now and I think at this point I'm also super motivated that I might as well just jump in next time whenever you are hosting the next event yeah absolutely come on bye yes um we do have a question for you by the way do you have a process for generating ideas for stream activities like projects and such yeah so I'm sort of working on that as as we go along but my thought was to decide on something that I wanted to learn and th
en build out sort of theme days so I mentioned on Mondays on Mondays I work through parts of the rust programming book with one of my co-workers uh who goes by chil codes and we are literally just working through chapter by chapter and that's what we do on Mondays and we and then on Tuesdays I'll follow that up with something a little bit a little more Hands-On so I might do rustlings which is a series of rust exercises um or I might do or I might build something that the book suggests as like a
follow-up to the chapter we did the day before uh Wednesdays are sort of game themed and so I just started doing doing scps which is a game that you an MMO that you play by programming your all of your units with JavaScript Thursdays is talking about education so like that in this case I'm I'm here with you all but ordinarily I'm I'm doing this sort of podcast talking about tech education and so coming up with those themes which are centered on things that are important to me that's created pro
jects over time and so the next step with my game my game day is I'm going to be starting up my own server that I can use to play along with folks in my community and we'll be showing how you can I'm hoping my hope is that we'll be showing how you can monitor that with New Relic so you know eventually coming back to my employer yeah definitely I think it is very important that you should do the content you have is something that you are really interested in and is something that you are really e
xcited about because when you're are live streaming your excitement will actually reflect and that would actually help you with your content so yeah yeah and I think uh just watching more watching more streamers helps so even if you don't do the same type of content that they do you can think like okay well how how would that look if it were on my channel and if it were me doing this like what how can I spin this to be something that makes sense for me in my community yeah definitely we also hav
e another question for you um I hope it's not too late but probably like let's read this as a last question so the you try to like you talked about all the different audiences and everything so do you try to make all your segments work for all your different audience personas or do you aim different shows at different people that is a great question Megan was actually my first guest on that Tech education show that I talked about and the answer is no I don't try to make all of those segments wor
k for everybody I know that some folks are gonna prefer you know talking about games and I actually do just play games sometimes on my twitch Channel like it's what you want it to be but I I try to focus I try to Focus each of those segments on you know whoever I think is going to get the most out of them and that it's a there could be a whole other talk about like branding as a streamer and like marketing yourself as a streamer and all of that definitely this was very helpful to me and I really
hope everyone enjoyed this session thank you so much Aisha for spending a Thursday with us and for helping us getting started with live streaming I don't know if I will do it but I definitely know that now I'm going to be a part of this thing as I'm like at least be there for be there when people are doing this thing because I'm pretty sure that I can learn a lot from everyone I love it yeah um hope to see you on Twitch yes see you soon there thank you so much okay bye um moving on I cannot emp
hasize this enough like this was such an amazing for me and I really I still yeah I hope like I wish if I had done like heard about live streaming before because I was like last night I was freaking out about accessibility and everything and I'm like oh my God and I I don't know like I should have told this when Aisha was uh here at that time but I was actually writing a long email to Aisha like Aisha I'm feeling so bad I really want to make this accessible and I really want to add close caption
ing but I'm like I already spent 4 hours trying to figure out how to add close captioning on live stream and I don't know and I really need help with that and I feel so bad and yes I this talk was really useful to me and I really hope you all also learned from that moving on I really want to introduce someone who is Nya I don't know if you know her or not but you should definitely know her she has I have been like really fuing her for a really long time and I'm not afraid to admit that but I hav
e really been like kind of like stalking her but in like a good way because I have been learning a lot from her when she is talking about like sketch noing when she's talking about mental health and to be honest Nya was the first person who made me realize that mental health is something that I should really care about so thank you so much Nya for joining us today and also know that nya nya is also offering sorry volunteering a 30 minute mentorship mentorship session I really need to hide right
now so feel please um drop your questions for Nya and I'm really excited for you what are you woohoo uh can you all hear me okay yes awesome so first of all thank you so much I have say thank you to Ria the gdg San Francisco organization all the people involved because this is a community I've known for a while and it kind of almost feels like a journey back um I'm also super happy because I get to talk about something I really love so I hope you find this interesting more importantly I love tal
king about this so if you do find it interesting and you want to kind of explore other ideas come chat with me so my talk is called sketch the docks and initially in my um notes right i' basically called it why visual storytelling can improve your learning communication skills I changed it to how because not only should you know why it's important but you should know how to do it so let's get started so before I get hopefully oh it was animated all right so this is the abstract I put out and I w
anted to start by giving you a sense of what the stock is about if you go check out at niia on Twitter that's my account you can also go check out at sketch the Dos this image that you see here is kind of meta it is what I see as a visual story that literally is the summary of the talk I'm going to do today the abstract that you see on the left is what's on the site and at a very high level we want to really talk about just two things if I leave you with two ideas I will have one the first idea
is when you walk away I hope you see visual storytelling to be as important as public speaking and Technical documentation in terms of communicating in Tech and second I hope you'll see visual storytelling as a way to help yourself learn and then to teach others so what is visual storytelling I want to look at this image here and this is what we kind of refer to as a sketch note but this goes a little bit beyond that um I actually have it on the sketch the do site if you go look at it this is a
summary of a learning module that introduces you to cloud computing right so what is visual storytelling it's got three components in my opinion first you're using a visual vocabulary the minute you see this you're seeing trucks you're seeing people you're seeing banners you're seeing all kind you're like what is going on right but what you're doing is you're using that visual vocabulary to communicate complex ideas so this one image that you see is summarizing an entire module that would have t
aken you 40 minutes to get through which has a lot of complex technology why should you do it because visual cues can help you in understanding stuff better remembering it and retaining it longer so why visual storytelling this is the statistic I always use I'm not sure how rooted this is in kind of like deep research but there are links that kind of use this and the statistic says that 65% of us have the ability to learn visually what does that mean it means when you think about learning someth
ing you're really looking at two things right you're looking at what types of learning abilities do I have some people learn by seeing things some listen to lectures some like reading and writing some like doing this you know interactive tutorials they're all ways to learn but the second thing is every one of us has the ability to absorb things and connect the dots and like see patterns better using one or more of these strategies and two out of three of us learn visual our brains can absorb spa
tial information make connections remember them later and detect patterns faster when you see a picture so my visual storytelling journey is actually kind of Ria talked a bit bit about this right like I believe a lot in like talking about mental health and self-care so like so many of us in Tech I have burnt out many times I keep telling myself it won't happen again but it will right because this is how like things are going on so my visual story telling Journey started out as self-care it turne
d out that I when I was in like giant conferences or when I was in a group of a lot of people I would get super stressed out and sketching helped calm me down it would help me focus and it helped me be present and that really really helped me cope with anxiety once I started doing this right as a way of okay I need to be able to like you know focus and improve my ability to connect it turned out it was a natural progression to journaling like everywhere I went I would carry like this notepad and
a pen and paper and be drawing all the time and in fact when I joined Microsoft as the develop relations team person I literally announced it with a sketch note so journaling is really about capturing what we're doing with notes that are visual and then from there it was like a very intuitive step to storytelling and when I talk about storytelling I'm really thinking about how can I use this to not just capture stuff that I'm listening but basically communicate it back in a way that will help o
thers and I hope to talk about all of this in just a bit but when I look at it from my tech journey and I'm specifically looking at visual storytelling for Tech this really has shocked me and this journey has happened over this period of one year so I wanted to talk about a few things that I think are relevant in the hopes that you will adopt it first sketch noting 101 last year Microsoft has a conference called Bild which is like Google IO and it's like a whole bunch of people show up and they'
re talking about the various Technologies tracks Etc and one of those I did a talk on visual storytelling like how should they just get started sketch noting what was interesting to me is two things one people who thought they have to know to draw kind of figured out well I can do this and they jumped in and just shared their stuff that was incredible second by seeing what people shared I was able to see that two or three different people would see the same concept differently so we as people in
develop relations or if you are like trying to teach someone something you're able to use this to see how different people see your content right second thing is um late last year early this year and this is later on if you're interested in this stuff I also did a talk on something called chalk the talk how you can use this to improve your skills as a public speaker and then there's this whole series of workshops called visualiz it where we kind of had different folks in the community come teac
h you various skills around visual storytelling not just sketch noting but how to do journaling how to use procreate how to basically be a graphic recorder who stands on stage and sketch notes right things like that but the other two kind of um things that came out of this which was surprising to me is one it was a great way to ify messaging when you're in the middle of a giant conference or in you're in especially now when we're all remote right we're not even in the same room you want to conne
ct with people you want to share something this in a stream of tweets there's a visual people pay attention the other thing which was surprising to me the second uh image that you see here is actually something I had done for our CVP and it was like visualizing her story in Tech and it turned out that's really an incredibly powerful way to visualize your own user Journey so there's a way to do personal branding around this as well so now let's get on to bra STS what is sketch noting so in your v
isual storytelling Journey your first step is always going to be in sketch noting here because we are in the gdg community I want to shout out a few people chuki Chan Corey ladisl even Virginia Paul Trak all of these folks are incredible not just you know sketch noers but also illustrators folks you can like follow and learn from but what is sketch noting sketch noting to me starts with rapid note taking right you are at a conference and you want to really like listen to what the speaker is doin
g and you want to have these like memory AGS to remember it you start taking notes rapidly second aspect it's visual you're capturing those ideas visually and third and this is the unique thing every sketch note is unique because it's about how you summarize and synthesize that information so this picture is literally me at a conference you can see I have a phone next to me I'm busy sketch noting and what you see as the background of this image is what a sketch note looks like it's not pretty bu
t it works because to this day I remember where I was what I was doing and what the topic was and that is the goal the whole goal is ideas not art where do you go after that once you've kind of conquered simple note taking and this is where I really want you to think about visual storytelling which is how do I communicate these to diverse audiences in a way that they will understand and remember and so the three aspects I always put in here are First Connect emotionally Denise you will has talke
d about this concept called anthropomorphism where if you use characters in your visuals which have eyes and nose and things like that people connect emotionally it's no longer like this abstract Tech right it's like oh my God it has a face this server is mad the server is sad that it crashed right so you you kind of can tell stories by using characters anthropomorphism that's where your next Journey would be next you you've captured the data you captured the information you've got them to conne
ct to it but did they understand were you able to actually get them to transfer that information and this is where metaphors really help the example I've put here and if you remember the first image I put out I was talking about cloud computing cloud computing is the delivery of Computing Services over the Internet so my metaphor was delivery H how can I visualize it and I said well we're in covid times everybody knows food delivery trucks right so I'm going to use delivery the metaphor as a foo
d delivery truck and explain everything in cloud computing using that metaphor and works because with metaphors you just have to allow people to kind of make a connection to a concept and then they do the work of translating it and connecting it to other things they know so the minute I say oh it's like a food delivery truck now when I'm talking about pay as you go pricing they're like oh it's like tolls on the bridge when the truck goes over and it's like yes it's like a parking meter where I h
ave to pay for everything I use yes right so metaphors help and then once you've got past that stage the next stage is really visualizing consistently how do you create a vocabulary so that people are now who are watching all the stuff you do they're beginning to see patterns and now the next time you put out a new sketch note they don't have to know everything they're like oh every time I see this I know what she means is this right and so that's really your road map so in the next um maybe 15
20 minutes I kind of forgot to start my timer so we'll you you keep me honest I'm going to split this talk into two parts first we're going to walk through how you can learn to sketch or how you can learn to kind of start your visual storytelling Journey I'm going to give you a minute if you have time grab a pen and paper that's all you need and play along with me and when you're done share it like tag me at niia and hash sketch the dots and share it you will be surprised at how many and I will
amplify it by the way you will be surprised at how many people are going to come talk to you about it so do that so let's get started so you want to try visual storytelling your first step is going to be sketch noting right wrong your first step is going to be to start getting into this mode where sketching is second nature it's just another muscle so the way I start is by saying start your with your sketching muscles right this book and you might even see it in my background is from Sunny Brown
she's done a really good Ted Talk which I hugely recommend you watch and it's called the doodle Revolution and in that she kind of talks about doodling which we tend to dismiss it's really about ways to help us think and focus right and the exercise she recommends is exactly what I should here so I'm going to play it again while you watch every day in the morning take five minutes take a pen and just doodle right make lines crisscross them and then color or shade the places in between you will
find that is super super helpful for two reasons it's pretty it brings me joy in the morning right but the second thing is when you start your day loosening up that side of your brain you get creative you get calmer you will feel the effect in the way you start start to do other things so try it out and then ask yourself how you felt and then from now on every day when you're at a meeting when you just take a sketch pad and doodle right next we're going to build a visual storytelling tools toolk
it so the example that you see here is a very kind of raw sketch not like simplest version this is how I used to draw a long time before and this is perfectly fine what I want to actually show you is the various components right so first we're going to look at fonts quotes people icons containers layouts Direction and colors when we think about a visual storytelling toolkit it's really about four things typography because it is notes and written stuff right so you want to make sure that you're u
sing it in a way people understand your writing imagery it is visual colors and composition how do you elevate that and we'll talk about all of it for what it's worth you can see examples of this quote so where it says find your voice could be a quote people you see little caricatures of community you see icons you see arrows showing you Direction and so on we're going to go into each one of these take a pen and paper play along with me first part of your toolkit fonts when you're talking about
visual note taking at the end of the day nothing matters if people can't even read what you've written right so when you're writing when you're thinking of about capturing and sharing information you want to think about two things for fonts the types of fonts can add visual interest so if you add like here are some examples right a font block font uh triple line double line single line doesn't matter the different things bring your attention they're like oh that looks interesting what is it so i
t's for visual interest but the sizing provides hierarchy you immediately anyone who's done web development or mobile development know this right like big fonts means this is important it's a header tiny things means this is a footnote right so hierarchy helps you set that up the thing you want to take away is learn to capture learn to write fast when you want to capture stuff so short short hands whatever it takes but learn to write slow when you want to practice for clarity then you'll notice
as you practice practice you'll speed up but your your handwriting will be visible My Inspirations for these I've put a couple of in every one of these I'll try to put some examples so you can go play with them these two have been super super useful uh lettering alphabets and artwork and creative lettering there are other examples that I'll share later but learn to kind of you know work with play with fonts learn a couple of font Styles try to do posters you'll get the the drift once you've conq
uered fonts now you're at a point where at least you can write notes right and you'll make them Visual and pretty then focus on the message and this is where the second part of your toolkit has to be quotes so even as you're listening to me today try to use this advice to come up with a quote right listen for repetitions if I keep saying the same thing over and over again multiple times you know that it means something to me that's the quote you want to take away but then there'll be lots of thi
ngs I'm going to say many times select for resonance pick the thing that somehow mattered to you that's what resonated with you because at the end of the day a sketch note is about your perspective not for general purpose right so learn you'll start learning to listen with intent so this is my favorite example this is a sketch note I was doing when I was capturing notes for a book called steal like an artist I'll have a link to it later and when I was reading this uh it's from Austin Cleon by th
e way this one thing stood out to me he'll talk about practice productive procrastination and I'm like that resonated my entire life I thought I was a procrastinator right it turned out he was like productive procrastination is creative people who defer things that doesn't mean they're not doing it but their brain keeps processing and processing and processing it and then when they finally hit a deadline they're like I need to get this done without their knowledge things are actually percolated
right you can do something with it so you can see that right like now you know this is from the book but the one thing that stood out that's a quote that sketch note if I would to just give you this you'll immediately take get that takeaway message next people so you able to capture stuff you got a takeaway message now you need to make people connect to it people is a great way to start showing where your audience maybe fits into your story how are they going to like where do they see themselves
right so the way you want to do is start with basic figures you've seen these examples this is stick figures star people look at it it's just a star right um Denise youu does fantastic workshops big shout out to her um star people very super super easy but if all of that kind of scares you learn two things just two see that blob little thing with a head that's a person see the crowd next to it lots of little blobs with lots of little dots that's people if you just know those two how to draw a s
ingle user and how to draw a group that's pretty much all you need in fact if you look at all my sketch notes that's pretty much all you'll see but the fact that they're there gives people a place to Anchor oh this involves users that involves a community right so you've got that Pinterest is your friend you'll find tons of cheat sheets for things you can do make your own so H for example right I try to kind of keep a cheat sheet of gestures and gesture Fest which I've put a link to over there t
hat's a really nice cheat sheet you can learn to draw some of these this is really to put motion like people running people talking people jumping and you can use those in several ways make a cheat sheet once you make a cheat sheet it's as easy as tracing over it or even copy pasting it if you're doing this digitally next we're going to talk about icons so when you've started with people you've already using icons but when I talk about icons you I'm specifically talking about now elevating you t
o a visual vocabulary we all know that our brains are trained to recognize symbols which is why even if I don't do anything and I give you a new app and you see that little kind of thing which has those three circles you'll be like that's where I go to share sh how did you know that because your mind is stained to understand that symbol right so what you want to practice is for the domain that you're going to tell stories in make yourself some icons so two bits of advice focus on the familiar do
n't try to iconify everything pick words or nouns that are meaningful and get a small set of icons for those you don't have to be Picasso make them just good enough that people will recognize them that's it they just need to recognizable so while I'm talking try sketching one of these right and stop looking at it as a picture just literally be like oh I have to put a blob and two things and little things that's a lamp or like a bulb right so your inspiration and my inspiration for this is really
noun project I cannot than thank them enough so non project is a site where designers share icons you can use them for free with attribution or you can pay them and use them without attribution and it's such a little amount of money for a fantastic site that I recommend it but when I talk about M project I'm not saying you need to use their icons I'm saying look there for inspiration and steal like an artist meaning learn to copy and Inspire yourself to figure out new ways to draw things right
to draw words next containers so by now we've talked about how you capture you know and make it visually appealing in notes we've talked about putting people on icon so now you have a vocabulary but you remember that first sketch note I did I can put a lot of information on one page what container do for you is they allow you to compose it for clarity and create some kind of grouping and boundaries that let people know hey these things are connected right so I've put a whole bunch of examples th
is is just from someone else's um imagery but the reason I put it there is cultivate a sense of Whimsy I mean the easy way out is to put boxes around everything right where's the fun in that so I like these because you can have like superhero s burst things right you can put speech bubbles you can put like you know wayfinding whatever you like but come up with ways to create containers that are actually meaningful and Whimsical and once you have come this far now you pretty much have conquered b
uilding your basic sketch note right now you want to think about who is reading it or who is looking at it and what the purpose is their purpose is going to be to try to make sense of what you created layouts are really about figuring out how your audience consumes information and what the flow pattern are so it turns out that let's say if I'm um sketching a talk right I tend to use radial patterns because I have no idea how long they're going to talk right I'm like I don't know if I'll run out
of paper so I'll start at the end and I'll keep writing it like you'll see all mine will go in circles and when I find I only have this much space left and they're still talking I stop I'm like you know what I don't know how much longer they'll go I'm going to wait till they have the takeaway message I'm going to put the takeaway message in the middle that's another tip by the way you don't have to capture everything if you have the beginning and the end people will figure out the middle so you
know don't don't have to like get everything in there but radial is what I use when I have that kind of scenario but it turns out that maybe if I'm trying to sketch note a workflow for a tutorial I might actually prefer something like a path step one step two step three or if I have one of those things that I'm I hear the talk as 10 ways in which you can make money who doesn't want to hear that talk right then I might do a hub spoke because I'm going to put this in the middle saying 10 ways you
can do this and there are 10 things going out and everyone knows there's a central idea and 10 different ancillary ideas right so when you look at layouts you want to balance how much information you have to capture and what the intuitive way for the users to consume that information is once you've done that direction is how you give them that extra nudge to say yeah well I don't know if you figured out why I did layouts but in case you're lost here are some trail markers right and the idea is t
o like use familiar signals I live in the Hudson Valley we love hiking around here Trail markers are my favorite so you could use arrows you could use Trail markers you can build connectors you can create Pathways that you put on top whatever you like but give them a way to kind of navigate just give them a hint this is how you need to look through my content and then now we come to the bonus features so all this time I never said you had to be digital I never said you had to have a pen and pape
r would have gotten here just fine now you can bring in color with intent I mean it's easy to just throw colors at a problem but you want to bring it in with intent one use it to create visual separation so this is an example on top is a raw sketch no like the person talking I'm just rapidly capturing stuff bottom I took that I cleaned it up and I just tried to like make little containers put Islands Etc and you see there's immediately two things you can use color to create visual separation so
the purple in the middle breaks off the different containers or you can use it to have contextual connects right so now looking at this I'll be like anywhere this dark blue it's points related to something The Challenge and this is where we start kind of thinking about well this is all cool but you know there's work to be done and this is where I really am at is accessibility the minute you're talking visual the minute you're talking color and things like that you're immediately not being inclus
ive so one of the challenges is if you're using Color make sure that color blind people can still see the context that you're trying to put through for me the bigger Cheng is it's a visual thing how do I make it accessible to those who have a disability in that context right and there are bit different ideas there I'll talk about that another day but with this you have your basic toolkit so now that you have your toolkit I really want you to think about this was great I can follow all this and h
opefully all of you are playing along and just trying different things out share them with me for sure but what can you do with it so I want to share with you some ideas and hopefully with that in mind you will start start understanding what I mean by there's two sides to visual storytelling one is learning to sketch which is what we looked at and then the second is sketching to learn in other words the more you sketch the more you're basically creating ways to clarify information consume it sha
re it and hopefully teach others right so here are things you could do first this is what most of us will have seen sketch noers do you probably see these in Google IO I've seen this at Bill we're seeing a lot more of it online now now because we are all digital right in this covid pandemic capturing talks life gives you two value propositions one you can share it you're no longer in the same room you want to connect with other people who are at a conference you want to let know who's there when
you capture a talk and you share it live you immediately get the side effect of people saying oh you are there wow this looks cool and in a sea of text suddenly there's an image people are like who is this person right and you you get to connect with people on two levels one is now they know you're there which is awesome second your notes tell them why you like the stock what about it did you like and that means the people who connect with you are those who have either a very close kind of like
hey you and me are thinking the same way about this or people who are like wow I have a different point of view but I want to talk to you about it because I want to understand where you're coming from and it's awesome not to mention it's a great way to engage speakers so this one was really from a a conference that we were doing around data that's a VP for the data thing and he was like this is amazing right you allow them to basically share their message second because we're all going digital
more and more and more we're seeing people tape talks ahead of time so when I talk about this I'm talking about you potentially doing a sketch note for your own talk or you might be an organizer of volunteer or something like that where or you might even see someone give a talk that they've given before and you have access to the video right you have access to what the talk is about capture that ahead and then when that talk is going on share it live right now it's a different value proposition
by capturing ahead you can see the difference between this and the previous one right this one is so much nicer neater colorful everything looks simpler but sharing it live lets you still take advantage of communicating and connecting with the community who's like at that event and sharing your perspective not to mention it helps people right like they can come to you especially if doing this for a speaker they'll be like oh uh actually this is great and can you maybe like help me visualize this
message right so you might even get some feedback on we see what you thought was important but maybe I didn't clarify it and that's great feedback for speakers that hey your message didn't really come through oh I keep forgetting to hit this so uh while I'm showing this I I'll talk about it briefly if you go so all the time we're talking about paper right like you can do this with pen and ink but if you go digital um this one is really let's play this if you go digital this one's a very short o
ne um you can actually you can actually share The Stroke by stroke time lapse which adds another layer of Engagement people are like wait I've got to wait to see how the story ends right so uh definitely explore this if you have questions leave it for me next learning guides I can't tell you how important this is and this is literally where the past month I've put a lot of my time on the right on the left is a talk that you know my fellow Advocates at Microsoft were doing on cloud and elasticity
right this had like five modules and tons and tons and tons and pages of text and they were going to walk through it live over an hour right um and it was a fantastic thing that they were doing they came to me and said can you give me a sketch note on the right is the entire sketch note this is a Carnegie melon University module that explains Cloud elasticity right and you can look at it and be like wait this is amazing and you can actually go check it out if you go to ak. mvisual Azure cmy you
can see the the original but what happens in this is now think of this as for you when you're learning this is a book end right on the one hand if I give this image to you before you see the talk before you see the session before you look at the kind of long tutorial you're basically getting what we call a pre-ad why is that important because our brains are wired to pay attention to things if you look at this you don't even have to know everything but you could scan this whole thing in two minu
tes I guarantee it you can scan the whole thing read it quickly and see it in two minutes and you'll think to yourself I didn't learn anything you think you didn't learn anything but your brain is now picking up words it's like oh okay load patterns is a word load balancing is a word autoscaling and it's filing these away saying I saw this somewhere and now when you actually go to the tutorial or when you go to the the talk your brain's already making connections it's like oh they mentioned this
word but I don't need to worry about because I know something else is coming that's going to connect the dots for me right so as a pread it's a very very good way to give people the big picture people like me I'm a visual learner I like to see the big picture before I dive into details and then there's the other side when they finish that talk they can come back and look at this and it becomes a post- review it's like I need to go take a certification exam now I've got cheat sheets that are vis
ual and guess what because I'll be seeing them for the second time I just have to say do I remember this or not and now I can kind of look at this and go oh I remember one two and three I don't remember four I'll just go and fix on that module right by the way I don't know if I'm running over time so someone tell me if I am I'm almost done okay so the next um example this is my one of my personal favorites and this is really something I talk about in depth there are there are conversations on th
is if you're interested and this is about using this to improve your public speaking I call a chalk the talk I actually did a a talk on this at let's sketch Tech conference last year but the way you want to think about it is once you can do visual notes you actually have a really interesting superpower one do the research for any talk that they're giving right do the research so this is an example I'm a mobile Advocate I was talking about surface Duo at droidcon and a few Android conferences las
t time it was just new and I realized we had like God knows how many pages of documentation and I'm like I need to know what is important right because because we've got documentation the Android team has documentation there's so much stuff what you see in the sheet behind you is the entire summary of the docs on dual screen patterns right so I literally wrote it all down it wasn't done for anyone else it was done for me I wrote it all down and then I was able to see the patterns I'm like oh thi
s and this connect this and this connect now that is before I got it done then I'm able to take that and distill it down into slides right I'm like okay I see one 2 3 four five six and so you can see that I actually am able to take this and translate it into the slides that you see on the right and guess what during the talk or before it after it I can use those visuals to actually promote my own talk and a lot of folks do this and it's totally awesome but the thing I'll tell you again and again
is this is really about understanding that when you do a sketch note you are distilling information and the reason I say this is super useful if you're a public speaker or an aspiring public speaker is you need to tell yourself that this is the before research right I also do this thing where I sketch note like you saw in the beginning I sketch note my talk the final talk I'll make a sketch note that I give away or I'll post saying hey here's a summary so the way you want to think about it is i
f you can't get your entire talk on one page you're saying too much there is no way people will remember this so it's your own asset test on hey am I talking or the right amount and will people be able to connect the dots we'll see in a minute right this is kind of like we talked visual toolkit so I just throwing this in here and you can't even see it oh actually here I have one of these so here is what that looks like so if you can see it um this is actually something a lot of people have done
uh kind of making a Zen so you can take the same knowledge that you have which is visual storytelling do a single sheet but do it as eight cells and then you can basically tear and make it into a Zen that you can give away and the value of this is that you choose how to craft your your giveaway message right now people remember the conference they're like oh I got this little thing but you have given the message the way you wanted it because they might all be sketch noting they're taking somethi
ng out of it but you want to reinforce your points it's a great way to do this so same toolkit a different format for delivering the the story and then I'll leave you with I think this maybe my last or couple of slides where we'll wrap up this is something I started doing at Microsoft like actually today that's one of the reasons I miss some of the talks today we run this show called hello live at 1:30 p.m. and I started doing these things where I would use the visual voal like the same visual u
h storytelling to see if we can kind of get people to understand terminology or products or things in just fun ways right so in this case I don't know if you can guess it if you guess what the answer is please by all means put it in the chat I'll would be very curious but you can see that by playing the time relapse this is a a guessing game it's like dictionary it's like show and tells shads right so on the left you're seeing that's an anchor it's a very bad anchor but hopefully you see it's an
anchor there's an anchor on the left side and you see a tablet and a phone looking at it and then it says I'm still in my space X number of days after and it's still an anchor and it says I use this to create mixed reality user experiences so if you didn't guess the answer the answer is as your spatial anchors right space anchor these are word games these are ways for you to like really help people understand a concept in a funny way that helps them basically translate it and kind of do somethi
ng with it right all right so I'm coming I'm wrapping up um hopefully uh you found this interesting so I want to leave you with a couple of resources by the way if you check my uh if you check those two links that I keep putting at the top the ones in blue at niia is me sketch the docs is a Twitter site that a Twitter account which is no spam it's only the only things that ever post are tweets which have a visual guide there'll be no chat I will not respond to if you talk if you need to talk to
me use app nithia but that way it's like a low spam way that you only get useful information the thing that I've realized is you can start exploring various ways to take this simple visual visual uh toolkit that you have to go explore other ideas so if you go check out one of those accounts you'll see that right now my new thing is stop motion animation I find it super fascinating more on that later let's talk about resources first one learn copy contribute this is how you can get better uh on t
he left side of there's a whole bunch of folks in the community that I hugely respect and admire they came together and we ran six free workshops so shout out to Denise youu um Aston rodenhiser who does graphical recording Marina Compton who runs the let's catch Tech conference Caitlyn goo who really like does a great job teaching you procreate and did all the icons here Britney if she's here Britney Braxton talked about digital journaling I did my chalk the talk talk you can find all them all o
f them there they just free YouTube videos so go check them out each is like two hours long in segments but those are ways for you to skill up on other storytelling skills on the right is a site called cloudy skills. do not go to it if you're on a low bandwidth connection I just needed a place to dump my highest sketch notes each one of the sketch notes will be like 15 Meg so don't try to kind of download them on the phone but what they are are great places for you to go and look at examples you
can see really higher res how highes is it that's the size of a sketch note you can put on a TV and you can still read every single thing right so go check those out to give yourself some inspiration so learn to sketch then by all means copy right go learn from other people try it out look at what I did and basically if you like it use it right I just say you can in fact repurpose any of the ones that I have there just don't do it for profit right but learn from others and then contribute back
if you created a sketch note and you want me to add it to that repository I'll take contributions so hit me up and I'll leave you on this last thing these are the people and uh resources that I have found super helpful and I would love love love for you to go take a look at them first is on creativity this whole thing that I talked about today is to say we all Focus so much on coding and we don't focus enough on creativity creative problem problem solving means we need to think outside the box A
ustin cleon's Books are amazing they will inspire you to like think different if you like sketch noting mik C's books are like the go-to place for every sketch not or I ever known I I recommend the workshop the workbook because it'll actually walk through examples for different contexts super useful and then I have a bunch of resources I hope to put on a site soon which kind of look at verticals so remember I talked about navigation I really love this book it's handdrawn maps and this is people
like you know vintage Maps gaming Maps Etc you'll get inspired by them visual doing and visual thinking are like two books which I like that talk to you about how you can do collaborative brainstorming around problem solving Etc and then three people I want to uh point out Ava lamb go to her site if you want sketch noting ideas she does a lot Denise U anthropomorphism and her workshops are out of this world Maggie Appleton her site is amazing if you want to understand the power of visual metapho
rs and I want to end with this the whole point I told you is when you learn how to do sketch noting you can own your message so my last slide this is a summary of the talk you heard today on the right is a sketch note on the left is the play byplay this is literally how I built it you can see it it's not perfect every time it lashes it means I made a mistake and I have to like erase it and do it again that's okay that's what makes this special so when you do a talk next time own your own takeawa
y if other people do a talk sketch and share your perspective on that and with that I want to say thank you uh calls to action anything you want chat with me at niia follow sketch the docs if you did do something today hash sketch dos and shareed I'd love to amplify it and those are my links and thank you so much sorry if I over I hope I'm okay if there are any questions let me know oh my God Nya thank you so much this was so amazing and I loved your energy and your enthusiasm these dots are som
ething like whenever I look at them irrespective of if I read them or not it's just like it makes my heart happy and I'm like oh like it looks so cute and I don't even think about reading the but just like it looking at that makes me feel happy and yeah I love that well I will tell you um I literally printed one of them there's a there's somewhere around here is a printed version of the sketch not that came on cloth because I mistakenly printed it it's washable and I'm like now I can print the d
ocs and that's my joke but yeah it's totally fun it's totally fun once you get started you won't stop you want to kind of do this for everything right yes yes well we have so many people who are like really inspired by you today and they all absolutely love visual learning um there are some questions if you have just few more minutes to answer them cool great first question uh is from Tyra I would love to be able to do this digitally but I'm on a budget and do you have any alternative favorite d
evices that you use for sketch noting oh I I I want on a thing that I did not plant this question but this is amazing so yes first of all look at my first sketch notes these are pen and paper right there's nothing wrong with that second is procreate is what I use on an iPad and yes iPads are expensive but guess what this is something I just discovered and I was almost going to show it today but I didn't finish it in time most of your productivity tools will let you draw so I'll talk about PowerP
oint because that's the one I've been playing with but they actually have a draw PowerPoint particularly has this ink replay model where it'll go back and replay your Stroke by stroke which is super useful so if you already use one of these productivity tools use it I know folks I'm going to shout out Luis freeze and um Rebecca Jackson both of them came uh and I'll put all these somewhere but they both use PowerPoint to do sketch notes and they look magnificent and the reason I say that um I wan
t to put a little bit more time into looking at tooling now is that's the easy way for us to scale but it also has the benefit that you can repurpose it in your internal meetings and things like that which is super cool so that's there uh that said there's a ton of folks who will just talk about you know paper and like Copic markers I think they are called like you can get tooling to like like simple analog stuff to get you start it but most importantly I'll tell you the first thing you want to
do is work on handwriting after that all the other tools yeah you just need something which has a touchcreen and a pen I'll even tell you that on Windows um there was a free research thing called plumbago that I used to use for a while there are lots of tools out there some open source ones as well so uh tag me on Twitter and DM me and I'll try to get you links to the various things but yes cost should not be your problem yes I absolutely agree with this you know what like I remember like after
looking at your sketch notes I actually bought a paid subscription of pro create and I haven't used that and I feel so bad and now I'm like so inspired from this now I'm like the next time we have learning sessions at my work I'm going to try create something using procreate and actually like first yeah actually like really use that now embedded in your slide I'm not even kidding I don't understand how people find this all awesome but every time I share it I will get good feedback so yes absolut
ely and don't even think that oh it has to be perfect No in fact it's because it looks so organic oranic like you know half baked that's what makes it kind of cool yeah it it's like yeah it looks so cute uh the second question that we have is from C can someone that is a linear thinking thinker create notes like this yes absolutely so the whole thing is you want to practice two things spatial thinking is where you want to put this on a page and kind of have it structured that's why you need spat
ial thinking linear thinking is workflows remember I talking about layouts that are linear what you want to do is start by listening to other people's talks and focus on visualizing information don't worry about how you're composing it on a sheet of paper just start visualizing take notes on index cards if you need to just keep taking it down putting there second thing is there are tools like mind maps and all that the way I think about it all of those are parts of a toolkit for visual storytell
ing it's not about linear versus spatial versus like you know kind of tangential thinking none of that it's about being able to capture your Concepts or ideas and put them down down visually on paper or some medium so yes it should not stop you at all one thing I've started doing and if you look at it like I actually ran a campaign recently called visual Green Tech because we wanted to really really get people to start thinking about sustainability and all it is is like one thing draw me one thi
ng right even the little uh vocabulary thing I saw was draw me one thing so start with one and then kind of like just connect the dots should be fine hope that answered it yes thank you so much this was amazing Nya thank you so much for spending your Thursday with us and for sharing how to create these beautiful sketch dogs absolutely and if you need uh anything or have questions hit me up and enjoy the rest of the conference amazing job gdg San Francisco thank you so much for having yay thank y
ou so much and let me tell you this thing the chat is completely fired up right now and they all loved your energy they all loved the talk and it was amazing I didn't even drink coffee my lunch is still sitting there so thank you you're making me super happy right now yay coffee time thanks so much Ria say hi to vicam and everyone see you yes bye thank you by moving up so this is I know like this is so amazing and we just have like one last session left but know that you got to stick to the end
to win these raffle prizes we have these amazing speakers who you just saw they are they are providing like one-on-one mentorship session as a giveaway so you should definitely definitely stick to it other so the next topic is something that's really interesting to me because when I got into Tech I had no freaking idea like what what am I supposed to do or like what are the other feelds that I should be worrying about like all I knew was that huh that person is a software engineer maybe I should
just do that and I still feel like I don't know everything and I'm always learning from people and learning from from like Twitter and seeing like all the other things that people are doing so we today we have Paris who is share that about so many other things that you can do in Tech hi Paris hello I'm so happy to be here I'm excited okay thank you so much for being here we're really excited to have you also people know that Paris is also uh doing this 30 minute mentorship session as a giveaway
so you should definitely fill out the feedback form and let us know if you have any questions for Paris or are you okay I need to figure out how to share my screen real quick so give me one second here we go okay cool just to confirm can you see my screen before I begin talking awesome cool okay so hello everyone welcome to my talk you do not have to be a software engineer by ex software engineer paraden which is clearly me um so what's wrong with being a software engineer absolutely nothing th
ere is nothing wrong with being a software engineer I have nothing against it my inspiration for this talk was the fact that I got into Tech thinking that I could only be a software engineer because that's all that I felt like I was offered that's all I saw people talk about on Twitter um and so that's the route I took but I then found out there were so many other career paths I could have taken within the industry and so I'm going to go over a few of them with you today so I'll go over eight di
fferent career paths that you can take in Tech um and so to go over the list I'll be talking about ux design UI design now ux and UI that's usually a role that's combined which you know if you can do two roles at once it makes you way more valuable um you get get paid more so you know definitely thinking about definitely think about um you know taking advantage of learning both the third is technical writing the fourth is Tech recruiting sales engineering data analyzation product management and
project management so let's start all right so we're going to start off with ux design which stands for user experience design now you're not designing a user experience what you're doing is improving a user experience um and you want to make it more usable and enjoyable for the user so you're doing that by collecting feedback um you know and really understanding the experience of every user in order to create a better one um and actually this field is really cool it's actually something I don't
know that I would have loved to take advantage of um just because I learned that it's sort of like investigative undercover work or it can at least so I learned that you are able to actually travel to watch people use different products or you know use different applications to make sure that they're using it in the way that's it's supposed to be used and if not you're going to watch and figure out why what assumptions are they making and if you see a pattern in in these users then you want to
improve that experience you know if they're clicking a button assuming something's supposed to happen and it doesn't and that happens over and over again then that's something you should prove um and so there this is an example of ux design on the web so here so let's first look at a like a good example a good user experience so you know when you you know enter information into a form and then it tells you you know something in this form isn't correct you can't move forward and it's really annoy
ing because you want to know like okay well what's not right is it my email is it my password is it my name like what's wrong if you don't know what's wrong it's going to keep you guessing it's just you know kind of aggravating um and that's a bad user experience a good one is when it tells you you know like this one oh this is the incorrect email um and then I'm also going to give you some examples on bad ux design on physical products and they're actually like really funny um so the first one
is this pencil um I don't know how you're supposed to use that eraser but that needs to be improved um this hook which is obviously supposed to be used you know within a child setting is just totally inappropriate then we have the Apple Mouse with the charger underneath the mouse and it not only does it look bad it just the functionality just doesn't make sense um this bag is supposed to say shoes and shoes it says shoes and holes which is kind of funny um this mug I don't know how you're suppos
ed to drink from that terrible design and then this sign here says it's supposed to say simply the best fish and chips in the world they accidentally crossed out in so now it says simply the best fish and chips the world um it doesn't ruin your day but it's just like a little disappointing when you read it um and so a ux designer would kind of go in and really fix this experience you want to improve it so that it does make sense and things are being used the way they're supposed to be used so wh
at can you expect to do on the job as a ux designer so you are going to be designing usable and desirable user experiences through like I said user re research which can consist of deep user research and like I said it's almost like undercover work where you can actually get on planes and travel um you know an example as like um a new car maybe you have to figure out you know how do drivers assume it's supposed to work how do they assume things are supposed to function within the car you want to
watch them and see what they're doing right and wrong so that you can improve that experience you'd create a lot of wireframes um which is like you're creating almost like when you look at applications you're creating the skeleton of it so that you can then hand it over to the UI designer which we're going to go over to next um there's a lot of collaboration with stakeholders and the developers and the ux designer you want to make sure that you know you are definitely understanding the goal and
purpose of this product and you're designing it as so then user testing like I said watching people use the product making sure they're using it correctly and presenting your ideas presenting your research um this is again to really validate that you're going in the right direction with your ideas and you do not need a degree to come into this field that's nice next we're going to talk about UI design which is user interface design um so you know what is this overall basically you are making is
sexy um so you are turning the ux designer's wireframes and creation into something that's aesthetic aesthetically pleasing you're making things pretty you're really focused on the look and feel of it so that means you know really focused on visual design which consists of things like color typography interactivity animation and here is a UI design example on the web a really good UI design example myself I'm just kidding guys I put that in as a dad joke um one is the Google interface when you
go on Google so this looks like really simple and boring but it's really Sleek it's clean it's to the point you know exactly what you need to do nothing's distracting that's an amazing user experience and so what can you expect to do on the job so you're going to like I said you're going to make user interfaces beautiful you're going to research Aesthetics in the current market so what's trending right now what are uses really drawn to is it something that you can Implement in this product um yo
u want to make sure that your designs fit all screen sizes um so that means you know not just for for web but on mobile you know TVs bigger screens smaller screens um and this role also allows for a lot of collaboration um with the ux designer the developers and again this is to make sure that you're on point with the direction that um you know stakeholders are trying to have this product going you want to make sure the look and the feel of it is the way it's supposed to be once again you don't
even need a degree to get into this field next is technical writing so I found this very interesting and it kind of changed the way I want to have conversations and um I don't know write my blog posts because I'm one of those people who kind of goes off on a tangent when we're talking about something completely different um technical writing means like you're getting straight to the point so um a definition of it is communicating technically complex information to your audience in my own words I
said writing easily digestable information that allows your audience to better understand navigate and or use the product so uh I'm going to give you some examples actually so technical writing is like you know when you're looking at different libraries to install into your project um you have to go through a readme you have to go through instructions step-by-step guide so these are like developer docs you're documenting um you know you're breaking down the steps of what someone needs to do in
order to achieve their goal um so this is like developer documentation there's UI documentation where again you're kind of breaking down instructions for this one it's like how to post a photo or a gif or GIF however you pronounce it um on Twitter so this is more like you know instructions for the UI you're breaking down something that may be complex to someone so that they can better understand it and achieve the goal um and the way I look at technical writing is like sort of like that term whe
n people are like you know explain it to me like I'm seven I feel like that's technical writing you're breaking down something that's complex so that even a seven-year-old can understand it so what can you expect to do on the job as a technical writer so you need to fully understand the product or concept um that you're working on and you have to have that ability to explain the product simply and breaking it down on how to use it and it has to be 100% objective so you want to be you know concis
e it has to be simple clear it has to be directly to the point you can't bring in you know feelings or your own personal thoughts none of that matters it's like the that one true thing um and lastly you definitely want to keep your document documentation updated um so that you know people are not doing something that no longer works something that's already deprecated you need to continue updating it once again you do not need a degree to get into technical writing I actually think that um perso
nally I think Juniors would make an incredible technical writers because they are um more new to the industry they have this fresh feel or a fresh understanding of you know what would someone in my shoes or someone who doesn't have technical backg background how could they approach this how should we really break this down um and I don't know I just really always felt like juniors are make excellent technical writers they really understand um you know breaking down something that's really comple
x because they're in the process of learning and then there's Tech recruiting and I entered a picture of myself because I am now a tech recruiter software engineer turned tech recruiter I am tech recruiter of black Tech pipeline my business um so to put it simply Tech recruiting is sourcing and recruiting technical Talent into companies and open roles so on the job it's like head hunting you're sourcing Talent pretty much anywhere you can find it and so some examples are through social media pla
tforms so um that could be Twitter it could be LinkedIn it could be angelist you know all these platforms where you can find talent and job Seekers that's where you want to go um and you want to find people who can fit the requirements of the open roles that you're trying to fill now Tech recruiters could work for companies and if you work at a company as a tech recruiter you could you know Source through um social media platforms but you could also Source through your company's current database
so look at old applications current applications who's applying to the role really go through um and see who'd be a good fit for the role um it's a lot of reaching out to candidates so I'm sure you know we all know what it's like to be reached out to through Linkedin um by recruiters you know they they want to see if one you're open to Opportunities right now if you're interested in the current opportunity the the current opportunity that they have for you and the company that they're sourcing
for um so they they're here to provide all of that information that you want to know as a job Seeker so tell me about the company tell me about the role what are their requirements um you know what's the pay what are the benefits they're they're going to ask all these questions and as a tech recruiter you want to have the answer to those questions so that means again really understanding the company that you're sourcing for and the role that you're sourcing for um and lastly recruiting it takes
a lot of networking so that means you know you want to go to events you want to build relationships you want to sustain and maintain relationships um you want to build a network of people even if they're already employed because things can change at any time and people are always looking for work um and recruiters depend on you know recruiting people into roles in order to get paid that's just what it is and so again you want to maintain a a large quality Network and no you do not need a degree
for this either all right so now we're moving into sales engineering sales engineering actually blew my mind after saw the potential salary you could have as a sales engineer and you you don't even have to be technical or you don't have to be a programmer to be a software engineer um so I have a little quote here by someone I heard this from someone and I just felt that it was really true so the last person to survive I'm assuming the apocalypse will be a salesperson why because a salesperson kn
ows how to either Market themselves an idea you know they really know how to sell hope and dream dreams and pull people in and have them really trust and believe them and if you have that ability you will Outlast everyone and that's just truly what I believe um and if you are that type of person you know you might great make a great sales engineer um so this sales engineer can also fall under names like Solutions architect Solutions engineer sales support um and what a sales engineer does is pro
vide a technical solution to a business problem so you'll facilitate the sales process by breaking down really complex information in a more digestible way almost like a technical writer um but you're you're explaining this to non-technical you know clients that you have um or those who are really unfamiliar with the intricacies of your product so an example of sales engineering I pulled up some job descriptions so you could get an understanding so this job description is by stripe um so their s
ales engineer that name falls under a Solutions architect and so for this role specifically you would be working with um you know improving the developer experience so developers who are trying to integrate stripe into their businesses so you would make sure that you know developers you know understand the documentation understand the tool why it's beneficial and how to implement it into the business and then here's another job description by tulip where you're you're sort of doing the same thin
g but oh I also should mention with the stripe Solutions architect you have to know how to code with this tulip sales engineering role you do not know have to you don't have to know how to code um but again you're explaining the benefits of the products you're explaining um you know those intricacies and things that people might not know um or you know ways to improve the business with the product again you're like really selling it but you're also again like maintaining relationship you're tryi
ng to get new clients you're like there's just it kind of falls under so many different um requirements um every role is really different but um they're both super super lucrative careers you don't just get paid a salary but you usually get paid commission as well um and starting salary for sales engineering I what I researched was something that started at I think $170,000 plus commission I've had others tell me it starts at 300,000 plus commission I think that's absolutely insane and so if you
're one of those people who goes where the money flows this might be something you're interested in so what can you expect to do on the job as a sales engineer so you'll be speaking and presenting to customers very frequently which means you need to be empathetic it also means you need to be a people person um you want to you want to know the ins and outs of what you're selling um completely because you're going to be ask those questions and if you don't have an answer it might make you look bad
um but you're there to support customer needs and answer their questions help them Implement whatever it is you know whatever it is that they are looking to do um establishing good relationships almost like networking but you almost want to treat your customers as friends if you establish those relationships they come back to you which means um more money for you makes you look good yeah um you get to do a lot of collaboration with sales and marketing again this is so that you really understand
the product you know maybe sometimes you come up with new ideas for the product that could improve um you know customer needs and experience and then you can research new products that might be trending in the market as well um that might solve new problems for your existing customers do you need an engine uh a degree to be a sales engineer honestly when I was doing research it's a yes and a no so there are a lot of sales engineering jobs because it's so business oriented you know a lot of them
do require a four-year degree um but then I saw others that you know if you have a lot of sales experience that's good enough so it really depends on where you're trying to work honestly now we're getting into Data analyzation so data is huge data is everywhere um you know we are eating data every single day so to go over it analyzing data helps businesses understand where they need to focus and prioritize um and the interesting about the interesting thing about data is it kind of tells you tha
t truth so it tells you what happened in the past it tells you what's going to happen in the future and then it tells you how you should go about doing something in order to um reach whatever goal it is that you have and so let's go here so I learned that some areas of data data analytics um fall within three categories so descriptive analysis so that that's where I said you know data tells you what happened in the past predictive analysis it uses descriptive analysis to tell you what's going to
happen in the future and then there's pres prescriptive analysis which informs us on which decision to make after analyzing all of the data and analytics you know so what what's going to be the best route to take in order to um it it really depends like you know what's it going to take to reach this goal that you have what is what is your desired outcome the data is going to help you get there so what can you expect to do on the job as a data analyst so you'll have to determine the goals of you
r client or your organization so again what is their desired outcome you have to figure that out after you figure that out you need to collect and extract data from literally every Source ever any any source that you can extract data from um that's where you need to get it again because this is going to give you so much information and kind of determine which route to take you you want to collect everything that you can and once you gather all of this data you want to clean it up and organize it
um after you organize it then you can actually analyze it um pinpointing patterns in the data or how the data correlates so you know what patterns do you find what trends do you find here and why then you'll create reports around your findings and you want to create visual representations and that's like the graphs and pie charts that you see all the time um once you do that you want to design create and maintain databases and Management Systems so that you can manage the data that you're retri
eving um and this role also allows you to collaborate with it data scientists and management again to make sure that you are you know collecting exact what you need and keeping that big you know bigger picture in mind of of why you're collecting this what is the desired outcome and you don't need a degree for this either now moving on to product management um honestly product management it depends things what I'm going to tell you may look differently in different organizations um you know you c
an even look us up on YouTube or Google it always looks differently it's hard to give it an exact definition what I've gathered so far is that you do a lot of planning and you know execution and staying involved throughout the life cycle of product development um so that means you are balancing customer requirements the product Vision collaborating with multiple teams to ensure that you know you're bringing the most value to the customer and the stakeholders and the business um and you're also r
esponsible for ensuring like that impact and value you're honestly wearing multiple hats you're kind of you have to be an expert in sort of every single role within a product life cycle and when I was learning this it was a little stressful to me but I think it's also really interesting because you learn a lot and you'd probably be an excellent consultant um for people who are trying to understand what sort of career they'd like to move into but um it's definitely a really big role there are a l
ot of responsibilities so what can you expect to do on the job as a product manager so basically you're acting as a mini CEO of the product so creating strategies for desired outcomes leading the team you know making sure they're on track understanding and tending to customer needs um Define what and how the product is built the cost the look and feel of it Define what and how the product is built and then you want to analyze the market for Trends again so that if there is a trend going on that
customers are more attracted to maybe you can Implement that into your product you want to suggest new ideas um that can create more profit for the business again becoming a an expert in every single part of the product life cycle I don't know why that brings me so much stress when I say it but it does um and yeah just keeping open communication with all teams all stakeholders and just doing what's best for the business do you need a degree in this I think most of the time again this is somethin
g I had to really look up and couldn't find a definitive answer but I'm not sure it really depends um a lot of product management roles require a business degree because again you're doing so many different things you're becoming an expert in so many different things you're wearing so many different hats um and so it it it says you it requires a business degree um it really depends though again I think it depends on the organization now moving into project management um project management seems
a lot more my wave um so I put in cheerleaders here because the whole point is like you really want to keep your team inspired and motivated and make sure things are in control and calm and people are getting things done and you know there isn't any confusion and so you know that's your job so my definition of it was being empathetic and ensuring that everyone is on track tasks and expectations are clear and that deliver deliverables are in on time oh no this was a mistake um that wasn't okay we
ll now you guys know there's no degree required um for this role but what you can expect from this to do for this role is again like time management making sure that people understand when things are due making sure people understand that the the tasks that things are very clear answers I mean questions are answered you want to make sure you really understand you know your project and you know what stakeholders are looking for so that you can clearly communicate that to your team um and you agai
n you just want to make sure everything is really like in control things aren't sloppy people aren't you know feeling negative you want to keep people really happy healthy safe inspired um and doing like check-ins I actually watched a YouTube video where a project manager said they feel a bit like a babysitter um I don't know if that's actually true but again it's like you want to check in on everyone make sure everyone has a really clear understanding of what they need to do and when it's due b
y U making sure the product you know is you know kind of like the life cycle of the product is going where it needs to be everything's in order um one thing to keep in mind is a project manager is not a direct boss that's usually usually the project the product manager a project manager again is like you're there to be a cheerleader Inspire motivate keep people happy and you know moving and clearly you don't need a degree and that is the end of my talk so you can follow me and blacktech pipeline
which is my business where I recruit software Engineers on Twitter um and Instagram at Paris Athena and at BT Pipeline and if you have any questions at all feel free to DM me you can ask me now um but I learned a lot putting this talk together and yeah that's it for me hello hello what's going on so much Paris honestly Paris I was watching in the YouTube chat before I came back into the background you the the way you convey your message is so strong and I I can see the chat already with some of
the comments you need to definitely give more talks around subjects like this I think that was so well done uh especially from like a TPM kind of standpoint I think that I think it was phenomenal any thoughts thank you this was definitely like a high level overview so if you want to learn more definitely have to do some research but yeah this is a good start yeah everybody here saying thank you thank you it was fire it was great phenomenal presentation absolutely uh R do you want to go ahead an
d take the lead on this yes so Paris there are some questions for you if you have more minutes sure okay let's get started where do you feel other roles such as quality assurance and developer relations fall with these role groups that you just mentioned oo um this developer relations to me is super interesting actually so quality assurance really reminded me of like ux a little bit just because again like you're really making sure that things are working the way they're supposed to work um and
then for developer relations that's a little bit more tricky that again I think developer relations almost Falls within like this same thought as product management where there isn't an actual like definitive answer it's kind of whatever the company wants it to be um so that could be you know traveling to conferences and talking to people about the product they're trying to build it could be focusing on you know developers experience specifically it really depends yeah and I know like Danny now
you are also in Dev Rail Road right yeah so my role is a mixture between Community Management and developer relations so we are uh obviously since it's with Google I'm popularizing Google Technologies Across America I'm getting people excited about some of the things that we're doing but the biggest role is and Google kind of understands that I'm coming at this from a different perspective I don't necessarily care too much about popularizing Google like Technologies as a name you know it's there
I'm more concerned with how can I help the individual developer become a better version of themselves how can I provide necessary resources that actually matter instead of spoon feeding them some commercialized item and really what can I do that adds value to their role their life and their career if there's a way I can help kick off that trajectory that's exactly what I want to do Google saw that exact format and that's exactly what we're doing together so um it gives me the power to do an eve
nt like this where we have phenomenal speakers like Paris and everyone else that's been with us today and they've all donated their time so obviously you know we don't make anything off of this but it's helping me with my goal of trying to give people the necessary educational resources that Google may not offer or other institutes for that matter because nobody's talking about subjects like this anywhere yeah so if we can kind of pair people with that then that's helping them exactly where they
need it in their careers and that for me is perfect honestly I look at developer relations almost as an influencer um just because you're trying to get people to use the product buy the product you know implement this product within their own project or businesses um it just seems like a really really fun role I think it's really cool it is I I like it and the other thing is too like I think the one thing that I've really liked about develop relations is when you enjoy teaching or helping and y
ou can pair that with a technology that you really enjoy then that's the perfect mechanism and I think that's why most people end up going towards the the Avenue of learning from a Deval person because they're teaching it in a way where they know the methods that the developer needs to understand it whereas some people they know the context but they may not understand how to convey that well so when you can find someone that's a great speaker and then pair them with that technology oh it's a Gam
eChanger and people gravitate to towards those talks definitely yeah and not gonna lie okay so ever since probably like end of 2019 I've also been thinking about like from time to time like maybe I should switch to Dil maybe I should switch to management and Leadership and so I've also been like fluctuating between all these fields because like they are all so powerful and there are so many things that you can learn in each Ro it's it's amazing to see I would say one thing too with that I think
Dev in like the last year alone has kind of blown up uh into levels it hasn't before and I think that's a direct derivative of the pandemic and I think companies number one realized hey we need to be able to educate developers in a better way but number two I think they realized whoa developers really absorb content this way so it obviously helps our brand and things like that but I think the bigger thing is people didn't really put stock into developers finding untraditional methods towards lea
rning something I think they just thought oh throw some documents at them they'll figure it out but now they're like no there's different ways of learning that we need to really explore and it makes developers better so for that I think that's the Fantastic kind of combination and I think social media definitely lit that on fire as well yeah yeah agreed that's agree so um we have a next question like you mentioned about black Tech Pipeline and that you also hired for that do you recruit only in
the US or worldwide worldwide we're International yes yay that's perfect so if you're looking for a job go check out black Tech pipeline oh yeah I don't know if I'm supposed to say hell by the way sorry I'm on company time sorry yeah um we have another question from prates can someone be a developer and also a part of devil role yeah um I'm not actually Danny you could probably answer this better than me but I thought that developer relations you had to know you had to be a developer but I might
be wrong so you can I've met people that have entered devil that are not developers like they weren't developers previously the one thing that you need to know is your technology simple as that so if you're a developer of relations for let's say mongodb you need to know mongodb you need to learn that Tech technology and you need to know it better than possibly somebody else that could teach that position because people are coming to you as an authority a source of information and really someone
that can convey their problems and translate that to the answers and solutions that they're looking for because part of devil honestly is like glorified customer service like people have problems with your product you need to be an expert on it so that way you can alleviate those issues right it kind of reminds me of like technical writing and product management where you need to know the ins and outs of what you're talking about because people are going to ask you those intricate questions and
you have to have those answers definitely y so we have uh one more question from Stephanie do you have more details about data engineering and data science versus data analyst and before you answer let me tell you this thing I am also always confused between all these three oh my gosh I I don't I don't know um I only know about like right for right now data analysts but I know that they work closely with data scientists um because it's like how exactly are you going to be implementing this data
um whether it's building like some sort of technology or whatever it is um and how is that going to improve the business or create more revenue and there's all these discussions that have to be made and they kind of go hand inand so I know that there's a a bunch of collaboration so I'll say on that like data analysts are analyzing the data where data scientists A lot of the time they're not just analyzing but their future projecting a lot of those statistics so it there there's a lot more in-de
pth um activities as opposed to just collection and analyzation of that information yeah and I've seen like data Engineers deal more with like EPs and like more on the engineering side rather than more on the data side so this is that's my limited information um cool so yeah that's all the questions that we have right now oh well we have one I'm Latina can I outly also yes I I was gonna write to her but I saw I can't write in the chat yes you can absolutely love that all right so we are in first
off I want to say Paris thank you seriously I know you are extremely busy for you to even dedicate this time thank you like that means the world to me and I'm sure it means the world to everybody in here as well and for those that keep asking we are definitely leaving this video up and I think we're going to chop it up a little bit so that way every speaker has their own track and it will be on this YouTube channel um I'm not saying you have to subscribe but you know probably favor this video s
o you can come back to the channel otherwise you'll probably never find it but um uh we're definitely going to do a lot more events down the road as well similar to this so definitely don't be a stranger to this channel Paris seriously thank you and if there do you have any like last words you want to share with anybody follow you online for sure follow me but thank you so much for actually listening to me um and again if I can answer any questions at all just feel free to DM me so thank you and
thank you so much for having me this is great absolutely thank you so much P St with us thank you awesome don't click off yet made it we made it we made it y'all I'm dropping a link right now in the chat put your name and email address in this form right now so for everyone that stuck around everyone that was here at the end we're doing all the giveaways right now so we need to get all your information um on that form so we can get all the names and put it in like a randomizer and give youall a
bunch of stuff I'm excited yay also I asked a question before that meanwhile we forgot this out what is something I'm must trying to find out yeah what new did you learn today and I had I seen like bunch of answers for that and I would love for yall to like share with us like what all did you learn today just so that we also feel like yes we did something good um so I'm going to start sharing those answers and we need permissions please add more to that yeah Danny I'm also seeing that is it wha
t is that a form you created or yeah an existing one no it's it's a it's a different one but why would this let me try this so I'm going to start sharing um okay so Les Leslie said I learned a lot there was so many great speakers with great information to share I'm so glad you love that Les hold on one second y'all let me figure this out let me remove myself for a second while you cool then Tyra mentioned there's not a one speaker that I was intered by same and yes like I absolutely loved all th
e speakers and I'm so glad that all of our speakers like gave such useful information and I really want I actually want to challenge all of you at this point that after this event after you're done with like we are done with all the giveaways and everything I want to challenge you that of all the seven speakers you have learned so many things do one thing and tag us with gdg at gdg San Francisco and let us know like what you did like what is the action item you took out of from from like today's
event and like from so many learnings what is one thing that you are actually doing in your life right now be like oh now I'm going to start live streaming oh I'm actually looking into other field like not just software engineering but I'm looking into like other um soft like other Tech fields or maybe now I'm starting sketch noting let us know how um how this event has impacted your life moving on Randy also mentioned that too much should HP in such small space 200 characters isn't nearly enou
gh I know this is why I'm glad like I can speak right now and I can share how I feel also know that like after this event is done I'm just going to crash I'm going to share a thank you note but I'm GNA crash and after that I'm going to like write a small cute message like saying with all the appreciations but yes like it's like 200 characters is really less I remember like when I was um like sharing all the marketing materials on YouTube I was having such hard time writing about all the speakers
because I was like I cannot enter all the information that I want in that small field I need more characters to talk about speakers yeah um to to be completely honest one thing that I would say at least a takeaway from this event that I hope a lot of people take away is number one if you're having aosta syndrome you're obviously not alone cuz Dono sakar talked about that number two if you enjoy making games guess what so does Anya cub and she's made a whole career out of this if you like being
a visual Storyteller guess what now you have the tools to make that happen you know there's so much that we took away from this event don't let it just be a memory make it an action item to bring some of this stuff into your current day-to-day because I think the best thing that you can ever do is take a thought into an action item and actually work on that thing so I hope a lot of people do that I'm extremely excited for all the responses we've almost everyone's filled out the form at this poin
t I'm going to give a couple more seconds to let a few more people uh get in there um the form is fixed now I just dropped a new the link in there just to make sure when's the next one I don't know when the next one is going to be I will tell you this was pretty exhausting so we're going to need a little bit of a break like what's funny is y'all get six hours we had like six weeks of preparation planning organizing going crazy so yeah it's definitely not um as simple as that but yeah we'll defin
itely get something done we'll definitely plan for a future event but right now I think I'm just gonna crash that's my priority at this point um sharing more there's also comment uh around being a better blogger getting out of imposter syndrome visual storytelling live streaming in all honesty I find it difficult to say a speaker is better than the other they all made an impact and we agree with that yes they all made an impact and Mary and Simons wrote that love that there was such a depth of i
nformation in each talk tons of great content thank you so much Mary this is I'm so excited I'm so glad to hear that thing when we were organizing this event our main focus was we want to cover as many topics as as possible and make sure that there are so many things that you can take away from this event and I'm really glad to see that yall also enjoy that thing I'm going to give a one minute warning for um to fill out the forms you have one last minute after that I'm going to put all these nam
es into a randomizer and put it on the screen and get things going so please make sure you fill it out right now yay and yeah I'm reading more comments like had such a superb time thank you spark and thank you for all the questions you all have asked thank you for being so active in the chat because that really helped me as well to like lift my spirits up and we were like yes we are doing this right thing and I'm so glad that this event was really useful to all of you seriously uh okay I think t
hat's everybody cool let's get started let's go here yeah I'm going to transfer all the names out so just give me a second cool and I got to find doubles I know I saw there was a lot of doubles yeah yeah so someone's mentioning in the comment section that I mentioned um Ali's blog gets a million views a month that is true yeah she gets over a million views a month um on her blog which is INS saying yeah um thank you elusive code for I'm so glad my energy helped you stay awake I think that works
both ways because of all your comments I was also able to stay awake man I was running so much in the background I had to take my kid to the doctor in between this so I literally ran there and had it on my phone the whole time came back I surprised to see you back I was like oh my God I don't know if you'll be able to make it or not and I don't know how to do all these things and I was like oh I really need you um I know Rachel I also cannot believe this event was free but our goal has always be
en to like do it for the people and share knowledge so we always always try to make sure that all of our events are free all our speakers volunteered for this no one got paid so please please please give a big shout out to all the the speakers on Twitter reach out to them how much you enjoyed their session and thank them for doing this thing because without our speakers we would not have been able to put this thing at all so please give a big shout out to all the speakers they are the reasons wh
y we were able to do this for free very true and like the crazy thing is like a lot of y'all don't understand like when we approach speakers and now that I work at Google they're like oh you got Google money no I don't uh Google doesn't give me nothing so I I I don't have Google money I can't can't pay yall so when they actually agree to do for free that's that's incredible yeah and one more thing like I even like as a gdg organizer I also always gets asked like am I getting paid for doing all t
hese things no one gives me money for organizing any event no this is all something I'm doing because I love it and because I love like sharing information and like connecting people and building a community which is why we all are doing this we all have like a share shared sense of mission shared goal um which is why like we don't like charge or like we don't even get paid so which is why it's like when we asking about next event we would absolutely love to do it but we just need some time righ
t now yeah and yes stay connected with Danny stay connected with me on Twitter um stay connected with GD GSF chapter on Twitter or um as well as on the dev Community where you joined uh where you RSVP for the event um that will really help you know like whenever we are organizing an event next time so please stay connected with us on all the social media platforms all right I got this thing going great let's we all right [Music] so let me see once it's shared all right y'all I got all the names
for the people that entered their names in the form right let's go down here first okay so here's what we're doing I think the first prizes we should be giving out are the plural sight ones do you agree yes okay do that just making sure all right so I'm gonna start spinning this the very first person it lands on uh the first five are going to get thre month um subscriptions to plural site completely for free okay so if you're one of the first five now mind you we got a lot of giveaways we're doi
ng so what's funny is with the amount of entries that we have being a total of 55 your chances of winning are probably higher than it's ever been in the history of our giveaways because I think we have like how many like almost 30 prizes that we're giving away so like it's pretty up there all right so I'm gonna go ahead and spin this first one let's go let's go let's go let's go from Rose I want to see all the excitement Ino Sanchez Dilo Sanchez let's go all right I'm G to I'm going to sort Shuf
fle this up Shuffle this up give it some Randomness all right let's go let's go let's go who we got this time oh oh Rachel Rachel Rachel Rachel Rachel all right congratulations let's go all right who we got this time and we got Joan Clark oh congratulations and we'll mix it up again so we have three winners so far three so far yes all right let's go let's go and then we have Maryann Simons yay congr all right let's go let's go let's go one more one more one more oh Alicia Chow I feel like I know
who this is the name sounds very familiar to me congratulations to the five that just won now the next person this lands on gets a oneyear subscription to plural site completely for free all right so we're going to shuffle this up Shuffle this up Shuffle this up I'm going to make this as completely random as possible Shuffle shff Shuffle Shuffle spin that's as random as it could be woo one year long membership congratulations oan Rodriguez let me make sure uh does it keep it in order so that wa
y I remember yeah okay yeah all right o you got it all right so now give y'all whoever this lands on is getting this prize um oh which one is it Paulina these prizes right now we are giving away five Oney yearlong memberships to scrimba so Paulina you just landed the very first one of the uh oneyear subscription to scrimba there we go congratulations Paulina and we got olula all right hold on conratulations SC I want to keep this in order so I remember the order of everything yeah all right so t
hat's two yep let's go let's go let's go Sher let's go congratulations I feel like I'm going to dodge all of these I mean yeah it's gonna happen for somebody right yeah James congratulations James so that's 10 so we got one more right what was that five yeah we got one more one more let's go let's go let's go let's go who is it who is it is it oh vivana vivations okay so now this time we are giving away let me explain what this is on May 20th verl skills is releasing their platform verl skills i
s basically transforming the way we look at boot camps so instead of paying $220,000 for three months at a boot camp the average person will will pay $149 a month to be on their platform of which you will get live calls with software developers people to pair program with that are in the industry and people that can answer your questions on top of all the content you'll be learning very very Hands-On well everyone that wins today is getting a six-month uh entry into their uh program you will als
o get with that six-month one hour every single month with a software developer in the field to par program with answer questions with and help out I kind of recommend doing it in 6 10 minute increments so like save up all your questions enter a call for 10 minutes and get them all answered do a little programming bounce off I think it's going to really really help you out every single person that wins this we're giving away three every single person will get those six months all right this is g
oing to be the big one so let's Shuffle Shuffle Shuffle make this random random random random random random random the program is called vers yeah ver skills so and the winner is Stephany Davis Stephanie Davis congratulations mistaken no you're right Joan Clark already won hold on so we have a Joan Clark here okay yeah oops show was about to get real mad at me there we go cool the next one all right so that was the first veral skills and the next goes to second one Muhammad razza Muhammad congra
tulations Muhammad all right and let's make it random again shule shule Shuffle give everybody equal chance and let's go it's the last one for the veral skills Jesse Moore Jesse are you still in here congratulations Jesse if this is the Jessie that I think if this is the Jesse that I think this is one of my students in the boot camp that I was just teaching at wow congratul Jessie fantastic Jesse now you really got some big help all right I don't know how many Mentor sessions we have we have fou
r Mentor sessions four Mentor sessions which who are the mentors let me check that again sorry we have Paris Jennifer Nya and Aisha okay so this one right now this very first one we're doing is for Paris let's go Mentor session with Paris yes and just to share a little bit about that four of our speakers have actually volunteered that their 30 minutes to do a mentorship session with you we will be helping facilitate that conversation so let's go congrat look at that the person I removed by accid
ent actually ended up winning man she would have been so mad at me if I look she even wrote yeah is it gonna show I don't know if it's gonna show why is this moving so slow got too much going on yeah thanks for catching that Danny well you won you won fantastic Michelle won the session with uh Paris who's the next one Jennifer Jennifer Jennifer is Awesome by the way yeah you can talk a lot about like leadership and all those stuff amazing and she also leads like women who quote chapter Daniel Vi
ctoria congratul only do she lead not only does she lead um uh what do you call it let me remove this comment not only does she lead that she's a director of it and like um she has some like pretty prestigious POS positions and like a very long um uh resume like like the things that she's done has been pretty incredible wow all right and who's this for we are now we are doing for nia nia I wish I could have a session with Nia I know everyone all right and this last session is with who um AA Aish
a to do the live streaming talk and now the winner is bongani congratulations all right mentorship session so how many udemy courses are we doing 10 we are doing 10 udemy courses yes 10 all right we got 36 entries we have 10 last prizes this is this is as serious as a gets y'all okay this is our last chances but your odds are like one and three right so like it's not the worst thing in the world right now hopefully hopefully hopefully we'll be reaching out to you to get you a udemy course let's
go all right Candace Ruben Candace congratulations Candace all right put on your serious faces this is serious yeah and Tyra congratulations Tyra and I saw so all right let's see who else that's two yep oh Yuri Cho Yuri congratulations Yuri oh you doing courses yes so I don't know who this was but I have their email address so this is what they wrote for name but uh I have your email address so I'm glad that you won and I make I'll make sure that we reach out to you all right all right and we've
got rinia congrat rations rinia all right all right and we got five more left yes five more let's show all the excit chat Mitch Mitch Mitch Mitch congratulations Mitch I already know which em course I want all right yes jinia you won oh oh who is it oh my that was so close that was so close I've never seen something so close before wow all right we got three left three three three three more Leslie congratulations Leslie all right we've got two left let's go ahead and Shuffle this up make it fa
ir fair fair all right last two and I hope it's for you oh my Christel Lopez congratulations Chris and last one last one last one the last one yay J congratulations congrats to all y'all that didn't win you're still winners in someone's eyes uh we appreciate having all of you here let remove this Danny if you can keep that one more second I just heard back from um Chrome Dev team and they actually have like one small thing to give away and that is basically like if you remember uh there is a din
o thing on Chrome like when Chrome dies down you play that dinosaur thing so they actually want to send that cute dino thing to one lucky person who attended wow session okay that's actually pretty cool yes so let's do it one more and give it to that person all right so this last person gets a dino I guess splush toy I don't know what it is it's like it's a bunch of like figurines like Android figurines see so it's same like for like the Chrome dinos shha congratulations shha we will reach out t
o you um separately and make sure that youall receive everything yeah we'll be uh reaching out to all the winners and sending them emails um so that way we can get all the information that we need and also just to let you know as well that um your emails will not be entered into any email list we're not keeping it after the next like hour or so uh Carla if you submitted your form you might did you submit it after the cut off time let me see I'm so sorry yeah you might have submitted after that c
ut I don't even have the form open anymore yeah you might have submitted after cut off time we all the names on the list were there before the cut off um but yeah uh I'm glad everybody had a blast I'm glad everybody was here um to be completely honest I'm glad for all the winners I mean we gave away literally almost 30 prizes that's a lot and to be completely honest I'm just glad that we were able to share the Positive Vibes with everybody like we didn't gain anything from this besides more stoc
k in Advil because I feel like I've bought so much because of this but honestly I really really enjoyed that we're able to do this for the community we're able to do this for you and most of all we're able to help you level up as a developer as a human being and more so so hopefully and I'm pretty confident we're going to be doing a lot more events whether it's with uh gdg San Francisco or another group or you know wherever it is in the United States in North America that I can add value I'm goi
ng to continue to do so and so just be on the lookout for that and if you're following me on Twitter you're going to definitely hear about any events that I'm doing we're always doing something yes thank you so much for sticking with us entire day and I cannot believe like how much I enjoyed like this event with y'all so please reach out to us if you have any questions if you have any feedback like how else we could have done or how else we could have improved this event we're always looking for
critical feedback so please please please and yes big shout out to every single person who was a part of this event I really hope uh y'all enjoyed it thanks yeah I hope you did too so you don't have to go home but you just got to get out of this live stream isn't that the way the phrase goes so I will say you know we could talk about stuff like this all day long but we want you to check out our other videos so check out our other videos and we will see you on the next one yep bye thank you
Comments