I just gave my third talk of the year, so this marks the half way point as I will do 6 events, total. This included my first opening keynote, and the largest audience I have spoken in front of yet (>700). Now I have a break until September. It seems like a good time to […]
I don’t like panels. I don’t like them as an audience member, because I find they are usually unfocused and boring – there always seems to be one guy who talks too much and says too little. I don’t like them as a moderator, because it’s a lot of work. And I don’t like them […]
I was one of two MCs and a magician at Try!Swift NYC last week, which was super fun. I’d been thinking it would be fun to MC for a while, so I jumped (OK, asked…) for the opportunity to do it. Liz Abinante wrote an amazing post about her experience MC-ing, which inspired me, although I […]
Chiu-Ki and I gave a workshop last year called Technically Speaking – From Conference Proposal to Submit, and we meant to do more with it… and then never did. But luckily, Mozilla reached out to us about doing a workshop as part of their Tech Speakers program (such a great initiative – see this blog post […]
Edited notes from my talk at UW Oct 15th which was in part a reflection of what had happened at GHC this year. This is the talk I live tweeted. I gave a talk on mobile last week at GHC, and I was feeling a little weird about the level of visibility I was experiencing […]
This year, I prepped one talk. Next year, I feel more confident and plan to prep 3 (working titles: Mobile is a Systems Problem, The Myth of The Intersection of Energy, Creativity, and Time, and a Series of Unfortunate Statistics). This year’s talk – Distractedly Intimate – has been given in timeframes ranging from 20 […]
There was an amazing response to my previous post, it was really gratifying to have people find it worthwhile. I wrote it, finally, for two reasons. The first was to take ownership of the experience, to not sweep it under the carpet like it was me that had done something wrong. When you allow someone […]
Prioritising There is a tendency amongst engineers to try and scope out the whole problem, and understand it all, and then work on fixing… all of it. Being able to say this is the most important thing, and then doing that first – even when it is not the most interesting thing, is a super-power. Do this, […]
I get very nervous presenting, although it’s something I do relatively often. This is not out of enthusiasm for getting up on stage, but rather because I find myself in the position of being the least unwilling engineer. After my last presentation I was told that I didn’t need to be nervous, because I was […]
Every so often I do something that is such a waste of time it makes me pause. Reading a non-fiction book I’m not into, it drags and I don’t retain much of it. Horse-riding with my friend at the weekend, we booked the trail option and it was over an hour of… walking, didn’t even make […]