Accidentally in Code

Tag: speaking

  • 2018 in Speaking

    2018 in Speaking

    My favourite slide from this year, thanks Matt Miklic!

    Speaking was weird for me this year, my speaker coach (and friend) Denise died at the start of the year, which left speaking at all times tinged with grief. Putting together the talk I prepped [blog posts] (eventually I settled on the name of “Creating Success, Together”) was… a painful process. Chiu-Ki and I shut down Technically Speaking, and even though I gave the same number of talks, speaking felt like a much smaller part of my life (although maybe that is in part about how intense everything else was).

    All in all I spoke at 6 conferences in five countries (three continents), one meetup, co-hosted one event (Try!Swift, for the third year), and did a joint webinar in English and in Spanish — belatedly fulfilling my 2016 goal to give a talk in Spanish.

    For 2018 my speaking goals were:

    • Speak at a WordCamp.
    • Speak at an event in Ireland.
    • More podcasts! They’re fun!
    • Say no.

    and more nebulously…

    • Give a talk I’m proud of.
    • Try something new.

    How did it go?

    ✅ Speak at a WordCamp

    Check! WordCamp EU in Belgrade, Serbia to be exact, where I gave a talk called The State of WordPress Mobile – which I gave a couple of months previously at a WordPress Meetup in Montreal. As part of this I was also (probably) on the Serbian news but we are never going to talk about that.

    This was a bit of a nightmare – firstly, I had rotated off the mobile team to run another one and it was a challenge to get back into the mindset of the team I had deliberately disconnected from. Secondly, Matt (my boss) was up immediately before to me and made some announcements that had me making last minute edits – only to get on stage and forget to refresh the slide deck.

    Thirdly, it featured one of my personal public speaking nightmares: my microphone fell off mid-talk, and slid down the back of my dress. They bought me another microphone, I passed it off by blaming the patriarchy and continued. However that was probably the last time I wear a dress on stage.

    One thing this talk made me realize was how separate I keep my public persona and work. When I get on stage and “perform Cate”, it’s different to who I am amongst my colleagues. These two things colliding – needing to “perform Cate” at a work event was… weird and hard in ways I hadn’t expected.

    ✅ Speak at an event in Ireland

    Done! I spoke at RebelCon, which was a local event and the organizers were truly lovely. They gave me a beautiful book and a large amount of gin.

    Another public speaking nightmare occurred – this was the one where there wasn’t a connector for the new macs (no HDMI) and a kind stranger loaned their laptop as the audience waited for me to start.

    ❌ More podcasts!

    I recorded just one podcast this year. I had a second one that we were scheduling but we never made it work. This was the kind of thing that fell away with how hectic things were.

    ✴️ Say no

    I made progress here – not just on saying no, but on asserting boundaries. I negotiated better, and did better at asking for what I need. The three bigger events I spoke at were all (in different ways) accommodating, and there was nothing I felt pushed into or regretful of.

    ✅ Give a talk I’m proud of

    It took a couple of iterations for me to get there on Creating Success Together, but I made it. I had a couple of people tell me some version of it being the talk they needed to hear and when they needed to hear it – which is always gratifying. The blog post series I put together with it was also well received.

    Probably this talk will be retired for the new ones I am planning, but I expect to bring back the concepts in those or in other things that are just in a conceptual stage…

    ✅ Try something new

    So many new things this year.

    • Co-presenting!
    • Spanish!
    • A more pure “management” talk.
    • Figuring out the help I need from who (and how) now Denise is gone.
    • Different slide aesthetic, the mobile design lead created them for me using the team branding.

    2019?

    I plan to prep two talks this year.

    • The New Manager Survival Guide – exploring the milestones new managers go through and struggle with, loosely based on this article.
    • It’s Probably Fine – tales from the turnaround, what does a functional team look like, and how do you take a dysfunctional non-team and turn it into a high performing and functional one? This will include the layers of communication and outcomes you need to build out, and how you figure out where to start.

    Event organizers: If either of these seem like a fit for your event, please email me!

    Everyone else: please suggest them to organizers at events you love! 💕

    Beyond that, I haven’t really set any specific goals. I expect I will either go with the flow, or be more deliberate about where I want to be, and even submit some talks rather than just relying on being invited.

    But some goals remain the same!

    • Give a talk I’m proud of.
    • Try something new.

  • The State of WordPress Mobile

    Slides from my WCEU talk on the WordPress mobile apps, you can see the full version with speaker notes here. It’s a recap of what shipped in 2017 and explores our themes for 2018.

    Mega thanks to my colleague Matt Miklic who made the deck.

  • Remembering the Eloquent Woman

    Remembering the Eloquent Woman

    DGC2013denver.jpgNearly ten years ago, I found a blog called The Eloquent Woman written by Denise Graveline. I read it diligently, and reading it I learned so many things. I learned about speaking in general, about structuring talks, clarity in scientific communication. I learned about the way women have historically been excluded from speaking, the way our voices are policed, the way that we are so often deemed “not qualified”.

    I learned that speaking up, seeking to be heard, is an act of feminism and an act of resistance. I was inspired by the series of “Famous Speech Fridays” just how impactful that could be.

    I progressed through the phases of social media – lurking, commenting through to writing guest posts. Denise and I progressed through the stages of a social media friendship – connected via a blog, then by Twitter, then by Facebook, IRL. She went from being the writer of a blog I loved, to being my speaker coach and my friend.

    As a speaker, I worked through the stages of speaking: academic talks, small events, big international ones. Lightening talks to keynotes. Denise helped me every step of the way. Through her writing, and the things I learned from her blog. She coached me through my terror of public speaking after being harassed (and shared my posts about the experience) Her book on Moderating Panels got me through my first panel moderation. She was an early supporter of Technically Speaking – one of our first webinar guests, and one of our first sponsors. Her influence can be seen throughout the talk I gave last year called The Not So Secret Feminist Agenda – and not because she coached me on preparing it (although she did), but because I tried to distill many of the things I’ve learned about the silencing of women into it, and much of that I learned from Denise.

    Denise died on February 9th. Days have passed since I heard, but I’m still reeling. I am so grateful for everything I learned from her. Whilst I know I thanked her for the individual pieces, the full scope of her influence hit me like a ton of bricks once I learned that she was gone.

    Denise always maintained the title of her blog wasn’t about her, but capturing something that women speakers aim for – eloquence. For me though, she’ll always be the eloquent woman – watching her give a talk driven by Q&A was truly incredible – and the smart, kind, on point person who inspired and helped so many women to eloquence – and recognised those who achieved it.

    Aside from my personal sadness about the loss of a friend, I’m currently experiencing a kind of existential dread of public speaking from the loss of the person who supported me through the best and worst of it. Denise always made me feel like she believed in my capacity for eloquence, and now what remains is for me to try and believe that too. Because more than the writing she left behind, that’s Denise’s legacy – the number of women who as a result of her work believe that we can be eloquent, too.

  • 2017 in Speaking (and 2018 Speaking Goals)

    2017 in Speaking (and 2018 Speaking Goals)

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    This year, my speaking goals were:

    • Give a talk I’m proud of.
    • Try something new.

    This came about because at the end of 2016 I realised I had (nearly) met the goals I set for myself, but I hadn’t really enjoyed the process. I stripped things back and tried something different.

    My guideline for this year was once again six talks. I did a video talk for Design+Exclusion called “The Not So Secret Feminist Agenda”, co-presented at WCEU with two colleagues, ran a workshop on public speaking and co-hosted Try!Swift NYC for the second year running. Aside from that I prepared one talk “YOLO Releases Considered Harmful” [blog series it’s based on] which I gave four times (plus once at a friend’s workplace). One of these was a keynote (checking off the goal I missed in 2016). Again, I hit three continents: Europe, North America, and Asia.

    I only did one podcast this year, the Simple Leadership Podcast where we talked Managing Managers. But – exciting, Old Media – I was included in a BBC piece on Imposter Syndrome (got to go inside a BBC radio studio, which was pretty cool), and I made my first TV appearance on the Today Show.

    “Give a talk I’m proud of” is not a great goal. It’s not specific, so it’s hard to say whether it’s been achieved – especially as when I’ve given a talk multiple times I often find myself starting to hate it, convinced that it adds nothing of value. But I was really proud of this year’s talk, and I got some great feedback on it. I think partly I ended on a high with it – Try!Swift Bangalore was the last event I gave it at, and was my favourite of this year. I spread out the time I spent preparing it, which I think made it better – the weekly blog post series leading up to giving it for the first time really helped. I also had Virginia Poltrack illustrate it with adorable raccoons which was great. My slides gave me personally a lot of joy, and I got really great comments about them too.

    Try something new – another goal, terrible in it’s vagueness. But actually I tried a lot of new things this year:

    • I ran a workshop solo.
    • I tried a very different slide style and a new person making them.
    • I did a video presentation on a more “diversity” topic.
    • I was on TV!
    • I changed my way of preparing – breaking down my talk and writing blogposts over a ~6 week period.
    • I co-presented.

    And – I went back to something that I knew worked, and had a session with speaker coach Denise which put me on the right track at the start of the year.

    The other thing that changed this year is that I used public speaking in my job more. I gave a short (~7 minute) presentation to the whole company remotely. I was on call for a ~6 hour live Q&A session at the all company meetup (and yes – I answered questions).

    Finally – I got better at saying no. Early in the year I agreed to an event and ended up regretting it. Whilst some good came out of it (you can always make the best of things) it was an expensive mistake (I ended up having to book my own accommodation at the last minute) and reminded me to trust my instincts and my criteria and not agree to “be nice”.

    So… 2018?

    • Speak at a WordCamp (I will have to start submitting again 😱)
    • Speak at an event in Ireland.
    • More podcasts! They’re fun!
    • Say no.

    and…

    • Give a talk I’m proud of.
    • Try something new.
  • “Who Made Your Slides?” (Not Me)

    “Who Made Your Slides?” (Not Me)

    Screen Shot 2017-05-29 at 14.17.09.png

    I’ve been having someone else create my slide decks for a while now. Because I hate creating slide decks. Because I’m not good at it. Because I don’t want to get good at it – better to practise delegation instead. Because it forces me to think about message I want my slides to give, rather than look at some picture licensed for reuse and think “will this do?”

    Who?

    You need to find someone who fits with your aesthetic (and desired aesthetic). I don’t feel like I have a strong aesthetic when it comes to slides (or perhaps in general), but I definitely have clear ideas about what I like and what I don’t – and I don’t want to hate the deck I’m presenting with. You need someone whose work you like and identify with. For the raccoon aesthetic (shown above), Virginia and I talked about like Fit Cat, but a raccoon.

    How?

    As part of your talk prep, you figure out 1) how many slides you want and 2) what you want them to say. You probably also have an overall theme in mind – a metaphor that runs through your talk and ties things together. This is the start of your direction to the person making your deck.

    Working in Google Slides can be convenient here – I made a deck and put ideas in the notes for what I wanted that slide to say. Then Virginia turned those notes into adorable raccoons.

    When?

    The earlier the better! I wrote about my process for breaking down a talk, and I try and get the deck started soon after I’ve figured out the structure. We can always add things in later!

    Why?

    1. Better slides – for most of us, anyway.
    2. Practise delegation – it’s a skill!
    3. Forces you to focus on structure.
    4. More clarity about what you’re trying to illustrate with your slides anyway – first you explain it to someone who reflects it back to you.
    5. Creates deadlines prior to the Big Event!
  • My Worst Public Speaking Experience

    My Worst Public Speaking Experience

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    In my friend Lara’s book, she writes about her first – and worst – public speaking experience. She was invited to keynote but… they invited the wrong person, and she realized that as they gave an unrecognizable introduction – just before she walked on stage.

    I don’t have a story quite that bad, but I do have one that enough time has passed that I can laugh about it.

    Last year I was set to give a talk at a great event, that I was really excited to attend… and I was really sick. I’ll be forever grateful to the sympathetic organizer and the person who switch slots with me and gave me an extra day.

    I timed taking flu meds, so that I could do my best impression of a functioning human on stage. It was going OK, but in the middle of the talk, I played this video. The proper thing to do when playing a video is to turn and watch it, too. When I was speaking, the adreneline was keeping me upright. But a break… I just couldn’t stand up anymore.

    I was behind a podium, and it occurred to me that I could hide… inside it. I gracefully (please let me believe that) lowered myself down to my knees and collapsed into the shelf on the podium. Things seemed vastly better closer to horizontal. I rested my head on the cool surface and sighed with relief. Then I realized I would have to stand up again.

    Oh, shit.

    When the video ended, there was this silence, as people wondered where I was. I stood up behind the podium, like that was a totally normal thing to do, and finished my talk.

  • 2016 Speaking and 2017 Goals

    2016 Speaking and 2017 Goals

    Credit: Pixabay / BreakingTheWalls

    Last year I set myself some speaking goals. They were:

    • Six talks.
    • Speak on three continents.
    • Give a keynote.

    How did I do?

    Six Talks

    My idea was “no more than six talks” and whether or not I adhered to it depends on your definition of “talk”.

    I gave 6 conference talks: Try!Swift Tokyo, OSCON, Self.Conference, Write|Speak|Code, 360iDev, and RubyConf CO.

    I also:

    Three Continents

    Yes! North America, South America, and Asia.

    Keynote

    Not really. I opened a day of Write|Speak|Code, and gave a general session at 360iDev. A goal to carry through to 2017.

    What Did I Talk About?

    I gave three talks this year.

    1. Applied Humaning for Technical Interviews. OSCON and RubyConfCo. This is a talk about being a better interviewer – it stars my favourite raccoon.  I talk about getting yourself in the right mindset to interview, how to project warmth, bias – how it effects people’s experiences and our feedback. Finally I touch on how we can try and help our teams interview better, too.
    2. How to be Invisible. Try!Swift Tokyo and 360iDev. A talk about how the best user experience is sometimes no user experience at all, and the difference between building tools and digital crack. I see this as the third in the series, after Distractedly Intimate (my 2014 mobile design talk) and Mobile is a Systems Problem (2015) [notes].
    3. Some Things I’ve Learned About Color. Self.Conference and Write|Speak|Code. The talk with the most viral tweets. A talk that will never be recorded and notes I will never blog. It’s about the five causes of burnout that are not overwork, how these relate to the experience of under-indexed folk in tech, and how side projects can help. I talk about leaving tech, and finding my way back. It features this amazing video my friend Sumana created.

    These were very different. Some Things I’ve Learned About Color is probably the most powerful talk I’ve given – the one that people reacted most intensely to. It’s also the most overtly “diversity” talk I’ve given, since I mostly try and treat inclusion as a foundation rather than give talks about “diversity”. Applied Humaning is the most practical, I gather that people found it useful. I don’t think I really got How to be Invisible right, but I think those ideas are important and I’ll have to figure out how to do something with them that people will be more receptive to.

    Podcasts

    I recorded three podcasts this year! A good way to practise extemporaneous speaking. Also: super fun!

    1. Talking Shine Theory and Other Things on LTOE
    2. Creative Coding Podcast
    3. Podcast: Should We?

    Speaking Lowlights

    There were some highlights this year. I really enjoyed my first time MCing. We were paid for the workshops, which was exciting – it’s hard to get paid to speak.

    But, there were a number of lowlights.

    • Having to negotiate security at an event. This was really traumatic, and not dealt with well initially – although later someone else stepped up and handled it really well. There’s now some kind of harassment policy named after me, which is… well maybe one day something will be named after me that isn’t depressing.
    • I was so sick at one conference that I had to 1) push my talk back a day (I am forever grateful to the speaker who swapped with me!) 2) in the middle, I played a video and since I could barely stand up had the idea to kneel on the floor and kind of lie in the podium. This seemed like a brilliant idea until I realised I would need to stand up again. Not my most poised moment.
    • Another speaker dropped out at the last minute, so after MC-ing an event I flew all night, and then went and spoke at another event a few hours after I got off the plane. I was happy to help the organisers out of a tough spot, but wow that was brutal.
    • Some anonymised talk feedback that I can still quote pieces of, but here’s a gem, “the speaker kept talking about useless things like feelings”. Perhaps I should talk about useful things, like “vim or emacs”.

    2017?

    When I look back at this year’s speaking, I realise that I didn’t find much joy in speaking this year. I did it. I did my best at it, in a couple of difficult situations. My talks were in general well received and appreciated.

    But I didn’t really enjoy it. When I walked off the stage after my last talk in Medellín, I determined that I wouldn’t give another one until mid-2017.

    As a result, my 2017 speaking goals are aimed at enjoying it again. They are:

    • Give a talk I’m proud of.
    • Try something new.

    This builds on my baseline constraints for speaking, which are the same as our considerations for including CfPs in Technically Speaking – there must be a code of conduct, and a provision for travel costs. When I can get my job to cover travel, I ask to have them listed as a sponsor and look for them to support speaker or attendee diversity with the money they save on my flights etc.

    These goals are vague, perhaps not really goals at all. But sometimes we make progress with concrete actions, and sometimes we can make a more creative leap by chasing something more ephemeral instead. One of the ways I’ve levelled up my speaking is by having someone else create my decks for me – she did all my decks this year. I also worked with a speaker coach a lot in 2014 – this was invaluable. In 2017 I hope I’ll find another such thing. I just don’t know what it is, yet.

  • #NotAllMen Like Playboy

    #NotAllMen Like Playboy

    Credit: Pixabay / Counselling
    Credit: Pixabay / Counselling

    So I hear that a conference gave away Playboy magazine as part of the event swag. The internet expressed their outrage, and there was an apology.

    I haven’t read it.

    I hear it wasn’t stupid, but… meh.

    Here’s the thing. There are some classes of problem in conference inclusivity.

    • Someone at our event behaved inappropriately. We dealt with it.
    • Someone at our event behaved inappropriately. We didn’t deal with it.
    • We failed to make $group welcome.
    • We failed to remember that $group exist.

    Playboy magazine – that’s the last one. That’s a “gift” that most (not all) straight dudes would not give their wives or girlfriends. Let alone someone else’s wife or girlfriend. (Some day, maybe, most – not all – men might stop seeing women only as chattel. They might recognise that not all men appreciate that kind of gift, either).

    Maybe Playboy is an appropriate gift for a frat party. Or a stag weekend. I wouldn’t know. Maybe your gay friend will pretend he’s fine with it, and the strip club. Maybe you don’t have a gay friend.

    Is your conference a thinly disguised frat party? Do you miss the frat house so much that you had to recreate it, but disguised as a professional (and tax deductible event)?

    Did you think your target audience and the audience of men who like to objectify women were one and the same. I guess the internet woke you up.

    Forgive me – but if that is news to you in 2016, I’m not really interested in reading your apology. Because I expect it’s about the incident, and really, what I want to know is how you made it to 2016, living in the world, and this could in fact be news. I want to understand how you managed to be so obtuse. Have you met any women? There are things that I would like to be able to ignore. Maybe I could learn something.

    I saw something really cool the other day. I saw a woman, on stage, in front of well over a thousand people, talk about the huge open source release she led, and the awesome features it contained. It was amazing. She was one of many women on stage at that event. There were enough women attendees that there was a queue in the bathroom.

    I think sometimes we have been fighting so hard for things like codes of conduct that we forget that such things are not the goal – they are just a means to an end. The code of conduct is not the goal. The “woke” apology is not the goal. The goal is diversity, on stage, and off, of people who are included and allowed to thrive.

    So, I’m not reading that apology. I have better things to do with my time.

  • My Current Policy on Speaker Travel Costs

    My Current Policy on Speaker Travel Costs

    Tiny Raccon perches on a pillow on a business class airline seat. Below sits a passport, in a case that says "without this I'm nothing"
    Tiny Raccoon would like to always travel in style. One day.

    About a year ago I wrote about how I get myself uninvited from unflattering speaking invitations (TL;DR I use them as negotiation practise). And last August I wrote about the different options that speakers have when it comes to travel costs – including not going.

    I was pretty public about not speaking if there was no real code of conduct, and I shared my costs for becoming a “public speaker” in 2014, but the thing I didn’t directly address last year was how I approached the money aspect.

    My general rule last year was no travel, no Cate. I made a couple of exceptions and accepted accommodation-only where it worked for me (basically I wanted to go somewhere anyway, and if I gave a talk, I could make a case to write the flights off against tax), and covered my own very minimal costs to get to a local event that I loved the year before.

    I said no to some things, but mostly just didn’t apply to things – I also find it useful that Technically Speaking highlights what travel costs are covered. And a big part of the reason why we do that is because we think it’s an inclusivity issue. This post covers it really well.

    Anyway I learned some things last year about speaking and travel and what I was and wasn’t OK with. For example taking 4 flights because the conference had a limited budget. Turns out I’m not willing to spend one of my limited 24 hour days taking extra planes just because. We eventually found a compromise, but I learned something important about conferences that agree to cover international flights – check how much they think an international flight costs, especially if you are not flying from a major hub. Because you might expect max 1 change on the airline you have status with and they might think 3 changes $random_airline is acceptable.

    This year I’m limiting myself to 6 talks, and getting more invitations, which means more opportunities for negotiation practise. But also, I can ask work to pay for travel, which also changes things.

    However I’m not changing my policy, really. Because even if I don’t necessarily need my travel covered, I don’t want to speak at or attend events where only speakers who can have their companies cover travel can speak.

    So in 2016:

    • For more community events, especially where I know the organisers, I’m willing to ask work to cover my travel in exchange for being listed as a sponsor if there is also provision for other speakers to have their travel covered. In one instance me doing this meant that the organiser could invite another woman speaker. Amazing.
    • For corporate events (I have a definition of this in my head, but it  lacks diplomacy and seems unwise to share it), I want travel / accomodation covered. Star Alliance, minimum connections.

    I’m not a diva. Well OK, I’m not that much of a diva. But my time is valuable, and to me this is an extension of the Code of Conduct thing – I only want to speak at or be associated with events that make an effort for inclusivity, and I believe that travel costs are an inclusivity issue.

    Two years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing and frankly as an unknown couldn’t afford to be that hardline about it. I’ve worked (and paid my own way to speak) to get to this place of privilege where I can say “this is what I want” and where I don’t feel like I’m missing out if I can’t get an agreement. I hope being public about it encourages other people (who also have this privilege) to as well.