We’re hosting YOW! Nights in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney  from Nov 15-17. Lindsay Holmwood from the DTO is speaking, and you should definitely attend…

This week I made it to FIVE different events – a new record! The first one was the Central Sydney WordPress Meetup held at Fishburners. The topic of the evening was monetising WordPress, and @DeveloperWil walked the audience through all the different ways you can build an online business. I gave a lightning talk about a site I built twenty years ago that is still running today. In my experience, the best way to make money from a website is by using it to learn and practice tech skills that you then use in a great job!

On Tuesday I attended the weekly lunchtime Tech Talk at Pivotal Labs. The speaker was Suresh Dhanushkoti from CoreLogic RP Data. Suresh explained that Agile ways of working are now accepted across most IT departments. As he put it, we are beyond “Should we do Agile?” and even “Is it working?” – the question now is “Where else can we be Agile?” CoreLogic wanted to explore using Agile principles across their entire business, so they developed and implemented a system called BizScrum. He walked us through how they got buy-in at the executive level and the lessons they learned along the way.

On Wednesday evening I went to the AWS Sydney User Group meetup at BlueChilli. The first speaker was George Watts from AWS, who started off with some cautionary tales of large enterprise transformation projects that failed spectacularly. “The main reason cloud projects fail,” George said, “is that people don’t want to use them.” 😂 Gary said that communication is key, and that you need to invest time up front to actually talk to the end users and find out what their concerns are. His other tip for successful projects was to use Amazon’s Well-Architected Framework, a set of core strategies and best practices for architecting systems in the cloud.

The second speaker of the night was Alan Milligan from the Last Bastion Network. Alan eschewed slides completely in favour of a live demonstration using the Jupyter Notebook platform to integrate the AWS Marketplace Product Support Connection onboarding programme – which had conveniently been released just that same day!

Thursday morning I attended the 2nd ever Connected Women ANZ event held at Google’s office in Sydney. This group is for professional women across the Technology and Digital industries, and there were representatives from over twenty different companies (including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn). Jason Pelligrino welcomed everyone and set the tone of the day, talking about what diversity and inclusivity means to him.

The first speaker was JoAnna Ferrari from Visions ‘n’ Goals, telling us her amazing personal story. I met JoAnna back in August when we both spoke at TEDxMelbourne, and I was so thrilled to get to see her onstage again. Her story of her journey from John to JoAnna took us from laughter to tears and back again. I especially loved how she boiled it down to lessons that are applicable to everyone, and she inspired us all to think about the things that were holding us back.

The second speaker was Lorraine Murphy from The Remarkables Group. Lorraine talked about gratitude and owning your victories, and she also gave us her tips for remarkable success – the first of which was my favourite!

Lorraine then joined a panel discussion with two other women: Sarah Liu from Gemini3 and Karen Lawson from Slingshot. The moderator was Renee Gamble from Google. My favourite takeaways from the panel:

• Entrepreneurship is over-romanticised. You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to change the world.
• Networking is not about finding people to help you. It’s about helping them and paying it forward.

I’ll also give a shout-out to Denise Shrivell from MediaScope (and the creator of Peggy’s List). Denise was at the event and was tweeting even more than I was!

My last event of the week was Thursday evening’s Sydney Node.ninjas meetup, held on the brand new level at SafetyCulture. (They were seriously finishing the renovations that day, but it was gorgeous!)

I can’t actually talk about the first talk of the night. It was TOP SECRET. I’m not even kidding! They asked us not to tweet or record it at all. Two developers from a large Australian tech company demoed a project that they were working on. It involved live coding, mobile phones, and Javascript… and that’s all I’m gonna say about that!

Then we had two lightning talks. The first was by Brandon Cook, an 18yo (seriously!) developer at SafetyCulture. Brandon told us what the first few months of his first ever full-time coding role had been like. He did a great job with it, and he’s clearly got a really bright future ahead of him. 🙂

The second lightning talk was by Kris Croaker, also from SafetyCulture. He ran us through a number of tips for running Node in Docker.

And the long talk for the evening was by Ajain Vivek from LoanFlare. Ajain explained how we can use new EcmaScript 2015 (ES6) features in NodeJS development. He had really clear examples showing the “before” and “after” for each feature, which made it easy to understand the benefits of this syntactic sugar. (I especially liked learning more about iterators and generators!)

Next week… Melbourne!

The 2016 YOW! Conference is coming soon. Don’t wait to get your tickets – Melbourne is already sold out!

This week I attended four different meetups in Sydney, all very different! The first was the second Equality Hacks Think Tank, held at the Elabor8 offices. This recently formed group was based on a similar project in Victoria called BoldMoves, with a goal of coming up with “safe-to-fail” experiments to increase diversity in tech. Jody Podbury facilitated as two groups explored ideas (many of which had been fleshed out ideas and experiments.

(Men of Sydney! We need you to join this group! We can’t do it alone.)

The second meetup I attended was Designing Products as part of the Sydney Spark Festival. This was also their second ever meetup, the first one happening two years ago! The meetup was hosted by the fine folks at Web Directions, and it was quite a full house.

The first speaker was Lauren Bedford, Head of Product Design at Expert 360. Lauren talked us through the top five lessons she learned being a product designer at a startup. My favourite was that startups do, in fact, have tech debt! She also talked about the tension between being a designer who likes to get things perfect and a product manager who needs to deliver quickly.

The second speaker was Buzz Usborne, Design Lead at Atlassian. Buzz also walked us through the things he learned over the course of his career. He said that designers all share the same frustrations even in bigger startups: no team is perfect; and there’s never enough time or budget. My favourite quote from his talk: “As a designer, it’s your job to make customers feel AWESOME.”

This meetup is a great new addition to the Sydney community. Thankfully the organisers say the next one is scheduled for January, so we won’t have to wait another two years. 🙂

The next event was also part of the Spark Festival – the Women in Tech Breakfast at Gravity Coworking. It was an early start, but the lovely coffee and catering helped!

The speaker was Lisa Martens, Director of Market Insights at Squiz. Lisa’s talk was nominally about personal branding, but really it was about a time when she realised her internal self-perception didn’t line up with how others perceived her. She was in a funk, and since she didn’t have six months “to quit her job and pull an Eat Pray Love,” she did something else entirely: she signed up for a boxing program and fought an amateur bout.

Honestly, at eight in the morning, the last thing I was expecting was “women in tech Fight Club”! But it was amazing. Lisa told us about her challenges along the way – learning the “systems” that would allow her to survive the training and the fight; dealing with friends and family who were less than supportive; a round of food poisoning that set her back a week; and her nerves as the big day approached. We were all on the edge of our seats until she revealed the outcome – she won her fight! She told us how it affected her self-confidence and her willingness to back herself in her professional life. As she put it, “The things we work hard for – we should celebrate those victories.” It was an amazing and inspirational talk, and judging by the number of questions afterwards, everyone found is just as fascinating as I did.

The last event of the week was SydPHP, held at the Hey You offices in Surry Hills. The speaker was Katie McLaughlin, Operations Engineer at Ambiata. Katie was giving her talk on “The Power and Responsibility of Unicode Adoption” (aka The Emoji Talk), and it did not disappoint! (Slides are here.)

Katie taught us all about the importance of using Unicode and the problems caused by legacy systems that don’t support it. As she put it, there are lots of people in the world who can’t even enter their names in some systems because they involve non-ASCII characters. She also told us about  the history of emojis and how new emojis are added to the standard every year. (Yay for the Female Technologist emoji!) We also learned about Zero Width Joiners, and how they allow for emoji to be combined in different ways (like making a rainbow flag or allowing for different skin tones). There were heaps of questions afterwards and a lot of laughter.

So Twitter is shutting down Vine. And to be honest, I’d never really explored Vine at all. It just wasn’t a thing I ever had time for. But then I found the Metafilter thread about it, and people were sharing their favourite Vines… and these ones made me laugh out loud SO HARD. We’re talking tears. (Make sure you have sound on!)

• Duck army
• When Mom isn’t around
• Your bra strap is showing
• Rare footage of me going to school every day
• When you don’t know how to use a toilet
• THIS DOESN’T EVEN MAKE ANY SENSE

Remember how I spoke at TEDxMelbourne back in August? The video is finally up on YouTube. 🙂

In case you missed the news, I started a new role this month as Director of Developer Relations for YOW! Conferences and Workshops. I first heard of YOW! back in 2012 when they gave away a conference ticket at a Girl Geek event that I attended. Since then, I’ve attended (and volunteered) at their YOW! Nights, sent team members to their conferences, and entered (and won!) their inaugural Women in Tech Speaking Competition. This past May, I travelled to Perth to speak at the YOW! West conference on making the transition from individual contributor to management, and a few weeks ago I spoke at YOW! Connected in Melbourne about knitting as computer code. So needless to say I’m a big fan of the organisation, and I’m absolutely thrilled to get to work with them to support the Australian developer community.

One of the most important parts of my role is to build relationships with local meetup groups, so I’ve been making liberal use of meetup.com…

(Yikes. And that’s pretty much just Sydney, so it’s going to be even worse once I started adding in Melbourne!)

I thought that each Friday I’d do a quick Weekly Meetup Wrap of the events that I attended. Hopefully this will give some love and promotion to the meetup groups and speakers, and maybe even introduce you to some groups you hadn’t heard of.

My first event this week was Cloud Foundry Day  over at Pivotal Labs. I found out about it through DevOps Sydney, a local meetup group. Cloud Foundry is an open source cloud computing PaaS originally developed by VMware and now overseen by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. They had a number of international and local speakers sharing their experiences building cloud applications. I especially liked the talk by Lindsay Holmwood, who heads up Technology at the DTO.

I also really enjoyed the presentation by Dr. Nic Williams, CEO of Stark & Wayne. He started by reminding the audience that once you’ve gone fast, it’s really hard to go slow. That was the jumping off point for a talk about how devops lets developers and companies move faster, and why that’s critical for success.

Later that evening I attended the second Sydney pitch event for Elevacao. This organisation, founded by Marisa Warren, aims to empower women entrepreneurs to become the next Atlassian. Three different sets of women founders pitched their startups to a panel of innovation luminaries, including Rebekah Campbell from Hey You and Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin from BlueChilli. It was incredible to be in a packed audience of mostly women for a founders event like this. My favourite of the pitches was Dr. Silvia Pfeiffer for Coviu, which provides web-based interactive videoconferencing. (Coviu was used to link up the various Health Hack sites last weekend.)

On Wednesday I went along to the regular monthly SydJS meetup. The evening started with a great off-the-cuff lightning talk from Rob Howard about accessible types. Then Ian Grunert gave a quick talk about yarn, the new Javascript package manager from Facebook. (I especially liked all the excellent wool photos he used!)

Next Fiona Chan gave an excellent presentation about public speaking – why you should do it, how to get over your fears, and how to get better at it. That was followed by a highly entertaining talk from Nikolay Nemshilov on genetic algorithms in Javascript and his quest for an ever more efficient keyboard layout. The evening ended with Justin Anderson talking about the language features of Javascript, and how being more declarative in your programming can help you avoid problems.

On Thursday, I attended my first ever Developer Drinkups meetup. As you can tell from the title, this one is purely social. It was held at Spawn Point Small Bar, a video gaming bar in the CBD. Elliot Chance is one of the organisers, and he’s put together a really friendly group. There were probably a few dozen attendees in all, and I was pleased that there were a handful of women there too. We had beers; we chatted; we played some games. Great event!

“Dress for Success has been outfitting disadvantaged women for nearly two decades. Can clothes really open up a whole world?”

I love this. What a great organisation. I was just inspired to see if there’s a local chapter in Sydney, and there is! I’m going to donate some cash to them, and instead of taking old clothes to the Op Shop in the future, any good things are going straight to them.

Last month I went to a talk with my friend Amy called “How to Find Balance: Mindfulness to strengthen focus, clarity and productivity”. A panel of experienced meditation practitioners told us their stories and then walked us through some exercises. It was great, and I walked away energised and ready to start making meditation part of my daily routine. And then I promptly forgot about it and never did any of it.

BUT today I found this handy 2 minute “Meditation 101” video which has renewed my inspiration. (I also really like the animation and voiceover!) So I’m going to create a “Meditate for 5 minutes” task on my To Do list and commit to doing it every day. (Thanks to kottke for the video.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqoxYKtEWEc

I’m giving a talk at WordCamp Sydney today about my Roald Dahl site called “My Website is Old Enough to Vote.” It’s about the evolution of the site over the years; the challenges of dealing with 20-year-old HTML; and how I recently migrated the entire site to WordPress over a period of five months.

Slides:

Plugins that I mentioned:

• Advanced Custom Fields
• Add Categories to Pages
• WP Gallery Custom Links
• Breadcrumb NavXT
• My Calendar
• Riddle
• WP-Polls
• Relevanssi

Other plugins I use but didn’t mention:

• Amazon Link
• CloudFlare
• CloudFlare Flexible SSL
• Display Posts Shortcode
• Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
• VaultPress
• Wordfence Security
• WP Simple Adsense Insertion

Oh wow. The fashion designer Vivienne Tam took inspiration from NASA for her Spring 2017 Ready-to-Wear Collection. There are NASA logos all over the place! I particularly liked these embellished slip-on sneaks, and if they’re available anywhere, they will be mine.

Vintage Classics UK got a designer from Marimekko to design covers for a new run of Virginia Woolf’s books. They’re gorgeous! (Link courtesy of Girls of a Certain Age.)