Credit: xkcd

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 it to a trot, really (mine did for all of 10 blissful seconds). And the beautiful sunny day had turned so we were freezing.

Last week, I gave a talk to five people. Something of a come-down from around 150 less than a week before. Nothing against the five people who were there, who were lovely, and engaged. But I can’t think that taking three hours out of my day to reach five people is a good use of my time. Also, only in academia do they “invite” you to give a talk and then charge you the price of a new handbag for it.

And so at the end of my month of public speaking, I’m thinking about why I do it. It’s not the end, it’s the means for me. I want to be able to give a good demo, speak up in meetings, and acquit myself creditably when invited to something as good for female university students as ONCWIC was.

Doing some public speaking helps with these things, but I’ve passed the limit of what is a good use of time. And so I’m thinking about setting parameters – I already won’t do talks about what it’s like to be an engineer if there are not going to be any women there. What else should I rule out? No more academic talks? Minimum 50 people?

I don’t want to seem ungrateful for the opportunities that present, but I can’t take all of them. If I’m going to take some but not all, how do I select the some?

Excel at something Meaningful.

Credit: flickr / Tyson Cecka

When trying to change habits, people have more success with the things they decide to do, than things they vow not to. If you’ve ever tried to give anything up, you’ll know this. However, often the most important decisions you make are what not to do.

In the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris (Amazon) he advocates checking email only once a week. I did this for a while, and I definitely got a lot more done.

It’s easy to excel at email. You can just throw hours at it. Make it a priority and you’ll be great at it. It’s very safe to be “good” at things like that. Reply promptly and maintain inbox zero and you’re golden.

It’s scarier to be good at less tangible, measurable things. How do you measure the success of writing a blog, say? In visitors? Comments? Meaningful connections?

How do you measure the success of writing code? Lines? Features? Number of users?

Anything creative is hard to measure. But it’s much more helpful to do okay at something meaningful, than excel at something fundamentally mediocre.

No-one ever said, “Wow, X was so impressive. They maintained inbox zero.”, after all. Maybe they did <list of impressive things> and still maintained inbox zero. But inbox zero alone is not enough.

Email is my personal bugbear. I pity anyone who tried to communicate with me by it. Thinking about the state of my inbox… well I try not to, and whenever I try to tackle it people reply faster that I seem to get through things and so it gets no better. Email is something that I’ve deprioritized in order to do better at things I think are more worthwhile.

The point – don’t excel at something that’s easy to excel at. Spend your time doing something meaningful instead, even if you suck at it.

Discussion point: What’s something mediocre that you could replace with something with potential for awesome?

Credit: flickr / B.K. Dewey

When I took off to China to live up a mountain and kickbox, a number of people thought I was insane. But when I look at my life now – living abroad, travelling a lot – my time as an international hobo was actually really helpful.

I don’t get phased in airports. I don’t stress out for long when faced with travel setbacks. I’m fine exploring alone.

In some ways teaching in French seemed like a pointless source of extreme stress. But now, somehow I’ve ended up giving a bunch of talks… and there is no doubt that it puts it all in perspective.

It’s hard to tell what will be useful down the line, and what will not. At some point it seemed like a very helpful skill to have beautiful handwriting. Before we had smart phones there were all kinds of things we learned that now we just look up.

If you do the things you find exciting, if you take advantage of the adventures on offer, there’s no guarantee that it will be helpful but I can tell you that everything I’ve done that has broadened my experience has been useful, whilst many things that seemed “useful” have been of little or no use to me.

Discussion point: What was something “crazy” that you did that was actually a useful learning or connecting opportunity?

Credit: flickr / newwavegurly

In the book Being Geek (Amazon), there’s a section on “Your People” (blog post).

Let me tell you about my people. They do things. They support me when I do things. They don’t say “no, but…”, they say “yes, and…!”.

Everything cool that I’ve done and will do has at least one other person who I don’t think it could have happened without.

Periods that I’ve not been as happy or productive have been filled by people who were the antethesis of my people.

It’s so important, who you surround yourself with. In the wrong crowd, I’ve wasted all my energy on pointless drama. With my people, that doesn’t happen. When you’re trying to do something awesome you don’t want the people who you always have to chase around, you want the people who you can rely on. They are your people.

The internet is such an amazing way to find Your People.

Discussion point: Who are “Your People”? Why are they awesome? How did you find them?

Credit: flickr / BuhSnarf

When I run into something where I think “this should be happening”, it’s a sign I’ve found an opportunity. It’s one that interests me, otherwise I wouldn’t have spotted it. This is why I started Girl Geek Dinners in KW, I went looking for it when I moved because I figured it would be a good way to meet people, and was disappointed to find there wasn’t one.

Once I’d connected with a couple of other women who also wanted such a thing to exist (my people!) we were set.

Gaps are opportunities. Say yes to filling them.

I advocate saying yes in general. Even though I really need to learn to say no before I have some kind of breakdown… saying yes is such a source of adventure and opportunities.

Clearly, I have no idea how to find a balance here. But, I do think that being someone who says “no, but” is an limiting way to live. Many people could use some more “yes, and!” in their lives.

Discussion point: What is a gap you are thinking of filling?
Discussion point: Share something that you said yes to that turned into an adventure.

Credit: flickr / chooyutshing

When you start something, you have this vision of what you want it to become. That’s great – and important – you need to have an idea of what you’re working towards. But at some point, you face a choice. You can build a tiny, solid steel, structure, completely controlled by you. Or you can give up some control and plant the seeds for an organization that will grow bigger than you could do alone, do different things you could never have imagined. There’s a risk that it will die. But – that’s another tradeoff you can make, because giving up control allows you to move on to other projects that excite you.

I stepped down from things when I left Ottawa, and other people took over. I know that things are going to change as a result but I’m OK with that – I trust them to do a good job, I can mentor and encourage, but ultimately, this new person will have their own vision – and that’s a good thing. I don’t want to stay in grad school forever, running the same things!

With the Awesome Foundation, we have a very flat structure. As a co-conspirator go around getting excited about things, and do a little more organization stuff but every trustee puts in $100 and every trustee gets a vote. I can say “I think we should do this”, but if I’m outvoted, I’m outvoted. My role here is not really a leader, more of a facilitator. There’s an important distinction.

If you want other people to help you, you’ll probably have to ask them! Asking for things is hard. Asking someone to join the board of the Awesome Foundation was terrifying for me at first – “hey! How about you give $100 every month to some crazy idea that may or may not work?” – I’ve got better at it with practise (and I don’t say that!). But you need to learn to ask for things, for starters you’ll need to ask for help.

Last year I read this great book, Women Don’t Ask (Amazon). I highly recommend it. And I started asking for things, for instance one of the first things I asked for was a t-shirt.

I know, random. But last year at Grace Hopper the Yahoo! people had these awesome t-shirts that said “I code like a girl and I’m PROUD of it”, and I wanted one really badly! It happens that I know a guy who works for Yahoo!, in fact before he moved I would take care of his cat. So I asked him if he could get me one of these t-shirts and he did.

When uOttawa asked me to create a programming curriculum for a workshop we run for high-school students, I thought it sounded like a cool idea. But – I’d already created a proprietary curriculum and wasn’t really interested to do another proprietary one. So I asked if we could open source it. They agreed to my terms, and now anyone can use the materials I’ve created.

I’m still afraid to ask. But I’m getting better at it. So try it.

And, pro-tip, start being more attuned to people’s implicit asks. When someone you think is awesome talks about this new project they are starting, introduce the topic of how you can help them before they have to. And then follow through.

Because – the real secret I’ve found in asking, is that it’s easier to ask when people want to help you because they’ve seen you paying it forward already. Or – even better – they are also attuned to implicit asks, and you don’t need to.

Discussion point: What have you asked for recently? Did you get it?

Credit: flickr / dullhunk

Who has an idea for a product, or web service, or piece of software?

As a programmer, I can tell you that there are lots of non-programmers out there who have some “genius idea” that they think a programmer should build, for “equity” – a stake in the eventual, hugely profitable company.

The reality is that the company is rarely profitable, if it even gets off the ground. And programmers have their own ideas, which if they want they could implement. This is why people – especially programmers – get angry about patents, because you can literally patent an idea and the person patenting it doesn’t actually need to know how to implement it. To a programmer, implementation is everything. Ideas are 10 a penny. What does this have to do with starting an organization (or anything)? It means that it doesn’t matter how amazing your idea is, it’s nothing until you actually implement it.

And if someone else gets there before you, the idea was good enough that someone actually did it – so be pleased! And either get on board with them, or come up with something else and move faster. It also means, that it can be hard to sell your idea until you start doing.

We were the first Awesome Foundation outside the US, but we weren’t the first period. The fact that we have a network of people to ask questions to and this model has been proven made it much easier to get going.

Discussion point: What’s your plan for implementing your current awesome idea?

Think about how big your comfort zone is. What are you OK with doing? Introducing yourself to a stranger? Going to a foreign country by yourself? Standing up and talking in front of a bunch of people?

Chances are, there is a whole world outside your comfort zone. I really recommend going to explore that, but it can be scary. Stuff outside your comfort zone is stuff you don’t know – and as you go off discovering it there’s a good chance that things won’t go to plan. You’ll fail.

You know in Harry Potter, how the bogart turns into Prof. McGonnagall for Hermione and tells her she failed everything – that’s her biggest fear. It’s no wonder Harry always saves the day, he’s OK with failing, and that makes him more able to take risks. Hermione might seem more successful, there’s no doubt that she is academically, but that’s within her comfort zone. For her to be successful in other ways, she had to learn how to fail. (It’s not quite that simple, here’s an interesting article: In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series).

When we first started the Women in Science and engineering group back at uOttawa, we tried an event and people were really enthused about it… but then no-one turned up. I was mortified, and really questioned what I was doing. We didn’t run that kind of event again, but we ran different things that were successful. We learned what our members want, and that’s what we put on for them. It was a setback, but it didn’t stop us from achieving a lot of other things.

The Awesome Foundation is a great model and there’s a lot of enthusiasm for it, but getting enough submissions is a continual effort. Seriously, we’re giving away free money but people don’t fill out the application form! It was tough in Ottawa, because you get to this catch-22 – you don’t fund anything, and no-one hears about you. We persevered. In KW we work at it continually.

There’s this great lecture by Randy Pausch. It’s an hour – go watch it. In it, he talks about how when you hit a wall, have a set back. He says that walls are there to keep out the people who don’t really want it. So when you fail, and I hope you do because I think that a life without failure is a life where you didn’t push yourself – you look at your failure, you evaluate what you can learn from it. And then you keep going.

Discussion point: Tell us about a failure that you learned from.

Credit: flickr / Jef Harris

Colin Powell said, “trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity”. Be likable - it’s important – but the reality is, if you want to stand out and do something extraordinary, there are people who will try and tear you down for it. People might not understand that ideas are cheap, and think that you “stole” theirs, because you got their first. If you do things, people might need to attack your success in order to excuse their own inaction – like “oh Cate, she just got lucky”.

I’m not going to lie – it sucks. Who’s had something bad said about them that they knew wasn’t true? Who was hurt by it?

A while ago now, I had someone I used to be friends with telling people (people I know!), basically that I was doing I terrible job with Awesome Ottawa. Of course it gets back to me, and of course I was upset by it. The way it all played out was interesting, because I tried to ignore it and just keep running around doing my thing, and in the face of my non-response, this woman managed to make a different story in which I played the villan.

It was difficult, but eventually it worked out for the best. But at the time? Horrible. And honestly, I could not comprehend why someone would behave like this, when they could have pinged me for a cup of coffee and got everything they wanted. I was talking to one of my mentors, and we talked about whether I could have done more. Of course I could – you can almost always do more to resolve situations, you can always try to reason with someone, no matter how determined they are to dislike you. But in the worst 2 week period of this, I went to New York to pitch to top IBM executives with my team. I interviewed at Google, and filed two patents (within IBM). I got on a plane, and went back to Europe. So the question is not, “could I have done more?” – it’s with these other priorities going on, should I have. I think I made the right call that time.

Haters will hate. I always take the time to consider if they have a reason for it, is there anything I can and should do to resolve it. But – if someone is determined to dislike you, they will find a reason to.  Anything you do can, will, be used against you. So at some point, you have to say – No. I’m doing what I’m doing, and I refuse to let you distract me.

Check out Leadership and Self-Deception and The Anatomy of Peace (both Amazon) for insight on managing interpersonal conflict.

Discussion point: What strategies do you use to deal with conflict?

Credit: xkcd

No-one is good at everything. It is totally natural that we have weaknesses. Often they are paired with a strength. For instance, I’m very logical so I struggle when people behave irrationally. When someone was being vile, I exclaimed to a friend that I didn’t understand why they would be so inefficient. The logical attitude that makes me good at programming means that I struggle with that kind of situation.

It’s really important to know what your strengths are. It’s even more important to know what you are bad at, so you can find ways to manage that.

For instance, I’m horrible at selling myself – so I hired someone to write my resume for me.

For Girl Geek Dinners and Awesome Foundation KW other people do the logistics. I would suck at that.

Discussion point: What’s something you are good at it’s associated weakness?

Credit: flickr / Hot Meteor

There are so many people who come home from work at 5 and spend the evening watching TV, that if you do anything, people will start telling you how awesome you are.

Appreciate that, but take it as a thank-you. Every moment you spend believing it is a moment that someone else is overtaking you.

Once I saw someone tweet something… I can’t bring myself to repeat it, but suffice to say the words “I’m so awesome” were used. I have no clue what this person does, but now I have zero interest in finding out. A couple of other people I know saw it and we laughed about it – her credibility was damaged by this gratuitously self-aggrandizing tweet.

The most impressive people don’t seem to need to talk about how gosh-darn impressive they are. They’re too busy getting on with things. At work, you need to document your achievements and put them forward to your manager for promotion. In the outside world, especially on the internet, if you’re awesome, people notice. Maybe not as fast as you’d like, but they do.

At my leaving party when I moved away from Ottawa, this guy showed up and said that he’d wanted to meet me before I left. That was really cool, it totally made my day. That kind of moment is worth more than a million people agreeing when I say how awesome I am. I’m taking it as a thank-you, and encouragement to keep going. But I don’t believe that I did anything special, which is perhaps key to doing things at all. If you only believe that someone extraordinary can start something, you’ve set the bar way higher than it needs to be. Anyone can do it. Honestly. I did. You can too.

Discussion point: What’s the most ridiculously self-promoting thing you’ve seen?

Discussion point: What act or comment from someone has made you feel most appreciated?

Credit: xkcd

In September, I challenged myself to say no. And so – I didn’t take a trip. I set boundaries. Yes, I will do the thing I agreed to, no, you can’t change it about on me like that. After reflection, my boyfriend and I decided that now wasn’t a good time to move in together. I would be doing it because I have been travelling so much, and how ridiculous to make a decision based on an aspect of my life that I would like to change. I changed trainer to someone who I can work out with when it suits me, rather than on a fixed schedule.

I need to keep working at it. Saying no has been a continuous effort for me. But, someone told me that I seemed to be doing better at it… well, he said I wasn’t rushing around as much. I take that to be progress.

For October, the theme is – public speaking. I have four talks scheduled this month (one down, three to go), and attended a number of panels at Geek Girl Con, went to Ignite NYC, and I have tickets for Ignite Waterloo coming up. So I’ll be devoting some time to trying to improve my own public speaking (the talk at Geek Girl Con was with a friend, so that was a new experience), and thinking about what makes a good talk, and a good panel. Oh, and advice given to female engineers that makes me livid – you have been warned!

It’s a little amazing how one can do that, right? I mean, in the real world, telling people I’m a software engineer will often stop a conversation.

Looking at other people, it’s easy to say, oh that person is dressed better than I am. That person is smarter than I am. That person is, frankly, just doing better at life than I am.

Looking at ourselves, it’s hard to see what we’re doing well.

Today, we’re going to talk about the flipside of being a superhero – the side you don’t see, that it’s easy to assume doesn’t exist. We’re going to talk about what a superhero is, anyway. And what we want you to walk away with, is the realization that you are already a superhero. We’re going to share some strategies that we use to get things done, and some stories of our own failures, and the successes we’ve built on them.

Redefining What Makes a Superhero

• Discussion point: Let’s think about some superheros and qualities we admire about them.

It’s great that we have Fantasy superheros – the Wonder Woman video yesterday was amazing. But, what about real-life superheros? Who do you know that inspires you?

[Introduce each other]

• Discussion point: Tell us about one of your real-life superheros.

It’s easy to admire people we don’t really know. We see their successes, but usually we don’t see their struggles.

[Explain how we see eachother’s struggles]

Setting (and Achieving) Superhero Goals

• Discussion point: Talk about Big Hairy Audacious Goals you’ve achieved?

Cate: getting a job as a software engineer at Google. I studied really hard, practising coding without an IDE, reading algorithm books. So that when I went to interview, I felt as prepared as I could.

Cate: getting my level 2 ski instructor qualification. Went out with less experience than a lot of people on the course, but I got up early to ski before class, took as short a break as I could for lunch to ski more, and often closed the hill with the ski patrol in the evening – or went to the gym.

Serena: noticing an issue with internal communications within this fast growing company, I took the initiative to approach my managers with the issue and introduce a solution. Took the existing Unicorn accomplishment tool (which was basically one lonely text field) and turned it into a full blown project tracking and achievement tool, to improve communication company-wide. Was featured in Fast Company Magazine this past summer.

If a goal is a really enormous, it becomes “safe” to fail at. If your goal is to be Oprah, well, every other person on the planet isn’t Oprah. If you don’t manage it, who’s to judge? It’s an intimidating place to aim for, and how the hell do you start?

It’s important to set goals that stretch you, but make sure they are realistic. It’s easier to achieve a bigger goal if you break it down into sizable chunks.

• Discussion point: What’s one of your goals right now and what steps are you taking to achieve it?

Cate: have a team of my own. I’m starting a new part of the project I work on and I got an intern for the winter. So I want to turn this into something other people can – and want to – work on.

Serena: Empowerment through education and creating more positive female role models are two things I’m really passionate about. I founded a chapter of GDI in my community to teach more women how to code and to get more women involved in the local technical community. Everyone knows about the low number of women in tech, but instead of complaining about the issues, I want to see more being done. We had our first event last month, and had the room packed with people.

There’s a great book by Richard Wiseman called “the Luck Factor”. It’s all about studies that have shown that lucky people do things differently to unlucky people. They are more open to new experiences, notice things that “unlucky” people don’t, and they take a more constructive approach to set-backs.

Failing is the ultimate learning opportunity.

• Discussion point: What’s a failure that you learned from?

Cate: I had an idea for something that I wanted to build, so I prototyped it and took it to people who could make that happen. It didn’t go the way I wanted, but as a result of the experience I really knew what kind of thing I wanted to work on and what kind of environment I wanted to be in. And so I moved to a new project where I get those things.

Cate: When I was working at a summer camp, I got passed over for promotion in favor for this guy, who was a complete idiot and had a drinking problem. More than once, he just didn’t show up in the morning because he was passed out from the night before or just hadn’t made it back. So I did his job – and mine – and I thought that would make my manager realize her mistake. It didn’t. He got that job again the following summer, and I learned that it was time I gave myself permission to be a leader – if that was what I wanted. And that he was capable of doing that job, he’d just elected to be drunk instead when I was around to do it for him!

Serena: When I was in University, studying for CS I always thought that getting a job at a big tech corporation was the ultimate dream job. One semester  I interviewed for Microsoft, I got through the first round, and they wanted to fly me down to Seattle. I spent  2 weeks preparing and studying. I went through 5 interviews that day, and was completely exhausted after. A few weeks later I got a phone call from them saying I got the job – yay! I should be excited right? But I wasn’t. I realized that this position wasn’t right for me, and it wasn’t the direction I wanted to steer my career to.

Serena: After 4.5 years of studying CS, I had finally graduated and was looking for full time work. I remember updating my resume one afternoon, and realizing “Wow, I really can’t picture myself being a software developer for the rest of my life and being happy.” I realized that software development wasn’t for me and I felt like a failure because I had just spent years and thousands of dollars studying for a degree for a job I didn’t want.

Different Ways To Leave Your Comfort Zone

Do you “nudge” or do you “leap”? Your comfort zone is like, a space and as you leave it, it gets bigger. We both use two main strategies for expanding our comfort zones.

Serena: Nudging. Continually pushes the boundaries of your comfort zone and so it gradually gets bigger. Taking organized steps forward, to move towards a bigger goal.

Cate: Leaping. A couple of times a year I arrange something, or agree to something, that flings me right out of my comfort zone. And then I figure it out and make it work. For example, I agreed to TA in French. I booked myself into a martial arts academy in China for two months. The downside of this is that at the time I quite frequently feel that I’m having a nervous breakdown, but I always, always know that I’m doing something that will expand my comfort zone.

• Discussion point: what strategies do you use to expand your comfort zone?

Comparing Yourself To Others

If you’re on a team of people, hopefully the people on it will have different strengths and backgrounds. Maybe someone is great at writing database code, another person’s great at UI. Someone might be really good at design.

It’s easy to compare yourself to everyone, and say, I’m not as good at databases at Alice, and Bob is really great at UI code, and Charlie is much better at design work. Alice isn’t as good as Bob at UI code, and Charlie isn’t as good as Alice at databases. You will have your own strength that they admire in you – stop finding yourself short compared to everyone else in every way.

It’s easy to focus on their strengths, but only see your own weaknesses. It’s okay if you’re not the best in absolutely everything. Nobody is.

Cate: one of the things I worry about is that someone else on my team writes more code than me because I’ve been asked to be the glue between two teams, and that means that I spend some of my time on that whilst he can be very focused. But this guy does not communicate that well, at all. I might want his strength – but I definitely don’t want his weaknesses!

Serena: After I switched careers into design, and began working full-time as a “designer” I felt insecure about my design skills because I never had the formal education that others did. But I quickly realized that my background in CS and visual arts, is highly valued in this field.

• Discussion point: what strength do you have that balances out your weakness?

Building Your Superhero Team

It’s really important to have the right people around you – your real-life superheros are your support team.

Your support team provides advice, inspiration (from the cool stuff they are doing), help, and sometimes just someone to listen.

There’s very little that you can meaningfully accomplish alone.

• Discussion point: how has your superhero team helped you accomplish something cool?

Cate: The Awesome Foundation in KW consists of 14 people. 12 trustees, who provide the $1200 that we give away, and 2 deans. One to run the pitch night events and one for the other stuff. And then 6-8 people who come and pitch. That’s 20 people or more plus the people who come and watch, all to increase the amount of awesome in our community by a couple of projects.

Credit: flickr / cogdogblog

In a recent discussion with a colleague, I voiced the opinion that the challenge of creating presentation software is to enable terrible presentations – zooming animations, tiny and unreadable text, endless bullet-points. Helping people create good presentations? That would be easy.

Really, you could do it with some nice, full-screen image viewing software.

He disagreed, arguing that there was no point in having slides at all if there was nothing on them. Mostly, I think, that he wanted to think that he gives good presentations. And he uses slides covered in bullet points.

My main point was that you can give a terrible presentation even with beautiful, minimalist slides. But that people rarely do, and that things about the discipline of minimalist slides, means that more effort goes in, the flow is thought out better, and this typically results in a better presentation.

Between now and then, I saw someone present. And I thought – I need to rethink this view on things, because this guy is giving a good presentation… and he has some of the ugliest slides I’ve ever seen.

But actually, I think this presenter is a good speaker, passionate and knowledgable about their subject, but their presentation itself could use some work. I think that improvements would flow from making more beautiful slides.

1. Structure. When you pare down your slide deck to the minimum, the structure of your talk is more apparent. If you’re making one main point per slide, then it’s easier to see if it’s balanced – you’re won’t have 10 slides for something relatively unimportant. Somehow, it’s easier for 10 bullet points on one slide to slip past…
2. Flow. Does your talk tell a compelling story? Similarly to structure, it’s easier to see this when your content is pared down. Something that is off-topic becomes obvious.
3. Key points. Because my slides are minimal, I think very carefully about any text I put on them. Sometimes it’s helpful. But when you have text-heavy slides already, that really important piece of text gets lost. And, if you read it aloud because it’s so important then it seems like you’ve drifted into reading your terrible slides.
4. Preparation. You can’t get away with putting chunks of your last paper/blog post/whatever into a deck and presenting it if you go minimalist. You have to spend the time to make a beautiful deck. Starting from scratch like that means you need to know what you want to say. Picking the right images takes time and means you need to know what your point is. I confess that sometimes I use slightly random images in my decks, but what I’ve noticed is that people read into them what they want to (e.g. someone thought the penguins in my ignite deck represented conformity).
5. Attention. Everyone knows that when there is text on screen, people read it. When they are reading it, they are not listening to you! You make less sense after a few minutes of distraction than if the audiences attention was on you all along.
6. Tempo. The thing about text on slides, is that the audience can tell when you skip over bits to work with the time available. Presenters even mention that “there are three things here, really, but I’m just going to talk about one”. When each slide is for a main point, rather than a set of bullet points, you have more flexibility in your tempo. I once gave a talk that was scheduled for 45 minutes, but then due to people being late was cut to less than 30. Part way through, they changed it back to 45 (for real, it was chaos). Because each slide was a point or story that I knew well and was passionate to share, it was easier to leave out detail when I thought I had little time, and then add it back in (and more) when the time went back up. Could the audience tell? Probably. But it would have been much harder for me to be flexible and carry this off if everything I planned on saying was right up there on every slide.
7. Translation. Most people don’t present in multiple languages, although if you do, not having to translate all that text is an excellent reason not to have it. But, this also applies to different audiences. I gave fundamentally the same presentation to high school kids and to adults at completely different venues. Both were well received. I kept the structure and the deck the same, whilst changing my wording, emphasis, and the stories I chose to share. By not publicly committing to what you’re going to say, you have the flexibility to be responsive to the audience.

Credit: flickr / Steve Tolcher

The wonderful Serena invited me to join her for a panel at a women/tech conference in October. We’re still working out the details, but essentially we’ll be talking about role models – our own personal superheros. if you will.

Some points that I’m thinking about:

• It’s great to see really successful women in tech, I adored Sheryl Sandberg’s commencement speech and the WSJ had an article about women at Google recently which was encouraging.
• But what about the superheros you know who not only inspire you, but you can call in a crisis?
• What about the superheros who call you in a crisis? I know a lot of awesome people, many of them women. I know all of them have setbacks, periods of doubt. I know all of them have failed. Knowing this, doesn’t make me think they are any less awesome, it makes me appreciate what they achieve all the more.
• There’s always a flip-side. Failure. Weeks living on Cherios. Days with too much wine/vodka (what’s your poison?). Mornings where getting out of bed is just too much. Mostly, we don’t see them – and so being a superhero looks easier than it is.
• Recent talk I gave, someone fabulous gave me quite an introduction. Honestly, I didn’t think I could follow it. She says, “here’s this amazing thing about Cate” and for each one I think about how that was really the result of me screwing up in some way (the flip-side).
• So what’s your super-power? My friend Maggie called it on mine. She said, “I think the main thing you got out of grad school was learning to make the best of a shitty situation”. It’s true, my super-power might be the pursuit of an interesting life. Good things have come as a result of that – and bloody hard work.

Core messages:

• Superheros are everywhere (and, actually, they are human).
• Get to know as many superheros as you can.
• Don’t underestimate yourself – being a superhero doesn’t mean that it’s not hard, or that you won’t fail.

Looking for feedback and ideas. Particularly, I’d love to know:

• Tell me about your superheros. What do they do that makes you think they are extraordinary? In what ways have they struggled? What have you learned from them as a result?
• What’s a key piece of advice you’d like to tell you at 20? (or at any point?) For me: those arrogant boys are not as good as they think they are, and you are doing better than you think.
• What’s your super-power?

Credit: flickr / hfb

Ignite is an intimidating format. 5 minutes is not a bad length of time, but the auto-advance format is very unforgiving. I’d had that topic in mind as an Ignite talk for a while, but it took me a long time to have the courage to actually present it. And by have the courage to present it, I mean… be talked into it by Melle.

I should prefix this preparation list with the fact that I like to feel very prepared. I do some amount of public speaking, but I am still a software engineer so it is a long way from what I do all day! I’m not comfortable standing up in front of ~350 people and the only way for me to do it is to feel like I have done everything I can to not screw it up.

Picking a Topic

I think all good talks can be summarized by a sentence, and that sentence should contain the core message. 5 minutes or 45 minutes, that sentence is the string that holds it together coherently. This is particularly true of an Ignite talk. The format is unforgiving if you stumble or lose your place, but even more so if you don’t have a strong message. I’ve seen many Ignite talks that tried to pack in too much, but I don’t think ever one that put in too little.

I actually found my topic playing with a humorous intro for another talk I gave (Art, Life and Programming for Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa). I’ve cut the standard intro of “I’m Cate, I work on X, and I’m going to talk to you about Y” and instead try to weave that into the introduction (I’m pleased with how that worked out in Software Engineering for Superheros). And so I started my talk by telling the story of the guy who didn’t believe I was in CompSci, and used this to illustrate the point that programmers don’t just have an image problem – we have a communication problem. There was enough there, and people laughed enough, that I thought I could make it into an Ignite talk.

My topic in one sentence: Humans and engineers are different, and often the two groups fail to communicate.

Choosing a Title

I think there’s a lot of good advice on writing headlines, all of which applies here. I was terrified to go first, but I was also lucky to – because that is quite possibly the most engaged the audience will be. I’ve noticed at these events that I can’t process the amount of information, so diverse and so fast. At the last Ignite I was extremely jet-lagged and so don’t remember large chunks of it. Your title is the first opportunity you have to wake up the audience and remind them that this talk was one they wanted to listen to. It’s important to remember that the audience comes from every kind of background, and they don’t have the same frame of reference. So keep it accessible.

Deciding What to Say

You can opt to time your talk to your deck, like, the slide with the X means start talking about Y. This might be easier to remember, but is much tighter because you’re working within 15 second exact chunks, rather than the larger 5 minutes. Or, you can have your content and have the slides follow, illustrating your points rather than giving you points to talk to. This is more forgiving, and I think flows better. I’ve noticed that the other way often has an effect of making the timings seem contrived.

So, I opted for the second way. I wrote out what I thought would be in my talk, and then read it aloud. It came to about 3 minutes 30 seconds. I was reading aloud to my boyfriend, so he commented where he thought I should be adding stuff, so I followed his suggestions, read out loud again, and came in at 4 minutes 50-ish.

I think it’s important to have less and add rather than have too much and cut. Two reasons for this – not every topic is right for an Ignite talk. Having too much may be a sign that the topic is too broad. Second, I think you will get better flow by taking your core point and then adding in things that work than by having lots of important points and culling.

I read it aloud again to see that my time was consistent, and then again two more times. My (long suffering boyfriend, who heard this talk more than any person should) put in *’s every 15 seconds (you can see this in the slides and commentary). We went through again to check that that was consistent too.

Preparing the Deck

Then I added images that worked with where I was at each *. I tried to keep them general, and beautiful to look at. When I couldn’t think of what would work, I went looking for pictures of penguins. Someone said afterwards that she thought the penguins represented conformity. Unfortunately, I’m not that deep. I just like penguins! There is an Alec Baldwin meme at Ignite Waterloo, which I have never really got – probably because I missed the first Ignite and don’t really know who he is. It makes everyone laugh, but I wasn’t going to introduce anything into my deck that didn’t fit or make sense. So, I tried to make penguins the new Baldwin.

For one slide (the xkcd tech support one), I put it twice on consecutive slides, because I thought it might take longer than 15 seconds for people to process it, and it fitted what I was talking about for that 30 second bit well.

Then I set the slides up to auto-advance on the computer connected to the TV whilst I read from the text on my laptop. We were checking timings and that the content flowed with the slides. I had to adjust my timing a bit, but once we were happy I sent off my deck.

That was probably when I accepted it was really happening. Eep!

Practise, Practise, Practise

My practise set-up was as follows: slides auto-advancing on the TV, and text in Google Docs on my iPad. I was standing up (something they encouraged us to do in Extreme Blue). I just kept going through it over and over again (with my poor boyfriend watching and looking at the flow). I tried to use my iPad less and less, as a safety net, and eventually put it down and went through without.

I focused on timing, and remembering what I was saying. Normally I don’t memorize talks, I have talking points that I’m passionate about. But I think for short talks you have to memorize (this was a key thing we learned about presenting in Extreme Blue).

The content changed because I wanted it to sound natural, you don’t talk like you write. I had the word “ascertain” in my text, which I never say in conversation. So that sentence changed to use “ask” instead.

Having learned the timing, I was able to adjust my pace, adding pauses or an extra couple of words depending on whether I was on, or under time. I talk quite fast in general, and the pauses wouldn’t coincide with a slide change, so I hoped this would seem natural.

The day off, I was doing a last run through and my boyfriend noticed that I’d cut a sentence. Probably it had happened a while before, but neither of us had noticed until then. I left it out, figuring that often if you don’t remember it, it’s probably because it doesn’t flow.

On the Day

I did a couple of last run-throughs before leaving, and made sure I was happy with my outfit. I picked flat shoes – it’s important to be comfortable on stage and I didn’t want to be fidgeting.

We did not leave early enough! Did not realize how far away the venue was, and ran into roadworks and the car started acting up a bit. I was freaking out! But luckily they started a couple of minutes late and I was just in time, with not too much time to get nervous. I was perched on the edge of a chair, shaking, when my friend comes up behind me and touched me on the back saying, “nervous?”. I jumped and yelped.

I also had not realized that there would be a physical microphone. Thankfully we’d used them last summer and so I remembered. It was weird trying to get it the right distance from my mouth as I started off, but once I had that figured out it was OK, I hope. They called me up, and I hit spacebar and went for it.

After

Physically shaking, I went straight to the bar and said “I need liquor”. They said “what kind” and I said, “liquor!”. Eventually I walked away with a vodka and orange which reduced the physical shaking a little. I am ashamed to admit that I do not remember much of the people who followed me as I was still so strung out.

Then I checked the twitter feed and saw that people were saying nice things about and to me. I tried to reply to everyone who has used my handle thanking them for their nice comments. And I enjoyed the second half, at least! People were really, really kind. The audience is so supportive and they want you to rock it, which really helps.

There wasn’t much food there (food has to be done by the venue for bigger venues, which is annoying) and so we stopped off on the way home and I had some milkshake. Milkshake is pretty much my crisis strategy.

What I didn’t expect: I slept for about 10 hours the night following. Probably the result of being so strung out. I was also very socially exhausted and ended up working from home in the afternoon because I was getting very stressed being around people. I’m not particularly extroverted, so allowing for some anti-social space afterwards was very necessary!

Overall

I spent a lot of time preparing. Most of a Sunday on the slide deck and content, and then probably 6 hours of practise. The format is just as tough as I thought, but following the strategy outlined above made it manageable.

But, three people tweeted they were going to encourage their daughters to be software engineers. Which makes it all worthwhile!

Challenging, but a good challenge. I’m glad I did it.

I was talking to one of our facilities people recently, about someone behaving a little… strangely. And she said, “they’re an engineer”. To which I replied: “I’m an engineer!”. She responded, “Oh,*but you shouldn’t be”.

Take the Quiz: http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/

Actually, I really love my job and so I’m pretty sure that it’s exactly what I should be doing. But, I have noticed something, where if an software engineer seems, y’know, normal, and well-dressed* and functions socially then people are surprised, or even skeptical of their profession.

Credit: flickr / g.naharro

Back when I was a student in Edinburgh, I went to a ceilidh. And I met a guy. And he asked me out on a date. Sure*.

Credit: flickr / papadont

And then ascertained from my roommate that I was single (apparently me agreeing wasn’t enough, but as it turned out him asking me out didn’t imply he was single, so fair enough). And then, he starts getting to know me. So he asks what I’m studying* – extremely normal, student, conversation – right?

Credit: flickr / Brian Hathcock

So by 3rd year I’ve finally accepted that I am not meant to be a chemist – mostly due to the sheer volume of equipment I was smashing. And so I say, CompSci.* And he says, “I don’t believe you”.

Credit: flickr / lin padgham

And then – you can tell we were both drunk at this point right? I mean, it was in Scotland – argue about this. And I’m all, if I was going to lie about it I’d pick something better. Like, “I’m in an elite program* that feeds into MI5. We take core courses in math and languages, and then weapons and advanced driving. I’m specializing in sword-fighting and snowmobiles.”

Credit: flickr / eskimo_jo

In the end, it probably would have been easier to convince him I was training to be a female James Bond than a CompSci student*. He just kept saying, “I don’t believe you. You’re too normal”. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out. And now I live in Canada.

Credit: SmugMug Pro / jfiddler

And honestly, I wasn’t that offended. Not so long before that I’d been dating another CompSci who had used to tell women he met in bars* he was studying “social anthropology”.

Credit: flickr / cypher23

I told this story in introduction for another talk I gave last summer, and afterwards my friend came up to me and said, “Cate, how did you KNOW?” – *she’d been telling people she was an English lit major.

Credit: flickr / Dawn Endico

Some engineers, even ones who have girlfriends, have taken offence, and they say “I don’t have to lie to get dates”. In this town, I can believe it.*

Credit: Mattel / http://shop.mattel.com/product/index.jsp?productId=4032107

But here’s the thing – engineers, we have an image problem. And maybe this is why in the US more parents encourage their daughters to be actresses than software engineers, a fact that horrifies and terrifies me.

But we also have a communication problem. We don’t *communicate the value we bring and what we do well. And we don’t listen well enough to what users want.

Credit: flickr / Michael Simmons

I was trying to explain to someone what I do. I was like, “you know, if you have an iPhone? And you get your GMail in safari? That’s what I work on.”*

Credit: flickr / curiouslee

And she said, “Oh, you work for the internet”.

Which is not really that accurate, but would be a pretty awesome job title, right? “Hi, I’m Cate. I work for the internet”. I guess Vint Cerf can really say that.*

Credit: xkcd

Meanwhile, my mom calls me because she can’t get Facebook to work, or her Windows machine to connect to a network, or some kind of question that I know nothing about, because I don’t use Windows and barely use Facebook. Last time I was there she complained is that my sister’s trainee-accountant boyfriend *gives better tech-support than I do. Which caused me to exclaim, “this is like asking a brain surgeon why your cat is shedding hair!”

Credit: flickr / Martha de Jong-Lantink

What’s the point of all this? I think if we could communicate better, then engineers would have to lie less to get dates,* but also humans would get better products.

Credit: Geek and Poke

Clearly, I don’t have the communication figured out. But I do know that we need to listen better, and ask more questions.

Engineers need to realize that humans don’t care about the things that we do. They mostly care *about getting what they want to do done, not how, or in what language, or requiring how much RAM.

Credit: Geek and Poke

Humans, writing code is not the same as using software. I literally spend all day every day using only Chrome, XCode, and an emulator. If you have a problem in an application running on Windows,* it’s extremely unlikely I know what that is. The big difference, I think, between engineers and humans when a computer is “not working” is that the engineer isn’t afraid.

(slide which only contains the words “DON’T PANIC”)

But the human shouldn’t be either, and if they are – that’s something that* engineers need to fix.

And finally, please tell your daughter to think about being an engineer. It’s awesome, and I think we need a more representative selection of humanity building our software, changing the world, and connecting, enabling and supporting humans*, to do whatever it is, they want to do.

Today, I want to talk to you about world changing. I get very excited about world changing. I’m going to take it from three angles – art, data, and people.

I’m going to try and convince you, that if you’re an idealist – if you used to daydream (or still do) about being a superhero then being a software engineer is one way to achieve that. I’m going to try and explain why I love what I do so much. One of my mentors described me as a “social animal” – this is ridiculous because we’re human – we’re all social animals. I guess software engineers are often the glaring, anti-social exception to the rule.

But, I love people. Particularly, I love connecting people. At the moment I’m involved in Girl Geek Dinners in KW, which is about connecting women in tech to one another, and Awesome Foundation KW, which is about connecting people with awesome ideas to amazing people who love their idea and will give them money and help them make it reality. By day, I work on mobile social. We want to connect people, you, to who and what and where will be interesting.

I moved in the fall, and I found out what was going on and met people via Twitter but it’s still not easy, and there are a lot of ways that we can do better at enabling real-world experience through software. What does this have to do with world-changing? It turns out that when you connect people in new ways, they make new, incredible things happen. Data might be the most promising tool to address some of the biggest challenges humanity faces. New kinds of technology has meant new means of creating art, and in fact, that art can be a helpful tool in telling both of these stories.

Art

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Movies have long pushed the boundaries of what is technically possible. I love that video because I think it’s a lighting view of how technology has progressed over the last 100 years.

I watch it, and it makes me excited for what happens next.

What does this mean for world-changing? Second Life is an online virtual world – what if it could help people who are disabled experience things they otherwise couldn’t?

Credit: postsecret

Postsecret is an online, collaborative art project. People send in their secrets on post-cards, and a blog-post collecting some is published each week.

I look forward to it each week – sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, always thought-provoking.

But, more than being an art project – a postcard someone sent in prompted a campaign against suicide on the San Francisco Bay Bridge [video]. A Facebook fan page titled “please don’t jump” was created, and gathered over 6000 fans. People gathered on the bridge to release balloons and leave flowers and messages of hope. In fact, one of the people there missed the group, but ended up talking someone down from the ledge.

An art project – hosted on Blogger – but because of the way communities can connect online, it became a movement for hope, for those who need it.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

This is one of my absolute favorite projects, I saw it live for the first time in New York in the fall and I was completely taken with it – it’s actually interactive. To me it represents the intersection of art, and programming – which is why I love it so much. But it also shows us the stories we can tell using visualization.

Data

There is a mind-blowing TED talk by Hans Rosling. It’s literally called “Hans Rosling shows you the best stats you’ve ever seen“. It’s amazing. I’m going to show you a shorter, but equally mind-blowing talk.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The graph he’s using gives a fourth dimension to the data, because the movement shows the passing of time. The animation helps him tell a compelling story.

Credit: flickr / catspyjamasnz

There’s more information put online every day, than you can hope to read in your lifetime. And so we talk about the data deluge, and filter failure. Data is also an opportunity. Google used the sheer volume of data available for crunching to improve machine translation.

Mapping the Human Diseasome

Mapping the Human ‘Diseasome’, an interactive graphic – see it at the New York Times.

There was a lot of data that we had, but with no sensible means of making sense of it, what was the point of collecting it? Now – I think data crunching on a huge scale will be the biggest source of improvements in healthcare over the course of the next century.

People

I was trying to explain to someone non-technical what I did recently, and it wasn’t going well. Eventually, she said, “oh – you work for the internet”.

I didn’t know what to say to that, and then we started running these chrome ads. Every one so far has made me cry. They make me think, yes, I do work for the internet.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

We can talk about “the Facebook Revolution” – it’s exciting. It’s important. But every day there are small but significant things, where people are using the internet to connect and help each other.

Like Kiva. Kiva is a site for micro-lending, it allows users to make loans to people in developing countries so that they can grow their business and hopefully lift themselves out of poverty. Many people prefer to loan to women, because they use the money to support their families with education, healthcare etc.

It’s not a one-to-one relationship. Loans are split into $25 chunks and a number of different people contribute to make up the loan amount.

Credit: flickr / victoriapeckham

Recently a British footballer had an… interlude with a Big Brother housemate. Why am I telling you this? Despite watching Keeping up with the Kardashians in times of stress, it’s not the kind of thing I’m normally interested in.

But this footballer wanted to keep this a secret, as you would – right? Big Brother housemates do tend to be rather… odd. So he took out something called a “super-injunction” to stop news outlets publishing the story. Thing is, everyone knows who he is because this snippet of gossip has been tweeted by 75,000 people.

Do we really need these details of celebrities lives to be public? No. But the world has changed, and everyone can be a publisher now, even if they limit themselves to 140 characters or less. And this changes the rules of the game. It’s hard to have the same threat over so many people (and you don’t even know who they are!) as you can over a finite number of news outlets. The old system of trading favors and coercion doesn’t scale. The US government was playing whackamole trying to shut down wikileaks. Wikileaks just made it easy for people to mirror the site. There’s a fascinating book called Bloggers on the Bus (Amazon) which is all about how bloggers changed the last US presidential election. In the UK, MPs expenses were investigated by crowd-sourcing.

Everyone has the option to be a media outlet now. An unimaginable number of people are taking it. Software, like Blogger and WordPress make it really easy.

Ultimately…

Technology is  like any other tool. You can use a hammer to build a house, or you can use it to attack someone, similarly you can use the tools available for good – or for evil.

We can cheer each other with lolcats, or we can torment with rickrolling.

The internet can be the ultimate procrastination tool. Wikipedia and Google Docs can make you more effective at studying. Endless videos of cats and social networking can mean nothing gets done.

A group of unconnected strangers can fund a business in a developing country and help someone lift themselves out of poverty. But teenagers (and non-teenagers) can find new ways to torment each other using social media.

It’s possible to start a revolution online, now. But it’s also possible for governments to invade people’s privacy and watch them like never before.

I’m hoping you’ll leave here with knowledge of some new superpowers today. Ultimately, it’s up to you what you do with them.

I hope, though, that you won’t be evil.

To start with, I looked at the social network that emerges when we look at the people on the list.

Future of the News Network

This network is pretty densely connected, with the exception of two users on the list. You can see their nodes floating away in the image below:

Future of the News Network - Outliers

The network graph that emerges from all the tweets connected is really busy, but may show who the most engaged users are.

Future of the News Network - Full

There’s just too much information here, so I started filtering it by eliminating nodes that had fewer than a specified minimum number of connections. Because of the dataset available, non-news-influencer nodes cannot be connected to each other. Thus, I was specifying how many influencers needed to mention a user for them to make it into the graph.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 2

Setting the minimum to two dramatically reduces the size of the graph. Many of the nodes remaining are also well known, for example @jack and @alyssa_milano.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 3

We can also see popular websites, like @techcrunch and @boingboing as well as @google (not surprising given how often google showed up in the earlier visualizations of tweet content.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 4

Future of the News Network - Minimum 5

Future of the News Network - Minimum 6

Future of the News Network - Minimum 7

Future of the News Network - Minimum 8

Future of the News Network - Minimum 9

Future of the News Network - Minimum 10

I find the graphs for minimum 8+ fascinating – I think they start to show who influences the influencers.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 11

Eventually, of course, we get back to our original graph.