I went north up to Euston to Facebook London to hear Mike Perrow and Kent Beck talk about building products.
Mike kicked things off, talking about building and shipping Workplace. The most interesting part was using the War room model when they launched.
The main talk was Kent Beck. Talking about 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract. Covering the shifting risk profile of software product development as products mature.
Looking back over the last year
For this Rails Girls London I wanted to talk about not needing to be an expert to solve real world problems.
Entrepreneurs and startups seem to be our new heroes but most of the people you read about are male. This is especially true of CEO’s and other senior managers. Much better informed people than me have written about why this is a problem and how we can go about fixing it.
I thought it would be worth highlighting one of the women in a senior position that have inspired me, Thayer Prime, who beside having just the best name, is currently CEO and founder of Team Prime and Primed.is.
She started in technology as a developer but moved on to running multiple successful startups, helped many well-known company’s and organisations. In addition to all that she has also run a wonderful conference, some very enjoyable christmas parties and mentored people new to the London tech scene. She managed to find the time to ran a marathon.
One of the biggest thing that continues to inspire me, is the way she does business differently, giving to charity via her company, not working all hours, spending time with her family. More people should follow her example
In my day job one of things I spent a lot of time on is recruitment. So when I was asked if I wanted to talk at Rail Girls London 7, something around hiring was the natural choice.
I was very lucky and got to do many interesting things over the year.
Read More about Looking back at 2015
This is my lighting talk from Rails Girls London #6
This is my lighting talk from Rails Girls London #5
MOOC‘s have been a good development for me. Not convinced they’ll be a revolution in education as you still need access to broadband, a computer and free chunks of time but they have provided a good way for me to study.
I started off playing it safe with subjects close to my day job, Android development, image and video processing, before branching out into machine learning and started learning about data science type things.
Going to conferences seems to have been one of my big themes for the year: Codefest London #1, London Lean Kanban Day 2014 (already signed up for 2015), PrimeConf (one of the highlights of my year), A nice tparty event (nothing to do with right wing politics) in the Oxo Tower, Dots, DareConf (which was a bit of a wildcard for me but turned out to be an amazing experience, if you get the chance to go, do), Playful 2014 (this was my second year. the highlight was playing Gang Beasts, multiplayer chaos which reminds me of Bomberman (Dynablaster Revenge is a good version for Windows)), Meaning 2014 (Mark Stevenson opening talk and Iain Chambers’ story of Exeter Street Hall are both worth a watch, if I had to pick only two). I found the great Agile Practitioners meetup, after a tipoff from someone at DareConf.
I didn’t just turn up to other people events: I was part of the group who presented to the head of Microsoft UK, Michel Van der Bel (and the head of the civil service, Sir Bob Kerslake who was shadowing him that day)
Gt day shadowing Michel Van der Bel, MD Microsoft UK. Picture here meeting GLEAM, the excellent LBGT gp in Microsoft. pic.twitter.com/m8WzWNfb1M
— Bob Kerslake (@SirBobKerslake) May 22, 2014
Ended up stepping in to facilitate May’s Procedural Audio Now meetup (which reminded me of how much I missed working on BathCamp and the ideals and interesting people). Talked about Gender and User Experience (and did lots of background reading)
Getting the feedback that a number of companies had changed their approach because of the event is properly what I’m most proud of having helped with in 2014.
This led to being a mentor at Rails Girl London (and having to learn rails quite quickly) and a judge at the first DigiGirlz London event (all the 10-12 year old were scary good).
It wasn’t all work. I went to my first sci-fi convention, Nine Worlds (which was great but a little overwhelming), A very posh works Christmas party at the Banking Hall, another party at the very fun Loading Bar (and being reintroduced to how much fun Micro Machines on the SNES is multiplayer) and rounded off with my first #techsmas.
Roll on 2015
I’m on the panel for the Skype/Intertech ‘Hey girl, let’s talk about UX and Gender‘ event today. I thought it would good to do a little link dump of my background reading.
Gender
Much more complex than a simple binary. Schemas for the Real World by Carina C. Zona is a good overview, the TL:DR option.
More from Sarah Mei on ‘Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora‘. If you want to delve more into gender and what it means for you, Kate Bornstein‘s (Speaking at the 40th Reunion of the Class of ’69, Brown University, some NSFW language but really worth a watch) My Gender Workbook is not a bad place to start. Finally these hello pronouns stickers, mostly because they are cool way of making people think about gender.
“Real names”
Mark Zuckerberg said “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.“, as a counterpoint, here’s a list of people harmed by a “Real Names” policy.
Danah Boyd talked about “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power. Patrick McKenzie on falsehoods Programmers believe about names and some real world examples:
Trans People
Trans 101 for those unfamiliar with trans issues.
How Video Games helped one woman go from boy to girl. Dys4ia is an autobiographical video game that Anna Anthropy, developed to recount her experiences of gender identity disorder and hormone replacement therapy. Juliet Jacques on the “dispute” between radical feminism and trans people, her transition diary is also a worthwhile read. Fred McConnell has written about things from a trans man perspective. For people who want to read more, I liked Julia Serano‘s book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Her (NSFW) spoken word piece ‘Cocky‘ is another video for your playlist). Ending with an interesting looking at how Transgender People can explain why Women don’t advance at Work.
Privilege
Opening a can of worms. A good clear look at the often conflated terms positive discrimination, quotas, and diversity targets. An open letter to Brogrammers detailing just a few on the important Women in the history of computer science, Ada Lovelace day has many more. John Scalzi has one of my favorite explanation, Straight White Male: The lowest difficulty setting there is.
Games
As an ex-games developer and current games player, even with a nearly equal number of female gamers, both the industry and culture have a long way to go on diversity, even if some games are doing interesting things with gender and presentation and just being more inclusive.
Picking two examples: The harassment around the Feminist Frequency Kickstarter (Disclosure, that is something I backed). Then recently the equally as nasty events around GamersGate.
I just want to end on HeForShe and Emma Watson’s speech to the UN.
Anyway the hashtag for the event is #UXGender.
