DEV Community: Sarah Withee

Nevertheless, Sarah Coded

Sarah Withee — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 05:00:00 +0000

From the #ItWasNeverADress campaign

Happy International Women’s Day! This is a part of Dev.to’s trend of yearly “Nevertheless, She Coded” posts.

My biggest technical achievements are…

On a professional level, I’m proud of getting to a point in my career where I’ve been known to be a great problem solver. I’ve had many coworkers that say I’m great at being thrown into problems and not just coding up solutions but finding creative ways to solve the problems. I also have a lot of past teammates, and even managers, that have said they’ve learned a lot after working with me. I’m pretty humbled to know that there’s a lot of people out there that would gladly work with me again (and have even tried to drag me to their jobs with them)!

On a personal level, I’m incredibly proud of Code Thesaurus! It’s been an idea of mine that I honestly hoped someone else had made somewhere. After not finding it, I finally worked on it myself. It took several years to get myself to work on it, but now that it’s alive and well, it’s been amazing to see the overwhelmingly positive feedback come from it!

I pledge to break the bias in tech by…

I try to not only shine as brightly as I can in the tech industry, but try to help other women I meet along the way shine too. I think when people look at women and assume they’re not technical or can’t work at the same level as the men in the same settings, they’re missing out on the creativity, intelligence, and empathy that their products and teams can have. It’s not always easy to try to do this, but by continuing to try to show this, either through my own work or by highlighting other women’s work, it’s really bettering the tech industry as a whole.

Throughout my career (as a software developer, in tech, etc), I have overcome…

I have overcome a lot of bias in my jobs, in job interviews, as a conference speaker, and probably other areas. I’m reminded of some jobs where senior level developers were surprised to learn things from my junior level self, or where I had to fight to have my great ideas listened to. I’m reminded of job interviews where they assume I really should be a teacher instead of a developer because I teach and mentor alongside my jobs. I’m reminded of conferences where I walk in the door and people are shocked that I was the one that gave the most popular technical talk at the event.

I also realize I’ve overcome a lot of bad team cultures and a lot of burnout as well. It’s easy to go into a job all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but it’s hard to stay there when the stress piles up, when managers don’t listen to you calling out problems, when you get in trouble for missing deadlines that are a result of other people not delivering. It’s exhausting. I have no wise words to get around this aside from just keep pushing on and maybe you’ll come across a better place where this isn’t the case.

Advocating for myself looks like…

Advocating for myself is hard to describe sometimes. It sometimes means responding to the men in the room that say the idea in the meeting you already said with “Wow, I’m glad you liked my idea!” It sometimes means taking mental health days from work because it’s too much. It sometimes means having backchannel conversations with all of the other women in tech you know to ensure the situation you’re in is real and you’re not overreacting to something. It sometimes means quitting a job before a new one is fully lined up because you can’t deal with the toxicity of your job anymore.

I pledge to support women, non-binary folks, and other minorities in tech by…

I will continue to support the underestimated people in tech by offering my advice for free to them. I’ll continue to mentor them when I can. I’ll continue to offer free resume reviews. I’ll continue to help them polish and refine their conference talk proposals (even if it means we’re fighting for the same spots at an event). I’ll continue to mentor the middle and high school students by teaching programming and robotics. I’ll continue to be a part of every industry leader panel I can be a part of for high schoolers, bootcamp students, university students, or whatever. I’ll continue to follow, retweet, and boost other underestimated people in tech on Twitter with whatever platform I have at the time. And I’ll continue to donate money to related non-profits to help them succeed.

I’m excited about…

I’m excited to see the all-girls robotics competition team I mentor continue to get great media coverage, and hopefully win more awards this year.

I’m excited to see how Code Thesaurus has grown by the end of this year.

I’m excited to see how the women I’ve mentored in the past week get over the career hurdles they’re currently at.

I’m excited to see how I grow and evolve at my current job, and to see where I might go (whether as a developer, moving to management/leadership, or what new projects I land on).

I’m excited to see what the next events or conferences I’ll be able to keynote are.

I’m excited to see what other random things pop up in my life, and on a whim I decide to go with it, and see how it continues to help me be a badass in the tech space!

The Most Important Things I’ve Learned About Software Management from My Developer Career So Far

Sarah Withee — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 04:00:00 +0000

Photo by WOTinTechChat.com.

I started my first programming-related job in 2005. Since then, I’ve had 13 managers across 10 teams (not including any contract work). It’s a lot. I’ve definitely had a variety of amazing, wonderful managers I’d drop a job in a heartbeat and go work for. I also have had managers I quite frankly hope I don’t run into again. Through these experiences, I’ve learned a lot about what I think makes up great management, both in terms of how a team can be managed and traits I believe a great manager has.

I’ve taken a lot of my experiences and tried to boil them down into 15 points. (For the sake of not calling out any manager or any company, I am anonymizing any specifics that may come up. I’ll refer to all jobs, including my present one, as a past job for the sake of this article.)

1. Managers should be “employee advocates”, not “task pushers”

Before I got into tech, the managers I had for food or retail jobs were people who told you what to do next. There were lists of stuff to do, and they assigned you a thing to do.

The best managers I’ve run into in tech have been the opposite. They’ve set up an environment that self-selects into tasks. The manager then becomes the person that does whatever they can to help you succeed. If you’re stopped by a production issue, by another team delaying something you need, or by unclear expectations of what to do, the manager should be the one that can spend the time clearing up those delays so that you can get back to work. They also work with you to reduce anything that’s delaying your productivity.

This is why I call them “employee advocates.” They’re there to help me succeed on my tasks, not boss me around with what tasks to do or how to do them.

2. Managers should be good at organizing projects/tasks/etc., but more importantly better at organizing people

I remember one time when a manager mentioned something about a disagreement with a coworker in my 1:1 with them. They had noticed that we were really getting on each other’s nerves, which was really disrupting us both. We talked about it, and I felt better after that meeting knowing what I could say to my coworker to maybe reduce our stress. We went for a walk, talked it out, and in the end, we actually became friends after we weren’t on the team anymore.

I’ve also had one team where, after not really clicking with a coworker and mentioning this to my manager, realized they probably had no clue, and in fact seemed thrown off at me mentioning this. In fact, they thought this person was not just smart but extremely cooperative. I learned later from other coworkers that they felt about the same as I did.

I think it takes a particularly keen sense of understanding people to be a great manager. There are lots of dynamics at play among people on a team, and it’s not always going to go great. However, I think a great manager can help reduce (if not eliminate) those tension points and at least keep the team in a good working flow.

3. 1:1s are vital, should happen frequently and regularly, and are about you the person

One-on-ones (1:1s) are just meetings between you and your manager. I think they’re important because they can fill them in on the things they can’t see that are happening, but also fill you in on what’s happening that you can’t see. I think they should happen frequently (at least once a week or every other week) and regularly (if they have to get cancelled, reschedule them, and don’t skip more than 1). I think aiming for a one-hour time block is good, but it’s ok if they end early.

One of my favorite questions a former manager always asked as the first thing in our meetings was “What’s your stress level?” I think this is a great example of what a 1:1 should be: about you, the human person. 1:1s should never be about project or task work. Why? Because literally every other meeting is about project or task work. This meeting is about you. How are you feeling? How are you handling the workload? How are things in life going? How are you getting along with your coworkers? What is going really well right now? What could use improvement right now?

Heck, I even had one manager that always ended 1:1s with “What can I be doing right now to help you succeed more?” I often felt he was doing great, but once in a while I had a suggestion, and he truly seemed grateful to work on that. I keep that idea with me as a great question to ask people even outside of work.

4. You should always get more out of your 1:1s than your manager

Again, these are meetings for you, the human. If your 1:1 is a project check-in, the manager is doing these wrong. Your manager has standups, retros, planning meetings, collaboration meetings, meetings with product owners, and more to get important updates. This meeting is for you.

What should you get out of it? I like the model one particular manager used:

What is going well for you right now?
What could use some improvement for you right now?
What am I (manager) doing well right now?
What can I (manager) do to improve right now?
What can I (manager) help do to help you succeed/reduce impediments?

While these could be work related (ex: “My tasks on Project A are going really well right now”), I also think they can be outside of work too (ex: “I just got accepted to speak at a conference and I’m excited!”). I like this framework because it’s focused on the manager being that “employee advocate” (remember point 1?).

If you’re not getting anything out of these meetings, it’s probably a project update meeting and not a 1:1.

5. The career ladder shouldn’t assume you go from an individual contributor to management

I had a manager once mention to me in our first 1:1 that they wanted to do check-ins, but also think long term about my goals. This could be company-specific, but also just career-specific. He was even upfront… he said if this meant a skill I wanted to develop that I could take with me even after that job, it was still important. And this is a great thing to ask those you manage.

But he said “if you wanted to just stay a developer, or whether you wanted to keep going into management, I’m here to help you think through that.” And WHOA… I was thrown off. I didn’t really want to go into management (at least at the time).

But one thing I realized after a bit is that the career ladder for growing as a contributor (developer, designer, etc.) is NOT the same ladder as management. They’re not even tied together. They are entirely separate ladders. I’ve seen developers get promoted to become managers and just plain suck at it. Remember earlier when I said how important it is to organize people? Some people seem clueless about how the other people think and work, and don’t seem to have a strong awareness of those people dynamics. This assumption is very bad, and I think it’s important for managers as well as team members to realize.

6. Psychological safety is extremely important

I worked at a place once where I got to try out teams before choosing a permanent one. It really was a cool idea! But one thing that came up for me was on my third team, I needed my laptop to be a very specific configuration, one that my machine didn’t have from the past two teams. I had an issue come up one day, and asked my coworker. He had been there too long and didn’t remember how to set up something and told me to go ask the most senior person on the team. I went to ask them about my problem, and he just laughed at me. “Why would you set it up like that?” This shook me from that day forward.

Psychological safety is an idea that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up at work, whether it’s about ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

Unfortunately, as you saw above, I’ve been on some teams that broke that safety for me. I’d be judged on the code I wrote, I’d be judged on the questions I’d ask, I’d be shot down on good ideas I had (or worse, shot down and others took them and they were then good ideas), and more. It not only ruins my feeling of safety on the team, but it harms my work and my productivity. It’s an extremely strong red flag for me and often leads to me starting to look for a new job.

I think managers can help foster teams that have psychological safety, and if they see something hindering it, or if it comes up in a 1:1, they have the power to stop it. It comes with the people organizing, and might be one of the most powerful things they can help do to help guide how a team works with each other.

7. The manager can really help foster (or destroy) a team culture

Early advice I got for interviewing often told me to ask interviewers (often managers) about the tech stack or version control or other more technical things. Nowadays I never ask those types of questions. I ask all interviewers about team culture. It plays a much larger part in how well I function on a team than the specific tech things I have to use.

I’ve watched teams go from a shiny, happy, cooperative team to a dysfunctional mess because of management’s meddling. While psychological safety plays a large part, I think a manager can also help make standups fun with silly traditions, encourage group outings (if you’re in-office anyway), and tell silly jokes. Why should a team be all serious, all the time? Some of my favorite teams of all times played pranks on each other, and even one of my managers was the biggest prankster of all of them. Encourage this! (Don’t worry, I epically pranked him several times as well.)

8. Managers need to always be clear on their expectations of work, contributions, team leadership, and more

I remember one project I was working on where my manager laid out the architecture of the project, laid out all of the cloud services it would use, laid out what I’d work on as well as everyone else, and for nearly all of the first half of this thing was at all meetings and led it all. They trailed off due to getting busy, and I picked up the slack on coordinating things with the other people involved and eventually guided the project to its end. At the end of the year, it was revealed to me that the leadership I showed during the second half was their expectation. This wasn’t pointed out in the beginning, and in fact seemed almost the exact opposite in the beginning. This almost cost me a bonus because my yearly review didn’t turn out as I expected because of this.

I get sometimes team dynamics and project dynamics shift rather quickly with regards to who is doing what and who is leading up some or all of the effort. However, if there’s an expectation of something, it needs to be very clearly laid out. This goes along with that employee advocate thing. Your manager isn’t working with you and working to help you succeed if they cannot lay out the expectations of your tasks, a project, how you’ll coordinate things with other teams, or more. I may need to ask expectations of smaller things, but large-scale expectations should be provided by the manager.

9. Yearly reviews should be absolutely no surprise and should be low stress

One manager told me this advice once. Sure enough, I was nervous when year-end review season came. I filled out my form, sent it in, he sent in his changes, then we met to go over it. The only thing that surprised me? He ranked me the same way I ranked myself (both positive and negative), but he ranked me higher on some things than I did. I had no real reason to be nervous!

If you have that great relationship with your manager, if your 1:1s are focused on you (the human), and if your manager is advocating for you and working to help you succeed, there’s no reason your yearly review should be a shocker. There’s also no reason it should be high stress. Those expectations from point 8 should be clear enough that also aids in making reviews a low-key thing.

Similarly, if things are going bad, then hopefully your 1:1s are a time to dive into that. Find out what’s causing it. Your manager should be advocating to fix what’s holding you back, telling (maybe even forcing) you to take vacation, helping reduce team stressors, and more. The company shouldn’t ever surprise you with warnings about your performance being bad.

10. If you have meetings with your team, they should get something out of it.

Of course all teams have standups, right? Where you meet in a room and everyone stands while they give their status updates about what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today, and what’s impeding their work. Right?

But what happens if your team is so big that there’s so many pieces going on that standups become overwhelmingly useless? Or so small that everyone’s stretched thin on their own things and it’s still useless? I’ve been a part of both and honestly it always feels like a waste of my (and my team’s) time.

At that point, your standups aren’t there for team’s benefit anymore. They’re now manager check-in meetings. If this happens, then there’s no real point to them. Give everyone 15 minutes back of their time and have them post updates on Slack or whatever and the manager can read at their leisure.

Ideally, meetings with your team should benefit the whole team. If they don’t, don’t include everyone. Especially if there tends to be a lot of them.

11. Your manager should be a buffer between developers/ICs and upper management

One of the things I’ve learned is that once you jump over to management world, there’s a lot of politics. It kind of comes with the territory I suppose. One manager told me once that they thought a good manager keeps upper management politics out of the way of individual contributors. It lets them focus on the work that needs to be done, and the manager can pass down any information that the person might need to know.

Though I’ve also had some managers that have done a bad job of shielding me from those politics, which can get ugly and drain on the mental health. Similarly, if they’re too good at shielding and never tell you about what’s going on, then you never really know what’s happening and might be blindsided by things that affect you at the company. I’ve had both and it’s not really fun either way.

Now I actually prod my managers in our 1:1s. I try to find out what’s happening. Not a lot usually changes from week to week, but month to month might see some changes. You never really know. But it’s probably better to at least try to understand what’s happening before some giant news drops you’re not expecting.

12. Skip level meetings should be a thing at more companies

A skip level meeting is one not with your manager but your manager’s manager. I was surprised at the first company that had a skip-level 1:1 meeting. I think I was initially both surprised and intimidated. Surprised because I wasn’t expecting it and didn’t really know what to say, but intimidated at their title and how it felt almost scary. But they also were super kind and wanted to make sure I succeeded and were there to also help ensure my success.

I think this should be a thing at more companies. I think it helps diversify your input on what’s going on at the management level. It also gives you a good connection with the manager just in case you ever did have to go past your manager to talk about something important. While I haven’t specifically asked for this at companies that haven’t offered it yet, I’m thinking about starting to.

13. You should know your team members, and spend time just hanging out with them. On the clock.

At one of my earlier tech jobs, I was still pretty new to that job when one of my teammates said “Let’s go get ice cream!” They all thought that was a great idea and started to get up to walk out the front door. I was definitely thrown off. My first thought was “whoa wait… you can just LEAVE?!? And go eat ice cream!? on the clock!? And they don’t care!?!” The answer was yes we could, no they don’t, and the ice cream was great!

More important than the ice cream was that time hanging out with my team. It broke down some of that all-serious, all the time type of mentality that can tend to build up if you only focus on work all the time. Building that team camaraderie might feel nonsense or unimportant to some, but I think it really helps build a better environment for working both independently and together as a group. When you start to understand more about your teammates and understand their situations, how they work, what’s going on in their lives, you relate and empathize with them. It makes you more able to know how to work with them easier. I had one team where we bickered a lot, and I dragged them to the work cafeteria to just chat over cookies and snacks, and we worked a LOT better after that.

I hope the manager of the team sets up times for the team to hang out. If not, maybe consider setting it up yourself!

14. Your team should be empowered to make code improvements (refactors, etc.) but should also be collaborated as a team

Though someone may “own” the product, your team should “own” the code. You’re the ones working in it, and you’re the ones that will have to deal with the problems in the future. The team should be empowered to make changes to make it easier to deal with, well documented, tackling tech debt, refactoring things, or whatever.

The downside is that I think there needs to be a coordinated plan of attack. The code, as it is now, is what you’re used to dealing with. If someone goes through and makes large changes to how things work, it will take time to adapt to understanding it and working with its new form. (For example, changing how Docker containers work, altering the startup script, extracting things out into libraries or replacing your code with a third-party library, etc.) If the team has discussed it, that transition to learning it is probably minimized. If it happens, and it’s unexpected, then there’s a huge hurdle on everyone to figure out.

Take time every sprint (or some time period) to think through changes you want to make that aren’t bugs or features. Figure out how you want to break those down, take on some tasks, and let your team know when they’re coming down the pipeline. It will help keep everyone at a good productive level, if not an improving productive level!

15. You HAVE to onboard people and do it well. (With exceptions for brand new engineering teams.)

My final tip deals with bringing on the new people. I’ve heard horror stories from people for years about the terrible experiences people have joining teams. Laptops not being ready, accounts not being ready, being clueless about HR forms, teams not knowing a new person is coming, and more. Heck, I even wrote a conference talk that included a lot of things about how to go from “we need to hire someone” to hiring, interviewing, onboarding, and retrospecting on that hire.

What will help your new team member integrate in a great experience? Figure out your onboarding strategy, then work on it before the new teammate comes along. The more materials you prep, the more suggestions you offer on getting things right, and the more you get accounts and computer right, the less overwhelmed the new person will be, but also the more energy they’ll want to bring to your team.

While some of this work may fall on the team to make sure stuff is documented, it also falls on the manager to help guide the process when they come in. Take all the above and use it to help shape and form that new relationship! Oh and make sure they don’t have to call tech support to get their password reset on the first day.

Conclusion

I never used to want to be a manager, but last year the thought entered my mind more seriously. While I don’t believe I’ll end up in any sort of lead or manager position at my current job, who knows what the future holds? I have mixed feelings about making the switch. But if I do, I feel I’ve had many wonderful (and a few not-so-wonderful) examples of managers to base my future experiences off of. While I would still want to take some management trainings probably, I think considering a lot of the above would be a pretty good framework to helping out a beginning manager. Or maybe even an experienced one. Even if I don’t become a manager, I’ve known what to look for in my team’s managers in interviews, and it has definitely helped shape my future interviews and what I look for out of a new position.

I’ve Hit Community Burnout

Sarah Withee — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 17:28:00 +0000

Photo by Dennis Skley.

[UPDATE] Added a section at the end for Discord server admins to add roles effectively.

At the last half of 2020, I started live streaming on Twitch. As I started getting into it, I was looking at other streams and meeting people on there. I met a good number of people who I would call friends now, which is great!

One of the popular things is for Twitch streamers to have their own Discord servers. If you’re not familiar with Discord, I’d say it’s like Slack but geared towards gamers and communities. If you’re not familiar with Slack either, I’d say it’s a chat room tool that offers you a bunch of different virtual rooms (called “channels”) that you can discuss various things in. The nice thing about Slack and Discord over older systems like IRC is that they’re a lot easier to visually communicate things. You have markup (e.g. italics, bold , and adding links), images, often get previews for online documents and other things like that. The tools are great.

But the point of this blog post is to focus on an issue I see brewing for me: Community Burnout.

What Do You Mean by Community Burnout?

Thanks, I’m glad you asked. It’s a term I’m making up (that may or may not have some real life similarity) in which you become a part of too many communities and your involvement in all of them decline.

Image of the inside of a Sarpy County, NE DMV office. Photo by

Kent Sievers of Omaha World-Herald.

It’s similar to a thing I realized at the DMV once. DMVs, doctor’s offices, and other places like to print out a sign to aid as a way to help direct people or tell people some important piece of information. The problem becomes that they tend to post SO many signs that the effect means all the signs are drowned out and no one reads any them.

First, Too Many Servers

How does this work on Slack and Discord? Let’s look at examples of some I belong to. For Slack, I have an account on at least 60 servers. They include:

Image of almost every Slack and Discord I'm a member of.

Local communities (relative to my past and present cities)
Online communities (like a women in tech or people that do public speaking)
Conference-based ones (like one for each year of Strange Loop, one for all of THAT Conference)
Ones related to a particular project (like for me some software project)

For Discord, I am a part of probably about 30 now. There’s similar but different types, notably:

Local communities (like above)
Online communities (like above)
Twitch streamers (one streamer has a Discord for the stream, the streamer, and the viewers that frequent it)
Friend collectives around a game (like for people to play Among Us together)

While many of these separate servers offer very different sets of people with separate sets of discussions, most of them have a LOT of the same types of channels. To categorize some:

Pet-related (#pets, #cats, #dogs, #furry-friends, #pet-photos, #all-the-pets, etc.)
Job-related or ways to make money (#job-board, #job-search-support, #marketplace, #services_selling, etc.)
In software ones, ones related to tech things (#java, #cpp, #python, #ruby, #programming, #functional-programming, #ux, etc.)
Especially on Discord, self-promotion channels (#live-now, #share-your-work, #special-streams, #ads-and-surveys, #gamedev-art, etc.)
Random, generic channels (#random, #general, #chat, #off-topic, etc.)

And they’re not on a few servers. I’d say on every server, Slack or Discord, I have most of the above categories.

Engagement on a Server

So, let’s say my cats do something adorable:

Theodosius decided to curl up and sleep on me on the couch last week.

Great! I love sharing my adorable, giant cats. Where would I post this?

There’s the Women In Tech Slack, probably my most-used server. I’d post in #pets.
There’s the Code & Supply Slack, a local community to me. I’d post in #pets.
I have a few friends’ Discord servers. I’d post in their #pet-photos or similar.

After a bit this gets exhausting. I don’t want to post one picture in 10+ places. There’s not really a good way to automate this either. On my phone, I’m basically clicking the “Share” button 10+ times. On the computer, I can drag-and-drop that photo onto every channel (faster, but still obnoxious).

That’s a silly example. Let’s say I want to have a more serious discussion. Something mental health-related.

We have #mental-health on Women In Tech Slack
Also #mental-health on Code & Supply Slack
Also #mental-health on @whitep4nth3r’s Discord
I recently joined @jennyfurhh’s Discord and it’s all about mental health so there’s many channels to discuss there
Girl Streamers’ Discord also has a #serious-stuff channel

Not all conversations are serious. What if I want to chat about fun or uplifting things?

We have #uplift-and-gratitude on the Women in Tech Slack
Or #successes in Code & Supply
Or #milestones on Girl Streamers
Or #good-vibes-only on my friend @LA_Draws’ Discord server
Or #brag on the We So Crafty slack (though people also post all of their projects on the other craft channels)

(I generally think the more uplifting channels, the better, but it’s still contributing to the clutter.)

So… different avenues of conversation are plentiful. If I’m super extroverted-feeling that day, I could try to post something to multiple channels. But I’m often not. So it becomes a choice: Which one do I do?

Notification Hell

There are studies now showing how mentally draining constant notifications can be. While I can log on and off of Slack servers as I want on my phone or computers, you are either have Discord’s app open (and therefore every server) or you close it (and have no servers).

Within both Slack and Discord, you can set server-wide notifications, usually notify of every message, notify of mentions (like someone says @geekygirlsarah or @here), or no notifications. This is a good start, but it’s not enough.

And withing both Slack and Discord, you can set channel-based notifications. This is where it gets complicated. The default is to get all notifications for all channels. If I added them up, that’s thousands of channels for me. This is WAY too much. While I can customize Slack’s noises per server, everything on Discord sounds the same. Throw in that my roommate also uses Discord a lot and notifications get very confusing.

I’ve started very liberally applying channel mutes to every Discord channel I don’t want to hear from and most noisy Slack channels. This helps a lot. Discord still shows me numbers for muted channels though. So essentially I am notified despite setting it to not do it. This usually happens because Discord owners LOVE doing @everyone or @here on theirs, which notifies everyone on the server of something. Often it’s a “hey, I’m now streaming on Twitch”. Which I don’t really need because I get notifications from Twitch itself.

It’s just… a LOT. The result is that I want to mute everything, which is effectively like me plugging my ears to entire communities, which goes against what I feel it should be like.

I’m an Extreme Case

I get I’m probably not the typical person. I AM involved in a lot of organizations and groups. I regularly talk to a LOT of people I’ve by the nature of those connections, I want to find ways to keep chatting with them. It’s almost always easiest to join their Slack/Discord.

I’m aware that most people aren’t this engaged. You might be in 1-2 local communities and that’s it. Maybe 1-2 online ones. And maybe you only drop into a few streamers so Discord isn’t so noisy. I entirely get this and that’s entirely cool. Probably better that way.

For new communities I’m joining, I’m at a point where it’s hard to feel included in them. I have the few I’ve been a part of the longest, but it’s getting harder and harder to really feel like I belong to the new ones. They feel like they’re more work than is worth it.

In general, I’m burning out. There’s TOO many things to be a part of. And it’s only gotten worse during the pandemic. People WANT to create those online alternatives to what they had in person but don’t have anymore. You can see this as Twitch reports millions more hours of streams watched since the pandemic started. Don’t get me wrong, _ I _ want those replacements for the in-person things I miss too. But I’m hitting a point where it’s not sustainable anymore and I’m losing any motivation to be a part of any of the groups.

So, Where Do We Go From Here?

Good question again. I don’t know that I have a great answer. I have a few ideas though.

Vision and Mission Statement sign for Richmond Primary school. Photo by
Michael Coghlan.

One of the things that I’ve learned from working with non-profits is that you really need a mission and a vision. The mission is “This is why we exist” and the vision being “This is what we see happening.” These can change over time, and I’d say that they should change in order to stay relevant to the people that the non-profit is serving.

Applying this idea to communities, I’d then ask: Who are the members? Why are they there? What’s the point of this group? What are you, the leader of the community or a member of the community, doing to help serve that point of focus?

For example, the Women in Tech Slack offers to be a source of support for, well, women in the tech industry. This can be through things like answering questions about various technologies, helping women get jobs, helping support when the industry is being rough on them. It’s also turned into a source of women to talk about things that tend to face women as a whole like getting appropriately paid, workplace discrimination, and more. But as we’ve grown, we’ve found there’s room for things like channels about relationships (romantic, friendships, or otherwise), connecting across cities (many channels like #loc-pittsburgh for example), and looking at finances, home ownership, and other things too. It’s blossomed as a great place to be but also many channels are regularly having conversations related to these topics. It’s been a massively great support for me in the 5 years I’ve been there.

At the same time, it’s grown to over 8,000 people now. People are joining all the time. Most people drop into #introductions, say a spiel about who they are and where they’re from, then… nothing. We almost never hear from most new members again. I can’t blame them… it’s huge and it’s often hard to figure out where to go. To add to that, most “women in tech” communities are just empty and quiet and just mostly self-promotion pools. (As in people going “I made a Youtube video where I…” or “I was on a podcast where I talked about…” with almost no conversation.) We’ve started to see that too on the Women in Tech Slack. People come in and most go quiet, but there are some people that are always making blog posts or Youtube videos are dropping their stuff in #main and not in any relevant channels. They don’t talk or converse, just drop their stuff and leave until the next time they do it again. It’s hard to join in to something so big and feel like you belong.

How Do We Fix This?

Here’s what I’d suggest:

If you’re a general, wide-topic community (like “women in tech”), find your focus. What do you offer? What makes you different than any other group of people? How should people get involved or engaged in that? Focus on building that up the people in that group in the ways they need to be built up and supported.

If you’re more of a niche community (like followers of a specific Twitch stream), what is your niche? Who are the audience or members? What are you offering them? Take those ideas and try to stay with that realm. Don’t try to be too much. I know it feels nice to want to try to provide that, but I’ve seen a lot of niche communities with a ton of channels and so few of them have any conversations in them. Or channels that just really don’t belong. Delete the extra things and be good at your niche. Let people get the other things from other groups.

The larger your community is , the more people will be lost when joining. You should have some form of onboarding at that point. A new employer will guide you on how to fill out HR paperwork, set up a computer, and tell you how your projects work. So your community should have some way (process or people) to help explain the rules, tell about the culture, and point them to the right places to do things and how to be involved. (This is something I see most communities need help with.)

If you insist on lots of channels on Discord , then make very liberal use of role-based channels. Use the variety of bots out there for people to add themselves to roles to unlock channels. Allow people to opt-in to the ones they want based on games they play, discussions they want to have, happy/sad/serious/etc. conversations, and whatever else. It benefits everyone, not just the person opting in as people can tell who wants to be there by looking in the member list.

Finally, a community is about the people involved. While it might be focused around some topic, trait, person, or thing, it really doesn’t work unless it focuses on the people that are there. I’ve seen communities regularly focus on discovering what people need/want and aim to provide that, but also some communities that never do this (like leaders usually doing whatever they want for example) that the community just doesn’t really work. And that just ruins the community.

A plethora of communities aren’t bad, but a plethora of communities that have too many random notifications, too many channels that aren’t necessary, no engagement, and/or no focus are a cause for burnout.

I’ve hit community burnout, and it’s time for me to start figuring out what communities I need to leave so I can be a valued member of any of them.

Year in Review: Looking Back at 2020 and Looking Forward at 2021

Sarah Withee — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 19:00:00 +0000

I’ve tried to do a year-end retrospective for the past several years. Sometimes I pull it off (2015, 2018) and sometimes I don’t (2016, 2019). I started to write a reflection and goals for 2019/2020 last year and wrote some of it on and off. By the time I got about halfway done, the Coronavirus pandemic hit in March and I basically lost the motivation.

It’s been a weird year. While most people would say the year collectively sucked (and I’d 100% agree), it doesn’t mean there weren’t good things that happened in the year too. To make it all the more weird, some things are good and terrible mixed together.

My past reflections have been deep dives into the year. This year I don’t really want to. There’s too much to process and too many weird nuances to all of it. Instead, I want to summarize some thoughts I’ve had this past year.

So here we go…

Summary Numbers In a Nutshell

Gave 5 conference talks (2 physical, 3 virtual)
Spoke at 4 meetups
Organized 1 conference
Wrote 4 blog posts
Was a guest on 2 podcasts
Did 10 PRs for Hacktoberfest…
… which let me release 1 open source project to the world
Donated over $1200 to nonprofits this year (the most I’ve ever donated)
Rode my bike 272.3 miles (including a single day record 23.5 miles)
Brought my A1c* down to 5.4%
Lost about 25 pounds

*Hemoglobin A1C is a blood test that determines the average blood glucose levels. Type 1 diabetics like myself are suggested to keep it under 7%.

People (or Lack Thereof)

This year had some very mixed good with bad things. I couldn’t see most of my friends or go to any of my activities. As an ambivert (a split introvert and extrovert), it’s a weird situation. Some days I was perfectly fine stuck at home, and other days I had massive cases of cabin fever. What was sold as “maybe a few weeks” became 9 months of trying to stay at home as much as possible. I gave myself permission to go out for bicycling as much as I wanted to (which did include with some friends, and we went to the trails separately). I had two COVID scares when a friend came over (one in March, one in November, both were already in my “pod”) then tested positive a few days later. Thankfully, I appear to never have caught it, and as of July officially showed no antibodies. I did move in with a roommate in October. She’s a friend of a mutual friend, and it’s been nice having another human around.

I also saw, along with the rest of the world, massive uprisings from the movements for Black Lives Matter. I have known about the movement for several years, and known there was inherently still racism mixed in with our society, I tried to listen to stories, watch the videos (as gruesome as they were), read up on more issues, and even went to my first bike protest. (There’s something amazing about an estimated 900 bicyclists taking to the streets causing chaos by doing nothing other than biking together in a massive group!) I have typically tried to stay away from politics on social media because I haven’t wanted the trolls and negative attention, and have generally wanted to be an uplifting presence there. But in June and July, I just went quiet. I posted nothing new. I only retweeted things from people of color and about those issues. I added “#BlackLivesMatter” to my profiles and don’t intend to take them off. And even though the movements have quieted down, I still am listening. I am still wanting to share stories. I am still trying to find more things I can do to support my friends of color and the people in my city. I am still donating money to causes to fight inequality and help those treated unfairly by the systemic issues of our society. I also want to continue to boost the stories of marginalized people and be a good ally. For all the horror that has happened to even cause these movements, I hope that the fact they’re very publicly visible and the world is very aware of them now helps cause major change.

Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm by Kashmir Hill, New York Times, June 24, 2020

Finally, the other major thing I think has come out of 2020 has been a stronger perception of the tech industry and its continuing effect on people and society. While I still like working in this industry, I am growing more and more aware of how much the industry can actually make society worse and dramatically affect people’s lives, often not for the better. I’m reminded of how enlightened I felt after taking my ethics class in college, only now I’m disheartened at how easy tech makes it for a few people to profit off of exploiting other people.

Between the global pandemic, systemic racism, and the rise of unethical technology, there’s not a lot one single person can do. However, I do hope that for what privileges I do have, I can always use them to have the greatest impact of good on the world. I learned a lot about these issues in the past several years, but learned even more about how bad they are in the past year and what I can do to help. I want to make 2021 a year I can continue to learn, grow, and improve as an ally, as well as continue to do what I can to try to at least my little corner of the world a better place.

Job and Career

I lost my regular job back in early 2019. While I did a lot of short-term contracts, I still looked for a full time job. The pandemic definitely made the struggle a bit worse, but in May 2020 I did find a job and started on June 1.

The interesting part of this particular job is that I’m one of the first two people hired to form a new engineering department. They had always used outside contractors and so the other engineer and myself formed a new team within a new department. We had so many conversations I’ve never had before about like thinking through software methodologies the team will use, what are our best practice standards, and what do we want our culture to be like? It’s pretty amazing to be in on these conversations from the start. We did hire a third person too. There are definitely other downsides, like transitioning from contractors to employees working on code bases has been a bit rocky. It’s definitely a lot of the challenge I had been looking for in an engineering job, and I feel incredibly lucky to work with the manager and teammates I do.

This is the first year that I have also seriously started considering pivots to my career. I’ve always loved being a developer and dealing with code and designing solutions, but after struggling to find a job, I did ponder other directions. Would I have an interest in being (and even be ready to be) a manager or team lead? Would I (or should I) go back and get a masters in computer science? For these questions and more, I pondered a lot but don’t know that I have solid answers yet. I guess we’ll see where 2021 leads me.

Public Speaking and Conference Organizing

I spoke at CodeMash conference doing the 'infomercial challenge', an improvised one-minute attempt to sell people on a randomly created product. Photo: Colin Dean.

I spoke at CodeMash in January, but told myself after that I didn’t want to apply to any more CFPs except my top five conferences, and I would also consider invites. It was mostly after feeling like public speaking and travel has been a part of my life for several years, but I didn’t really feel like it was benefiting me much anymore. Then the pandemic happened, which cancelled the invited places I was going to speak at and cancelled all the top 5 events I would have applied to. It sort of made that a bit easier. I ended up submitting to a local tech event in August, then was asked to submit something in October for a new event ran by a friend. I did end up speaking at a few events, but the lack of travel and the shift of not doing many events actually was a nice change that I appreciated. Even if 2021 opens up, I will probably limit my CFP applying to just my top favorites and possible invites.

After a massive burnout with organizing Abstractions conference, I reluctantly joined the Heartifacts conference team as an organizer. I helped run the CFP again and I think helped bring in numerous wonderful topics and speakers. The pandemic closed the world about the same time the CFP closed, which caused the organizing team a massive headache in trying to figure out how to pivot the conference. It wasn’t perfect (both in general and as a virtual event), it is an event I am generally proud of. It also helps that I got to emcee it again (though virtually this time) and helped frame the event in a way to focus on the important mental health and community topics we had.

Health

I hit my heaviest weight ever in June 2019, just before heading to speak at a conference in Oslo, Norway. While I don’t want to obsess over certain numbers being “good” or “bad” as health is a very relative thing, I do want to say that I felt the worse I have ever felt. I came back from Oslo having lost 5 pounds from so much walking and moving and tourism! I decided to try to focus on continuing to lose weight and improve my health.

A graph from MapMyFitness that shows 52 weeks of bicycling stats.

Over the course of 2019 and 2020, I tried to shift to eating differently as well as doing some exercising. I had been a regular on-again-off-again bicyclist, it wasn’t too hard to pick it back up. I got a new bicycle after moving to Pittsburgh, and this year I pedaled over 272 miles! This combined with a better diet helped me lose 25 pounds, getting me back to a weight before I moved to Pittsburgh. While winter is always harder to get out on the bike, I’m hoping to keep the momentum up to help me continue to feel better, lose more weight, and go even further distances on the bicycle!

Miscellaneous 2020 Goals

Aside from speaking less, I had a few smaller goals:

Delete all accounts on the major, large tech company websites
Switch my phone to all open source software
Delete all old email aliases at my old domain (sarahwithee.com) so I can give it away, preferably to another Sarah Withee
Get rid of my last web hosting server

These were lofty goals, and I didn’t accomplish them. I did make significant gains to completing them. I have managed to find open source (and non-privacy invading) apps and delete some old ones, delete my Amazon and Microsoft accounts, migrate all data off of Google (except Google Voice), and delete about 70% of my old email aliases.

2021 will include trying to finish off these lists. I plan to blog in the future about my tech company deletion, software I replaced everything with, and steps to do it.

Finances

At the beginning of 2020, I was still hurting from losing the full-time job. The contracts were helping, but I was still dipping into savings. I definitely acknowledge how lucky and privileged I am to have found a job, both doing something I love as well as in the midst of a global pandemic. Because of that, I knew as soon as I could repair a few finances, I wanted to immediately donate a lot of money where it was needed. Then I got lucky: the pandemic placed a halt on paying my federal student loans back. Combine that with a salary bump, and I had a lot of money to do good with.

In 2018-2019, I focused a lot on organizations in Kansas City (my hometown) as well as Pittsburgh in both tech spaces and LGBTQ spaces. I shifted dramatically this year to reduce those a bit but then spend a LOT more on local food banks and organizations to help incarcerated people. I am presently donating over $250 a month to organizations all over and hope to bump that up more in 2021.

Car title for the first car I paid off

From the freezing of loan payments and interest on the federal student loans, I got lucky enough to find that despite throwing money into a savings account and into an IRA, my checking account was still growing. I started throwing money at my car payments. I paid off my car loan! It’s the first time in my adult life I can say I paid off a loan, but also did it a year and eight months early! Combining that with a lowered insurance cost, there will be more money available monthly. I can focus on donating more and paying more to student loans.

2021 Goals…?

2021… I want to say it’s going to be a better year. But we also said that 2019 was the worst year and 2020 would be better. And 2018. And 2017. And 2016. And 2015.. And… well, yeah.

Like I said at the beginning, 2020 was a weird mix of some good things on top of a collectively terrible year. I have no specific goals for 2021. But I do know the general direction I want to go. I think I can summarize it like this:

Be good to myself. (Exercise, take care of my health, keep fixing my beat up millennial finances, practice good self-care, etc.)
Be good to others. (Donate to non-profits, be a good ally, help my friends, wear a mask/wash my hands/etc. so I don’t catch and spread the pandemic, get the vaccine when it’s my turn, etc.)
Try to make the world a tiny bit better. (Be a positive influence on younger generation, vote for responsible people, leave society and Earth a bit better than I found it, etc.)

~ Sarah

A Story About Growing Up in Kansas City

Sarah Withee — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 17:22:00 +0000

Map of Kansas City, KS/MO. Screenshot from OpenStreetMaps.

I took June/July off & only retweeted things related to Black Lives Matter & Pride/LGBTQ issues. I’m going back to my regular posting, but I wanted to share a story first.

I grew up in Kansas City. It’s probably most famous for being that weird city in BOTH Kansas & Missouri. There’s another interesting trait about it. The Missouri River cuts through the KC too. Growing up I heard about “North of the River” (where I grew up) and “South of the River.” I often heard about how South of the River was bad. Lots of crime. Drive-by shootings. etc.

As an adult, I ended up moving South of the River in KC. Turns out it’s kind of a cool place to be! Lots of artsy things, diversity, and cool people. And sure, there’s crime (I mean, there was North too) but it wasn’t anything like I was given the impression. I had basically grown up in KC with the impression that certain areas of the city were “bad” because they had people of color, more “urban” neighborhoods, and other things. I was taught not to cross certain streets. It’s all inherently based in racism and red-lining.

While I learned over time about these bad thoughts I grew up with, it took years to mentally rewire my brain. I’m extremely glad I moved, and in fact wanted to stay there before I moved to Pittsburgh. But I think it helped me grow as a person and I’m better because of it.

I think I realized moving South of the River in KC helped show me the many ways the city was set up to be worse for people of color. I saw how different parts of the city got less funding and got less care, but also how people struggled to leave due to costs of leaving.

This leads me to my main point of this thread:

Black Lives Matter and Pride aren’t events, they’re conversations. They aren’t a one-time thing but they will continue on. They’re movements, they’re calls to action. And that action can’t stop yet.

People right now are needlessly dying. Black, brown, & other people of color are dying from police and inconvenienced white people. LGBTQ people are still dying for who they love and are. US federal & state governments are killing many underprivileged people by COVID mismanagement.

We’re hearing less about protests, more talks of police reform in some places, and some COVID numbers are going down. The focus on these things can’t stop. The momentum has to keep going. We (especially white people, especially privileged people) can’t just ignore this.

What can we do from here? Good question! I think there are several things, but I want to make a quick point:

“Privilege” is thrown around a lot, but it’s not a bad thing on its own. It can be used for good or for bad. Key is to recognize it and see how it affects others. Privilege isn’t a thing you have or a thing you don’t. It’s a scale. For example, I’m white (which gives some to me) but I also spent most of my adult life in poverty income (which takes some away).

Overall, it basically means what issues hold you back from success?

The more privilege you have, the better off you are, ensuring your safety, comfort, finances, & stability. The more you have, the more likely you don’t realize you have it, & why awareness is key. It’s why some say the system is against them when it’s not against others.

So back to what can we do… there’s several things!

Stop what you’re doing and listen. Listen to black/brown/people of color, LGBTQ people, the less financially fortunate, & others with less privilege. Their stories are important. Don’t try to solve them, just listen. Listen to the pain, sadness, frustration, & anger of Black people & how they can’t beat the system. It’s rarely their fault, our systems are set up against them. Don’t just hear, but truly listen. It’s important. We all need to understand where they’re coming from.
Start following a diverse set of people on social media. People tend to associate with people like them (myself included), but you can fix that. I’m working on it too. But make sure your feed is filled with lots of ideas, opinions, and voices. It’s good for you!
If you are able, join some protests. It’s a hard time to do them with COVID, but if you’re healthy, can stay distant, & wear masks, they’re great ways to help amplify voices & bring awareness to injustices in our government/laws. Big groups boost voices of people who need it!
Donate! Send some extra money to non-profit organizations doing good work in your community. Every major city (and some smaller too) have groups doing good work. Do some research, ask around. If you can’t find any, consider NAACP, ACLU, Black Lives Matter, or others. If you’re in the tech industry like me, good chance you’re easily in the top 10-15% of US incomes. Help some good organizations help other people out! Even if you’re not in tech, simple $5-20 donations help a lot too!
Better yet, set up recurring donations. While something like $50 can help an org out, a monthly donation of $5 goesa lot further. Regular donations show your commitment to supporting them & helps ensure their financial stability over time. It has a longer impact.
Can’t do protests or donate money? It’s ok, donate time! Ask any non-profit & that’s another thing they’re likelylacking. Find out how you can help them teach kids in underprivileged neighborhoods, provide services to those whoneed it, or distributing food. Or more!
If you have a smart phone (which >80% of the country does), keep your phone charged and ready when you go out. If you’re somewhere and the police show up, get your device out and start recording. It may not end badly, but better safe than sorry. If it is bad, post it. Capturing bad police actions is one of the most important things that’s bringing awareness to the injustice that’s happening in our country and the world. Posting it gives it that awareness. Consider also sending to organizationss or lawyers, or tagging your lawmakers.
Consider discontinuing businesses that put underprivileged people at risk in the pandemic. Amazon, Instacart, GrubHub, Uber, and others operate on the idea that they reduce customer costs by exploiting cheap labor. A pandemic is NOT the time for this! However… There are people at high risk, esp the elderly, disabled, or people w/ chronic health issues. They SHOULD use these, and if you’re a low risk, let these services be in use for those people that need them most. It’s convenient for you, but necessary for them.
Finally, go find out your voting status. Check your city/county/state websites and see if you’re registered. If not, go register. If you are, find out how to vote absentee or with mail-in ballots. All states have this. Find out how to do it to keep the polls reduced. Our elections coming up are some of the most important. Our governments on every level are FILLED with people doing stuff with their own interests and don’t care about representing you. Get people into the offices that DO represent you! How? Well… Go to ballotpedia.org to learn what you’re voting on and read about your candidates. Write down who you support. Take that to the polls, or keep it for your absentee/mail-in ballot. There’s a lot of positions you haven’t heard of, but they’re important!

To put my money where my mouth is:

Since starting my new tech job in June, I’ve been donating >$150/month to many non-profits, and plan to increase that amount as I fix some finances.
I’m registered to vote and will receive mail-in ballots until middle of next year.

If you made it this far, thanks! This needs to be a conversation. I want to keep learning. I want to hear the voices of the oppressed and do what I can to help boost them. I sincerely hope you do too. These conversations might be uncomfortable, but they’re vitally important.

And finally, remember…

People are needlessly dying, but:

The pandemic IS real
LGBTQ lives DO matter
Black lives DO matter

And we need to take care of our fellow humans.

The following is a direct copy from a Twitter thread and Facebook post I posted, both on August 4, 2020. There might be slightly typographic inconsistencies due to the formats of posting on Twitter and Facebook.

Learning to Share Accomplishments: Part 2 - Sharing My Accomplishments

Sarah Withee — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 14:00:00 +0000

The "album cover" photo my team took on our last day working together

This is the second part of a two-part post. The first part is more on how to share your career accomplishments. You may want to read it first. Part 1 is here.

For part 2 of this post, I want to actually talk about those accomplishments. I think it’s helpful for me to get out there and while it may not be as interesting or relevant for you, maybe in looking it over you can see some ways you can talk about your own accomplishments as well.

What I Personally Have Worked on in My Past Jobs

I want to spend some time looking back at my work. Like I said above, I’ve apparently had some times I’ve been terrible at talking about this in job interviews, so I wanted a list. I kind of want to use it as a thought exercise for me, but maybe also to help sell myself to anyone who might be reading this post. I don’t intend this to be literally everything I’ve worked on, but perhaps more of the highlights from different points in my career. And who knows, maybe a future employer might see this and think I really would be an awesome addition to their team.

One other thing: I have literally had job interviews where, despite all of my developer experience, have looked at me and said “Looks like you do a lot of teaching stuff. Maybe you should be a teacher and not a developer.” I’ve found it puts me in an incredibly awkward place to have to defend why I am applying for a developer job and these people don’t even see me in that light. I’m not sure if that’s, again, me not “selling myself” well or if that’s me not writing out my resume well enough, or just things like conferences are more visible than projects I’ve worked on (which are usually NDAs or not publicly available). So I hope this post helps with that as well.

Best Team: Data Pipeline Team

This team was created to replace a $1M/year third-party product with an in-house solution. The third-party product was expensive, a pain to set up, didn’t scale well, and the company only used about 10% of it. Ours was built for this specific solution, scaled with the click of a few buttons, and cost closer to $1000/month (a VAST savings).

My team drawing out our architecture diagrams*

What did I Do?

I was the generalist on this team. I felt like I was the glue that when given a random problem to solve, thing to research, or item to build, I just did it. This work often helped fix some problems that would have delayed our release or fix an issue that would have popped up later on.
I figured out the best way to do an AWS-based service queue system for our monitoring microservice. I did the research by looking at all of AWS’s types of queueing systems and their costs of running. I later implemented a basic prototype, and then wrote the final code to convert our monitoring service to push to it.
We had a broken build for our client executable that wasn’t building separate versions correctly. I wrote some shell scripts that fixed Travis CI (for our Mac version) and AppVeyor (for our Windows version) to get both working. It then built and uploaded to AWS S3 buckets in the correct versioned structure.
I contributed at least one feature to the code base of every Scala microservice we had when I had no prior Scala experience. (It’s similar to Haskell, which I had done a project on in the past, so I picked it up quickly.)
A teammate couldn’t get one of our services working in Scala so they rewrote it all in Ruby over a weekend. We ended up keeping that, but it was built to run locally. After that person quit shortly after, I Dockerized it, wrote the CI scripts to deploy it to AWS, and got it to work with AWS’s Aurora databases (as opposed to a local Postgres install). I later ended up resolving at least 85% of the security flaws that came up in a security audit on it. I did this without prior Ruby or Ruby on Rails knowledge, which I picked up quickly).
When I was hired, they wanted me to start work immediately and relocate to Pittsburgh as I could. I started work within about two weeks of the offer, and spent the first two months working remote out of Kansas City (where the time zone was an hour earlier than my team). I also was packing to move at the same time I did this work.
From day one, I was given ownership of two of the 8-10 microservices our project had.
I wrote and modified existing Terraform scripts to add additional deploy and containerization features for some of our microservices. (I had never used Terraform before either.)
After our original manager was fired and a new one was brought in, I regularly checked in on and mentored the junior member of our team when the new manager didn’t take that on.
We didn’t have 1-on-1 meetings after our original manager wasn’t there anymore. I tried to have unofficial 1:1s with the two original remaining team members just to make sure they were doing ok.

Favorite Work Project: Team Metric Tracker

I really liked this project not because it was particularly complex or really cool, but because of the creative solutions that came out of it.

Our five-person team was all hired at the same time. We were on a three month internal project which helped us learn the security protocols for software at the bank. The project was sold to us as “make this Excel spreadsheet into a web app”. Once we dived in deep, we realized this was a quirky problem with some hidden issues. The spreadsheet had a dozen tabs, data from several years, a constantly evolving report, and a dozen users that all added data to it. Our basic web app turned into a quirky data project that required data auditing, a report-designing system, hierarchies of management, and redefining terminology the department used. (For more fun, we were told another team tried to tackle this in the past and couldn’t do it.)

The five of us designing the metric tracking part of the system**

What did I Do?

While many of us worked on the original design and wireframes, I came up with the idea of redefining their terminology (what we called “metrics” and different kinds of metrics) so it made sense to us (the client used a lot of words interchangeably), and later I designed a way to abstract out the database tables to make it easy to store the different kinds of metrics in the same table. It resulted in faster queries later.
To ensure people could edit the actual data metrics, we had a sort of “meta” database table describing the metrics themselves, then a table to store the metric data. (ex: “Widgets per hour” vs “this month we did 12 widgets/hr”.) I had suggested this idea originally and it replaced an old idea that wasn’t really effective.
Some metrics were calculated (ex: average per year might be the sum of the metric divided by 12). We wanted to ensure users couldn’t mess up these formulas. I came up with two ideas. The first was to make a formula that could be stored with both constants (as in the “12” above) as well as ID numbers (so some metric might be database ID 45). Prefixing a ‘c’ or ‘i’ on the number meant we could tell what the number meant, and ID numbers could just pull the metric from it’s table and row. This remained fast to query.
The second idea was to provide the user a calculator-like interface to allow users to enter only valid formulas. While the calculator wasn’t my idea, the validation scheme was. On the front end, we gave them a literal calculator that you could also drag metric names into the equation. This used a state machine I designed to ensure whatever they put in couldn’t be saved until the formula was mathematically correct. On the back end, we used a math parsing framework to validate the entry before it was saved.
We needed to add auditing to the data so it tracked who entered what. I designed this system where audits were stored in a separate audit table, both making saves and lookups easy.
We needed a hierarchy of who could add, edit, or delete particular sets of data. I came up with the idea of tying in our system with Active Directory so we could actually look up the management ladder and allow people to edit the people’s entries that were under them. If they moved teams, left the company, etc., they lost access as it was in AD already, and required no special login or management tables in our product.
We needed a way to create and run reports. We learned about a tool other teams used but realized on a short time frame we probably wouldn’t integrate it well so we built our own. I designed the structure of how people would design reports, and then later with another team member, came up with a structure for how it would be stored in the database.
Reports were VERY slow in the beginning. I developed a caching system that would pre-calculate all calculated metrics, and store those values as they were entered. Using the cached data took reports from a minute or longer to load to about a second or less to load.
The other developers shied away from creating PDFs. I found a library and implemented an export of a report to PDF files.
Not only did we get a minimal viable product out in three months, but the next group of five hired after us took over the project to finish our features. In addition, other departments in the bank saw our project and loved the open design of it and wanted to adopt it for their own use.

My Successes While Interning For Two Summers

I interned with a electronic document management company that loved me so much they brought me back the next summer. I was on different teams each time.

My teammates (and the foil-covering prank I pulled)

What did I Do?

The first summer, I was handed a tiny bit of code that was supposed to build out a set of sample documents to test in a report. After two months, I had expanded that from that tiny bit to an entire testing framework that would create documents and test them against the business intelligence reports automatically. This reduced the work of our QA person about 50% because she didn’t have to manually test reports.
I added internationalization to the the business intelligence installer application.
The second summer, I was given a C# program to add features to. I had not learned C# before. I added the features requested, but also discovered some quirks in how it ran on particular clients’ machines. I also fixed those additional bugs.
I added a variety of features to a large JavaScript app that used jQuery (which I had never used at the time).
During the second summer, I helped fellow interns not only understand the products they were working on, but often went over and paired with them on debugging sessions to find errors and help them “rubber duck” on tasks. I helped out 5 interns that summer.
The developers of both of my teams had said they could tell I really was good at development and would be absolutely happy if I joined their team after graduating.
I was the first intern to show off a “Innovation Week” project in front of the whole company. It not only made many of the 200+ developers know who I was after that, but the next year it inspired some other interns to build and share a project of their own.
People on both teams had told me they were surprised I was an intern as I had a lot of the skillsets of a full-time software developer.

Other Projects and Teams

Design/architecture meeting with an old team***

What did I Do?

At another team at the bank, I was the lowest experienced person there. I redesigned and rewrote a large chunk of some software that made loan documentation.
At the same team, I made design changes to the rewrite of another project that substantially reduced server workload and network bandwidth.
I was a part of a hackathon team at the bank that built a real time credit card fraud detection system. (The prior system was SQL queries ran periodically throughout the day.) Our 15 person team implemented this system in 2 days that processed over 2 GB of credit card transactions in under 10 seconds with 90% accuracy. The managers estimated that, when refined then put into production, would save them about $1.2 billion dollars annually.
In 2007, I was hired on at a local technical support and consulting company. I started off in tech support but was quickly writing Sharepoint scripts as well as later some custom development for different clients. I later helped optimize a process for installing new computers more efficiently.
In 2016, I upgraded a local magazine from having a hand-coded PHP website that was regularly quit working to a Wordpress site. In order to move 2400+ articles from their archives to WP, I had to write a variety of scripts that not only automated the database imports, but rewrote the articles to go from BBCode to HTML, as well as insert images in place on the articles. The owner of the magazine says the site is now easier to use, looks more modern, is mobile-friendly, and easier to update. It doesn’t crash anymore.
From 2009-2012, I started my own business to provide technical support, website development, and web hosting to people in my city.
I wanted a developer reference tool that allowed me to compare languages I know and ones that I don’t know side by side so I could quickly learn or reference a new language. I haven’t found a tool exactly like I want (though there’s tools along similar lines but they aren’t helpful for what I need). I started designing the architecture behind the tool and have built a mock-up of how it will work. During Hacktoberfest 2019, I finished an actual working mock-up of it. I need to write some documentation, fix a couple more small issues, then I intend to tell the world about my open source project! I will also keep adding more data sources to it, and keep encouraging others to contribute to it as well.
I was involved in a robot competition team in college. For the three years I was involved, I contributed to building or coding four robots. I broke the culture of the team having only one super-overworked developer. I also broke the culture of this develoepr never sleeping during competitions. I brought in multiple other students and formed a team. This allowed us to work more reliably and also get some sleep.
At a local homeless services and food kitchen organization, I took them from passing around Excel spreadsheets with donor information on it to having a centralized web-based donor tracking system. This enabled much better record keeping as well as made it easier to send out mailings and tax receipts at the end of the year. While there, I also sometimes helped make and serve food and helped them open and staff a thrift store to raise money for the organization.
After my local PFLAG chapter’s website was hacked, I managed to undo the damage, restore backups, then implemented a firewall and security system within Wordpress to (hopefully) prevent future attacks.

While I have a wide breadth of other accomplishments (like conference speaking, being on different board of directors, and some awards), I wanted to focus this post specifically on coding, software design, and technological solutions I have implemented.

Conclusion

This part of the post took a really long time to write. And rightfully so: I’ve done a lot in my career so far. I think I have done a lot of good, creative work. I’m hoping that while it may not have been directly useful to you to look at this post, maybe you have picked up on some good vibes you can use to help write or speak about your own accomplishments.

I’d love to hear if anything about these posts resonated with you. Feel free to reach out!

~ Sarah

P.S. I realize there’s some gray area on showing design documents from projects I’ve worked on. I’ve decided these were likely ok to share because:

* This is the diagram for a project that was killed off and is no longer real.

** This diagram described some of the object and data mappings as of 2015. It has likely evolved since then and was for an internal project that never saw the outside world.

*** These would have been accurate as of 2016 and have likely evolved since then. Also it’s for a tiny subset of what that thing did that it doesn’t really make sense outside the context of that one small subsystem.

Learning to Share Accomplishments: Part 1 - How to Share Accomplishments

Sarah Withee — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Until I figure out a better image to put here...

In my last post, I talked about my last round of job hunting. More specifically, I mention one of the pieces of feedback was on how I come off as a bit more of an “individual contributor” (someone who just takes tasks and does them) as opposed to someone who actually designs or engineers solutions (someone who takes a vague thing and maps how how it will work, breaks it apart into smaller tasks, then can work on some of those).

After some thought, I realized this is because over time I’ve learned to give credit to those on my team for some of the things we’ve worked on. I think it feels better to have a team take credit (well, and take on the failures) of all aspects of a project. While this is important and I think every team should do this, it sucks for a technical job interviews. It doesn’t work to “sell yourself” to a future employer.

For part 1 of this post, I want to spend some time thinking through how to talk about accomplishments. What’s the right way to do it without feeling like I have an inflated ego? How do I own up to my work, even when I’ve been on teams?Why does it feel so hard to do?

“Bragging” About Yourself

As someone who now has been in dozens of conferences, podcasts, videos, websites, blogs/articles, etc., I’ve had to come to terms with tooting my own horn some. All of these things usually want a bio from me. It’s a lot easier now that I have made multiples and keep them around for things like this. In the beginning, it wasn’t easy. In fact it was just downright terrible. It just felt wrong almost to try to write about all these things. It felt like bragging.

The easiest way I found to toot my own horn? I found one rule makes it easy: Stick to the facts.

The basics are to look at things I actually accomplished factually. These things definitively are provable. They have a place, a time, a number, or just anything that is solid and concrete about them. These aren’t disputable because they’re not my opinions. I did work that job. I was on that team. I wrote that code for that project. Because I can’t dispute these, it makes it easier to say about myself.

But the basics of a bio are easy. Actually taking a team accomplishment and diving into my specific thing is a bit harder (at least mentally).

For each project/team/accomplishment, what was my one specific contribution? In some cases this is easy, like when I implemented a feature for a project that made it into production. Other times less so, like when I built a thing and learned it later got scrapped. The scrapping wasn’t my fault, and it feels weird to talk about it because it isn’t visible anymore. It’s still an accomplishment of mine though, and it’s one of the things I’m trying to keep an open mind about when writing this post.

Finally, what specifics can I back up things with? Did something I build save the team time? Did it save the company money? Did it solve a major crisis? Did it fix a security flaw? These go back to the thing about adding more facts. If the company said “We think we can save this much money by running this in production”, that’s a thing I can definitely throw in the mix.

“But Sarah,” you may say, “the impostor syndrome! I don’t really deserve that credit! I wasn’t the only one who worked on that thing!” (Or insert your favorite excuse here.) Tough cookies. Write it down anyway. Just because you weren’t the only one that worked on it didn’t mean you didn’t work on it. Keep that in mind! (And this is also where I need to take my own advice a bit more.)

Over time I think adding all these little things up helps make me sound awesome, even though individually maybe they don’t. I don’t think I’m born a level of more awesome than anyone else, I just happened to do a few cool things that, when bundled together in one narrative, have made some people say that I’m awesome. I really think anyone can probably do the same for their own interviews or bios.

What I Personally Have Worked on in My Past Jobs

I wanted to spend some time looking back at my different jobs and the work I have done. I decided to put that into a separate post. Feel free to check that out Part 2.

Conclusion

As I continue to interview at places, a cloud of insecurity has been starting to come over me. I’ve felt like because I haven’t secured a job yet that maybe my career has been bad or maybe I’m just not as good as other people that are at the same point in their career as I am. I think figuring out these methods (and using it to write my accomplishments in Part 2) has helped me see that I really do have a wide range of accomplishments and am good at the things I build. I hope maybe in the process of writing these two posts that I have also built up more confidence for my job interviews. Hopefully you’ve also learned a bit on how to write and talk about your accomplishments more confidently too.

I’d love to hear if anything about these posts resonated with you. Feel free to reach out!

~ Sarah

Reflections on the Latest Round of Job Hunting

Sarah Withee — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 19:00:00 +0000

Back in February, my employer let my whole team go after getting rid of the project we had been working on. It threw me back into the world of job hunting. While there some similarities to my last job hunting experience, this one just felt a bit different in many ways.

Types of Jobs I Was Looking For

What was I looking for in my next position? Well, in a way, basically my last position. I originally joined that team (and subsequently moving to Pittsburgh) because I saw five things that really stuck out to me:

The team seemed very thoughtfully constructed and full of smart, empathetic individuals (including a big focus on diverse team members)
The manager not only cared about the work we were doing but really cared about the individual team members as actual people. He also noticed that despite the fact I didn’t know any of the technologies the job required, he immediately saw I was a fast learner and quickly absorbed new info. (Something my manager later wrote pretty high praises in an employee review (see about halfway down))
The company seemed to be working on a product that I not only thought was good, but potentially having a great effect for its users
The pay was a definite increase over my last job and felt more in line with what I thought my experiences brought to the table, and I appreciated some of the other benefits (including unlimited PTO that seemed to be done in the “correct” way, like ensuring you took a minimum amount of time off, you took it when you needed it, vacations were real vacation time (and not “work” somewhere else), etc.)
It would allow me to get out of my last city, which I just started to feel stuck in, and Pittsburgh seemed like a great place to be that I had great recommendations from people I knew there

While ultimately the job didn’t work out, I came out of the job knowing what I wanted out of my next position. A strong, diverse team. A great project I felt good working on. Empathetic team members, managers, and company. Good pay and benefits.

And when companies asked me, “What kind of role do you see yourself in next?” these were a lot of the things I mentioned. (I didn’t say the pay/benefits part.)

The Difficult Spot I’m Starting to See Myself In

One of the difficulties I found in the last job hunt was that I wanted to make sure I was in a role that I felt would challenge me, but also a place that I felt like I could use my skills. So an equal part being able to contribute a lot, but also being able to learn a lot (from work or from coworkers). It’s kind of why I aimed for the moon (and going for the cliché of if I missed I’d be among the stars). I interviewed at Google, Amazon, Square, Etsy, MongoDB, and more. And I made it to nearly the final round of every one. I knew I couldn’t quite do that this time.

For starters, I had just moved. I wasn’t ready to relocate before I had even lived in Pittsburgh for a year. So I was looking for remote or local work.

But as time has went on, I’ve sort of landed in this spot where I’m in a new language, a new tech stack, a new field… basically everything new. Ultimately, I see this as a skill. I’m a great problem solver, and so if you throw me into a weird situation, I’ll find a way out. The more I expose myself to different languages/frameworks/technologies, the better I think I end up after seeing all sorts of new ways to approach problems. The downside is, of course, there’s a bit more ramp-up time to get myself going. My last job appreciated this though. There would be 2-3 days after a new task was assigned to me where in standup all I could go was “Uh, I’m learning this thing.” However, time and time again I not only solved problems but felt like I conquered them. The more time goes on, the more I’m finding this is an amazing skill.

I learned to program in first grade, so one might way since it’s 2019 that I have about 30 years of experience. But obviously not all of that was paid and in a business setting. If you count work since I got out of college, then it’s only four years of experience. But I had development jobs before college too. I estimate if you added up all of those positions, I probably have 7-8 years of experience. I taught C++ in college as well for three years, so I figure having to know a language strongly enough to not only teach someone but answer all sorts of weird questions thrown at me and have examples of how to do it should count for at least one of experience on its own.

This range is a very weird thing to reflect, both in interviews and on a resume. People seem to want to calculate it differently, and the prevailing number seems to be the lowest.

But when it comes to my “seniority” as a developer, it gets even trickier. No matter which number you pick, if I haven’t stayed in one stack/language long enough, I don’t come off as “senior” in it. Which is weird because I feel like the “seniority” of a developer comes from experiences in problem solving, in software design, in dealing with data and algorithms, and in dealing with other teammates, clients, and other people. The best developers are going to have this big bundle of experiences. And I have that. But if a job is looking for someone with 6 years of .Net, that’s not me.

(Though I have 6 years of experience and have .Net experience.)

In other words, the longer I go into my career, the harder I’m finding it is to “sell myself” (as those career coaches like to say) to future employers despite the fact that all of them would probably agree that these individual skillsets are important.

Experiences in My Interviews

Since I’ve been looking at local Pittsburgh jobs as well as others that are remote, I’ve had a wider variety of interview types than I did in the last round. This seems to include:

Experience questions (ex: “Tell me about your last project you worked on,” “What did you do when you encountered a situation when…”)
Technical questions (ex: “How would you go about solving a problem where…”)
Coding questions (ex: “Here’s a small problem, please code the answer in this language” but also where I discuss what I’m thinking)
Pairing questions (a coding interview, but there’s discussion back and forth with the interviewer)
Computer Science Trivia (ex: “What are the steps in a HTTP request?”, “What does REST mean and what are the different commands it uses?”)

I’ve been tracking stats of every one of my interviews on Trello. I’ve probably done over 70 phone calls of some sort or another. I’m definitely seeing some major patterns.

For starters, one of the biggest problems I’m having lately is ghosting, or the process where the interviewer or recruiter doesn’t get back to me and no longer responds to emails or phone calls. I’d say about a third of all of my interviews end this way. (This is a TERRIBLE percentage and it’s just plain rude for me to spend so much of my own time and energy to get no response.)

Another problem I see is that I learn later there’s some sort of discrepancy in information passed back and forth. For example, they reached out but are a much lower experience or pay than I had before, or along the way they changed their mind about what they were looking for in the role and failed to tell me. This usually results in me declining to go further, or me just not matching up to the revised attributes they’re looking for. (I once had a role I applied for that, mid-interviews, changed it’s job title to a stack I don’t work in. Recruiters said “oh keep chatting with them.” Interviewers were VERY confused why I applied for a role I knew nothing about. That was fun to explain.)

There’s been some others where they turned me down. Those are sort of the ones I want to focus on mostly.

Reflections on Interview Feedback

Most of my interviews don’t result in feedback, though I can kind of extrapolate a few general ideas of why they turned me down. Though there’s a few that do offer feedback, and they usually leave me quite annoyed, but not for the perhaps obvious reasons.

First, some of them seem to interchange “experience” and “knowledge” with each other. While I won’t dispute that having a good amount of knowledge (what I like to call “computer science trivia”, or the things I would have learned from a class in college) is important, I feel like the more “senior” a level is that I apply for, the more they assume that means I should remember more of these types of things. Obviously the further I get from college, the more I tend not to remember things from my classes because most of them don’t apply on a daily basis. And I don’t think memorizing as many terms as I can and knowing what acronyms stand for really equates to showing off my skills as a great problem solver.

Second, I’ve started to get some feedback where people see me as more an “individual contributor” than a “team leader” type thing (which some degree of leadership is something you generally want as a senior developer). I’m learning though it’s coming from something I wasn’t expecting: I’m too kind. I’ve learned that, as a team, it’s often a variety of people involved in pulling off things and I want to give everyone credit where it’s due. However, this becomes a problem in an interview when you have to talk about things you did. So I tend to start off talking about the project my team works on as a whole then try to dive into things I worked on, but I guess I’m doing it in such a way that it’s not reflecting my contributions well. (Fun fact: I had a director-level person just tell me that it’s funny because their teams work on so many things in pairs that they have trouble self-describing what they work on individually, so it’s weird they counted this against me.)

Finally, one of the things I’ve learned is that I really suck at the 9am-5pm job schedule. Partly because I just don’t do mornings well and even if I do get to an office on time, it takes me a bit to get fully going, but I’ve found I just don’t work well in one continuous block of time. Some of my best work is done in multiple, small bursts. Heck, I even solved a tremendous bug from about 11pm-2am once to get it done in time for a large scale deploy the next day that I knew was going to fail miserably. (I pushed the bug and emailed my team to say “this should solve all the problems for tomorrow’s deploy. I am sleeping in late and will see you after 11am.”, then went to bed. The deploy went flawlessly because of this. I was basically applauded by my manager in the company Slack for doing this.) But I’m finding I have to tread cautiously as I ask about core hours or scheduling, and many local and smaller companies have very strict hours or core hours (usually 9am-3pm) and there’s a tiny flexible window. But that window isn’t usually flexible to how I work best, and I’m usually not certain how to proceed (though often one of the other reasons for rejection happen).

(I do wonder sometimes if gender has a role to play as well, as studies show that men tend to just find other men more competent than women by default, and so I guess I have the bias game to fight against as well.)

So, Now What?

Good question. I’m not sure.

I have a temporary freelance project. It will last about a month. After it’s over though, I’ll be connected with a freelancing network in the area that seems to get projects quite regularly, and I might be able to just start picking those up. And honestly, at this point freelancing might seem to be the way to go. I’ll be thrown into random projects, in random tech stacks, and can use those problem solving skills to not only figure out solutions, but use my experiences to help design some software solutions. And with flexible hours, I can more or less work whenever my brain feels like taking on work. While I always hated the idea of finding my own work and dealing with client billing and such, the pros might outweigh the cons at this point.

I’ve pondered also if I should try to go back to school to get a Master’s degree. If I could go learn about robotics, or machine learning, or natural language processing, or something that seems interesting and up my alley, maybe it would give me that specialty that I keep hearing that I need and allow me to enter a challenging field I could succeed in.

It also makes me wonder if it’s time for me to do some hard core research and resource gathering on effective interviewing and team building strategies and start writing up some guides on how to do effective interviewing. I keep seeing things like “oh you know, tech people don’t know how to interview.” Why the heck not? There’s research out there. I’ve seen talks on it. If you care about hiring the right candidate, spend some time not just interviewing but making sure you’re interviewing correctly, and you’re judging your candidates in the right way possible.

But maybe in the mean time, I keep reflecting on my interview skills and try to document what I’m doing and take time to focus on building up other strategies for “selling myself.” Clearly my skills and experiences aren’t showing, and while I know the process of interviewing is terrible, maybe I need to take time to learn how to bend the rules to play the game a bit better.

I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and discuss this (though constructive feedback only). Let me know what you think!

~ Sarah

Photo credits:

Interview room: Razvan Caliman
Two rocks: Ann Kanth
Cell phone on table: Craig Young
Man with question marks: Bob Smith

Behind the Scenes of My New Website

Sarah Withee — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 19:00:00 +0000

Screenshot of my new website along with the web developer tools open

I did it! It took about two years to finally get myself to sit down and do it, but I converted two Wordpress sites on three domains into one static site!

I did a few cool things with it, so I wanted to talk about what I did.

(Note: I talk about a lot of technologies on here. It’s all my own opinion and no one’s paid me to say any of this.)

Before

Screenshots of my old sites side-by-side

I had originally owned the domain sarahwithee.com and used that mostly to host a website I built in mid-college. It was fine for what I needed it for. I was kind of terrible at design and had this left over cursive thing my friend Andrew made for me years ago, so I decided to find a theme and incorporate that. My friend Josepha Haden had a theme on her site at the time (in Wordpress) that I really liked, and used it on my site after modifying a few colors and background images. I didn’t have a lot going on at the time, so it made for a nice personal site.

I acquired geekygirlsarah.com later after realizing it was kind of my “brand” and I really should own it. I decided to start up a blog (again) after a blog a couple of friends and I had, Binary Girls, really didn’t pick up traction. (It was mostly me publishing stuff.) I imported in my old content and started slowly writing new content on there.

The Reasons For Updating

At one point, a site I helped manage running in Wordpress got hacked, and the whole site was trashed. It took a looooong time to recover from that, so I ended up installing some security software on my two WP sites. It worked well, but I’d see the stats and see how often they were getting hacking attempts and it was rather disconcerning. I didn’t know if it was because I now had a bit more of an audience or because my site was attractive for being WP (or both), but slowly started wondering if I needed something else.

I knew a lot of people were hyping the static sites. I was all on board for this idea, but one of the things that held me back was analytics. While I’m not a huge stats-watcher (and likes/follows/etc. aren’t my thing), I wanted something but didn’t want Google Analytics. I saw there were a few services, which I could pay for but didn’t feel up to paying their rates at the time. This held me back some.

Mostly, the site just felt outdated. It was old, the stuff people would come to my site for wasn’t really highlighted or easy to find. It was getting harder to manage the content (tables in WP are a pain and several pages had duplicate content). I wanted something easier to update.

The Upgrade

I knew my main options seemed to be Jekyll (based in Ruby), Hugo (based in Go), and Gatsby (based in React/Node), all of which I wasn’t familiar with.. I tried all three out for a bit. I really liked Hugo. I started on a trek to find some Hugo themes, found a few I liked, but after so much playing around, I couldn’t get them to quite do what I wanted. I was diving too far into docs to even pull off a few simple things, and I got tired of it and gave up.

There was Gatsby, but after reading a lot of the documentation, it felt the barrier to entry for me was too large. So I played around with Jekyll. And found some themes and could get them to work. After trying what felt like over a dozen, I finally settled on Minimal Mistakes, a nice flexible theme that I could get to do most of everything I wanted.

I knew I’d need to convert everything over from Wordpress to Markdown sounded like an absolute pain. I found a WP plugin to help with this, but a lot didn’t convert over well. I had to go back through each page (over two dozen, which I later condensed down to about 15) and all of the posts (over 55). But I got everything to work and my site was coming together.

I knew content rewriting was a thing that needed to happen. I spent some time trying to over over each page, keeping bits I liked, scrapping bits I didn’t, and making it first person instead of third. (I figured this helped as it was my site, but also it might be a portfolio-like thing, so I wanted it to sound more like I did it, not someone else did it for me). I figured if I was putting a resume and my blog on here, third person also seemed out of place. I updated all of the bios and pages and was good to go.

Finally, I wanted it to be open source, so I threw it on GitHub. I also knew about Netlify from some friends, so I tried them out and found it was super easy to deploy sites (and automatically update them), so that switch was easy. (And bonus: I was going to use Matomo for analytics, but within a month Netlify announced their own stats for a quarter of the price. I jumped right on that!)

Some Cool Parts

I know a lot of people know me from my conference speaking, so it’s important to have up to date notes, slides, videos, etc. from my talks as people go there to see things. I went through and updated all of the pages with the latest information, version histories, code updates, links to the GitHub content, and so on.

There’s also a schedule of talks, something I managed in HTML directly. It was pretty annoying. I knew Jekyll could do some manipulation based on data files. I started loading talks into a YAML data file (the full file is here):

- date: 2019-05-11
  end_date: 2019-05-12
  event: "!!Con"
  location: New York City, NY
  type: Lightning Talk
  title: I Built an Artificial Pancreas!
  event_url: http://bangbangcon.com/
  talk_url: https://sarahwithee.com/speaking/building-an-open-source-artificial-pancreas/
- date: 2019-06-07
  end_date: 2019-06-08
  event: Self.Conference
  location: Detroit, MI
  type: Session
  title: Building an Open Source Artificial Pancreas
  event_url: http://selfconference.org/events/2/sessions#speaker_2
  talk_url: /speaking/building-an-open-source-artificial-pancreas/

I was going to make files for past and future talks, but then found out based on date, I could filter things. I wrote this blurb that I was kind of proud of for pretty-printing talks in two tables, one for upcoming and one for past talks (and see the full file here):

{ % assign today = "now" | date: "%Y-%m-%d" % }

| Date | Event | Location | Talk Type | Talk Title | 
|------|-------|----------|-----------|------------|
{ % for item in site.data.conftalks % }
  { % assign event_date = item.date | date: "%Y-%m-%d" % }
  { % if event_date >= today % }
    { % if item.date == item.end_date % }
      { { item.date | date_to_xmlschema | date_to_string: "ordinal", "US" } }
    { % else % }
      { { item.date | date_to_xmlschema | date_to_string: "ordinal", "US" } } - { { item.end_date | date_to_xmlschema | date_to_string: "ordinal", "US" } }
    { % endif % }
    | { % if item.event_url % }
        <a href="{ { item.event_url} }" target="_blank">{ { item.event } }</a>
      { % else % }
        { { item.event } }
      { % endif % }
    | { { item.location } } 
    | { { item.type } } 
    | { % if item.talk_url % }
        <a href="{ { item.talk_url} }">{ { item.title } }</a>
      { % else % }
        { { item.title } }
      { % endif % }
{ % endif % }{ % endfor % }

(Note: to make this render for the blog as well as aid in readability, I added a variety of spacing to it. Check out the full file for the correctly formatted version.)

This would print the items in a table if the date was today or later. I basically made another similar block for if the date was in the past. Once I put everything on one line (since tables are formatted that way in Markdown), it was so cool to think I just could add a conference to a data file and the site generates itself. (I shouldn’t be too amused at this, I am a programmer. But simplifying this felt wonderful!)

Screenshot of the Latest Podcasts section of the home page

For the home page, the theme included a feature_row, which let you have a left-aligned or right-aligned row on the front page. I modified it a bit to include a feature_block, which would let me show a few entries of data of some sort. I chose to put upcoming talks, latest podcasts, and blog posts there. I can pull from the same YAML lists of data, and just pull the last 3 (or however many) items I want and show it as a list.

That looks like this:

{ % assign type = include.data_type % }
{ % assign show_number = include.show_number % }

{ % if type % }
  { % assign today = "now" | date: "%Y-%m-%d" % }{ % assign count = 0 % }{ % if f.url contains "://" % }{ % capture f_url % }{ { f.url } }{ % endcapture % }{ % else % }{ % capture f_url % }{ { f.url | relative_url } }{ % endcapture % }{ % endif % }
  <ul>
    { % if type == "posts" % }
      { % for item in site.posts % }
        { % if count < show_number % }
          { % assign date = item.date | date: "%Y-%m-%d" % }
          <li>{ { date | date_to_string: "ordinal", "US" } }: <a href="{ { item.url } }" target="_blank">{ { item.title } }</a></li>
          { % assign count = count | plus:1 % }
        { % endif % }
      { % endfor % }
    { % elsif type == "talks" % }
      { % for item in site.data.conftalks % }
        { % if count < show_number % }
          { % assign date = item.date | date: "%Y-%m-%d" % }
          { % if date >= today % }
            <li>{ { date | date_to_xmlschema | date_to_string: "ordinal", "US" } }: <a href="{ { item.event_url } }" target="_blank">{ { item.title } }</a> ({ { item.type } }, { { item.event } })</li>
            { % assign count = count | plus:1 % }
          { % endif % }
        { % endif % }
      { % endfor % }
    { % elsif type == "podcasts" % }
      { % for item in site.data.podcasts reversed % }
        { % if count < show_number % }
          { % assign date = item.date | date: "%Y-%m-%d" % }
          <li>{ { date | date_to_xmlschema | date_to_string: "ordinal", "US" } }: <a href="{ { item.url } }" target="_blank">{ { item.episode } }</a> ({ { item.show } })</li>
          { % assign count = count | plus:1 % }
        { % endif % }
      { % endfor % }
    { % endif % }
  </ul>
{ % endif % }

(Note: Again, it’s been modified for readability and rendering. See the full file here.)

The simple explanation of this:

If there is a type (posts, talks, podcasts) passed in, show the block (otherwise hide it)
Loop through the items sorted forward (talks) or reversed (podcasts/posts)
If the item matches a future/past date, then show it
Increase a counter
Break out of loop after you reach 3 (or however many) items

So then I just do three of these together to make all three blocks on the home page!

<div class="home_feature_table_cell">
  <h2>Upcoming Talks</h2>
  { % include feature_block data_type="talks" show_number=3 % }
  <a href="/speaking/" class="btn btn--primary">All Talk Schedule</a>
</div>

Deploying

Screenshot of the Deploys page of Netlify

I knew if I was getting rid of Wordpress, I could keep hosting a server myself, or I could use something like Netlify to do it all for me. Netlify is a static site hosting service. When you push up content, they not only publish it but use a variety of content delivery networks (CDNs) to make it super fast. Personal plans are

free (you pay for extra services or larger sites). It’s quite great!

Because it ties into Git and GitHub, I can just push to my master branch and it will automatically rebuild the Jekyll site and push out a new version. It’s configured to run the right commands (mostly just jekyll build) and because it caches all the dependencies, it gets to be super fast. I just need to include a .ruby-versionfile in my root to tell it what version to build the site against and it works its magic.

They even include free features like getting certificates from Let’s Encryptso I can have SSL for no cost either. I have all three of my old domains here (geekygirlsarah.com, sarahwithee.com, geekygirlsarah.dev). All of them redirect to geekygirlsarah.com for simplicity sake. (I may get rid of sarahwithee.com in the future for one of the other Sarah Withees in the world to have.)

Another cool feature is they allow some simple web forms to submit somewhere. I configured a contact form on a page in a way that lets Netlify just take the content and email it to me. It can also be set up with spam detection, which has kept the emails slim. The free version allows 100 messages a month, but since I never even hit that with spam from my last site, I didn’t worry much.

But finally, there was one pesky thing I wanted to ensure: backward compatibility. I still have business cards, old tweets that link things, links from my slides, etc. I wanted them to be rather smooth and seamless to just transition over. Netlify came to the rescue again with a _redirects file in my root. This tells them to just send anyone going to a URL in the left column to a URL in the right. This lets me also do things like link geekygirlsarah.com/talks back to it’s new home geekygirlsarah.com/speaking and still work. Blog posts all go to their original URLs, and it lets the confusion of two sites work like one.

# Redirect domain aliases to primary domain
https://sarahwithee.com/* https://geekygirlsarah.com/:splat 301!
https://geekygirlsarah.dev/* https://geekygirlsarah.com/:splat 301!

# These extra rules are required because HTTPS is not forced
http://sarahwithee.com/* https://geekygirlsarah.com/:splat 301!
http://geekygirlsarah.dev/* https://geekygirlsarah.com/:splat 301!

# Optional: Redirect default Netlify subdomain to primary domain
https://geekygirlsarah.netlify.com/* https://geekygirlsarah.com/:splat 301!
http://geekygirlsarah.netlify.com/* https://geekygirlsarah.com/:splat 301!

# Misc captures
/talks/ /speaking/
/press/ /media/

# Talk - Building Your Team to Last
/build-your-team/ /speaking/building-your-team-to-last/
/building-your-team/ /speaking/building-your-team-to-last/
/buildingyourteam/ /speaking/building-your-team-to-last/
/buildyourteam/ /speaking/building-your-team-to-last/

# Other talks are included on full file...

I try to make short links to my talks, and I realized they might be easily confused, so I set up all the variations people might mess it up with. (Or I might forget I told people!)

Analytics

Wordpress contains some great analytics from their Jetpack plugin. I used that, but can’t use it anymore with the static site. I knew I didn’t want Google Analytics (as I try to avoid dumping my life into their data-hungry servers) so I looked into alternatives. I found Matomo, which would have been $20/month for their analytics. It was just a pixel tracker I’d add to the page. While I was on the trial of that to see if I liked it, Netlify actually announced their own analyticsfor $5/month. Since theirs is based from pure server logs (which are collected anyway), it doesn’t require pixel trackers. And since the logs exist anyway, it doesn’t slow down the site. I signed up to try it out and liked it.

Feedback

I spent a couple of weeks working on the basics, then sent it to some friends for opinions. Most of them loved it immediately. Feedback continued to improve over the next month or so as I rewrote pages, reworked layout of things like the Speaking page, and reworked the navigation to try to simplify everything.

And now? I’m quite happy with it! It takes only a couple of minutes to open up my repo, make a small change if need be, commit it, and Netlify automatically pulls in that change and publishes a site in under 20 seconds. I can write a blog post nearly anywhere I have a text editor, then just also push it to my _posts directory and it magically shows up on the site. And I can run a local copy easily with bundle then jekyll serve and see anything. It also makes me happy that I can offer it online in case anyone wants to use any of the same things I did.

I’d also love to hear any feedback of what you think, especially if you remember my old websites. Drop me a tweet on Twitter, a message on my Contact page, or drop me a line some other way. I’d be curious to hear what you think! I’m also happy to answer questions about if you see anything you want to incorporate onto your site.

Thanks for reading!

~ Sarah

Year in Review: Part 2 – 2019 Goals

Sarah Withee — Sun, 19 May 2019 17:59:53 +0000

I started writing this post back in January (an ideal time to do some yearly reflections and goal-setting). Then life took over. My whole team was laid off, I started organizing Abstractions’ program and CFP (call for proposals), and got a huge wave of conference acceptances. All of this took away time and sort of backlogged this post. So it’s mid-May and this post got abandoned. Coincidentally, my idea of what I wanted out of the year also changed, so perhaps it worked out in the end to wait this long before I finish up this super old post.

In Part 1 of my Year in Review post, I wrote about what happened in the past year (or two) in my life, both good things that happened as well as some things that could be improved. In this part, I hope to put into words what I really want to figure out and work on in this year..

Job Hunting

At the end of February, my company laid off my whole team. I feel better knowing this wasn’t anything to do with me, and got a small severance. But I am on the job hunt. It feels like I just went through this a little while ago, but it happens.

It seems to be a weirder spot I find myself falling into with each job hunt. I’m an amazing generalist: I’m the Jill of all trades and the master of none. I rock at a lot of things that are thrown at me, even with lack of knowledge in it, but it’s a hard sell to try to say “no really, I’m a senior (or higher) level developer despite not being an expert in that thing.” Companies seem to love hiring those experts. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be considered one of those. The problem is I keep landing in a variety of fields and are all totally different, languages that are all different, doing tasks that are all different. It really sets me up to be great at whatever I work on, but it’s a harder sell to tell them to hire me. I think I’m really the perfect consultant but want the stability of a corporate workplace.

Add in my conference speaking, workshop teachings, and all the other things I do and I look a lot more attractive to employers. But considering I have a bunch of time I’ll need off for the future events I have, I become less attractive. Go figure. In this case, I’m probably better suited for developer advocacy, but I also love development too much to want to give it up.

Then people often say “You’re SOOO good with people, you should be a manager.” Well, ok… I think I am good with people. I could manage a small team or project probably alright. The problem is that’s not THE job position I want. I’ll do it as a part of my regular work but I know I will feel very out of place and unfulfilled if I moved to that type of role.

So I’m still looking. I have many leads (which I will probably need all that I can get) and hopefully one of them sees my talent and is willing to take a chance on me, and they in turn are everything I’d want or need out of a job!

Mentoring and Teaching

I quit doing most of my mentoring and teaching last year, mostly after my move, and it left a bit of a hole in my heart. I want to get back into it. I’m thinking at minimum of going back to the kids in robotics that I helped out for several years. I may not be able to do it as regularly as usual (maybe 1 day a week instead of 2-3), but I think it’s important enough I need to go back.

(Update: I did find a high school girls’ FIRST robotics team. I applied to volunteer with them and a background check is still pending. I am thinking of applying to TEALS, an organization that works with local schools to help improve computer science classes and departments, including sometimes teaching the classes.)

Conference Speaking

Wow, conference speaking. In the last year, I have had a >90% acceptance rate (only turned down from one conference in the dozen or more I applied to). It’s great, it’s refreshing feeling this compared to past years’ really terrible rejection rates and lack of new ideas. It’s been harder to fit them in though. The great thing though is that the one I got rejected from would mostly be a nostalgia feel of speaking in the past and it going so well, but I don’t know that there’s much I miss outside of seeing some people I like again. (It’s also a conference with a big focus on drinking culture, something that I don’t partake in and found I don’t miss from conferences that don’t have that.) I’ve been going to so many cool conferences with cool aspects to them (either fun locations like being in a water park, or cool twists like it ends with a premiere of a movie, or are just so much about the joy of technology and not at all work-related) that I’d much rather keep going to those. So I’ll probably be focusing on those in the future.

Not directly related to conference speaking, over at Abstractions (the conference I’m helping organize right now), we did some open mentoring CFP sessions. They were zoom video calls where people could come in, ask any conference-related, CFP-related, or talk-related question they had. We were asked about ideas they had, how to make better abstracts to submit, and just for general advice. I LOVED that we could provide this for them. So much so that I’m working towards making open CFP mentoring a regular event every month. So I’d love to get this up and going.

Reading and Listening

Like many people, I tend to build up a collection of browser tabs full of things I want to read or look at later. For years, I built up bookmarks and Pocket entries. And the books people would loan me to read piled up and I never read them. I just never sat myself down to really go through these things.

One thing I discovered last year was Pocket’s text-to-speech feature. You could bookmark sites in it, and they’d show up in a simple easy-to-read format on screen, but if you clicked the headphone icon, it would read it to you. Amazing! Many mornings now I get up, open Pocket, and have it just start reading me things. I feel like I learn so much now, both in terms of cool things (like how they took the picture of the black hole) or current events (latest news and other things), but also can catch up with some friend’s blogs. It’s been really helpful, especially since I can listen in the car (though don’t have a regular job to drive to anymore) and makes my mornings feel better than just showering and getting ready with nothing going on.

I hope to be able to keep this up. I’m really a sponge when it comes to learning things, so I want to keep filling my life with great things. Maybe with this habit, I can finally start to figure out ways to read books (even if they’re read to me). I always feel bad that I end up with books I don’t touch (and some of them I’ve had with me for a decade now and don’t remember the original owners).

Self Care

The more time goes on, the more I realize this is important. I want to make sure I dedicate enough time to taking care of myself, but enough money too. One example is that I need a haircut, but also don’t have a hair person in Pittsburgh yet. I really need to buckle down and get some recommendations. I’m kind of thinking maybe I need weekly or monthly self care goals and strive to meet them.

Side Projects

I’ve had a variety of things I’ve wanted to do over the last few years. Some have been touched, some not. I rarely get things finished, and sometimes I just run out of energy or time to work on a thing. It’s kind of depressing.

One of the things I think is most important is starting to find ways to finish them. One finished project is better than 12 unfinished ones. I need to find some and spend the time to finish them out.

Another thing I really want to do is to find collaborators. I can’t do these on my own, and I know some people want to be involved in open source projects, find ways to boost their resumes, learn more things in tech, as well as ways to boost their own names, so I’d love to provide ways people can do that. It’d also be nice to work with some friends (current ones or maybe new). I’m not totally sure how to find these people yet, but maybe that’s where social media (or perhaps this blog post) could come in.

Other things

There’s some other things I’d like to figure out, but they seem all able to fall under the above categories. And I’d rather see this goals post go online than drag on and on about a hundred other things.

Conclusion

2019 has been a decent year so far, despite a few of the downsides. I think I have less concrete goals now than I have in the past, but perhaps finding some direction to go with things can help set me up for success in the future, whatever that “success” may look like.

So here’s to the rest of 2019! May it be filled with good things and some better direction!

As always, I love to hear what others are up to. Do you have goals (even halfway through the year)? How are you coming along on those? Feel free to reach out on Twitter or any of the other social media things (I’m @geekygirlsarah everywhere).

Thanks to Jamie H. for reviewing this post for me!

Year in Review: Part 1 – 2018 Retrospective (with some bits from 2017 too)

Sarah Withee — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 10:56:14 +0000

Pittsburgh skyline (photo by allenran917, CC BY 2.0, https://www.flickr.com/photos/allenran917/6799707859/)

I started trying to write a year in review/retrospective every year since 2015. I think it’s good to reflect on accomplishments and the good things that have happened in my life, but maybe also on some things that could have gone better too.

I didn’t end up writing a 2017 year in review. I think some of it was just last year was really rough, but also so much felt up in the air by the end of it. Then very early in 2018 I got a new job, relocated, and stuff started very quickly repairing itself. It was good, but a lot happened quickly at the beginning of the year, and I never finished my draft.

While I want to focus mainly on 2018 accomplishments, I will probably try to throw some bits of what I remember about 2017 as well. I accomplished some more things and different things than I originally intended for both.

So on that note, maybe I’ll dive in!

What Went Well

Reflections

2017 felt like The Year That Needed To Change and 2018 kind of became The Year Where Everything Changed. 2017 felt exhausting and full of emotion. 2018 was full of emotions too, but mostly because it meant a TON of change and sometimes uncertain ones. While I wish things moved faster, I’m generally glad they worked out how they did.

I’m bolding the key points for skimming.

Accomplishments

My biggest accomplishment probably was my relocation: I moved to Pittsburgh on March 31, 2018 after living in Kansas City basically all my life. I didn’t have an end destination to my move so I was on the hunt for jobs outside of my hometown. I found a great job, and after visiting Pittsburgh and talking to the people I know that live there, it seemed like a wonderful city. So it seemed like a good deal. It was a bit bittersweet… I knew I needed out of KC and part of it was a feeling like my friends had moved on with their lives. Of course as soon as I announced I was moving, they came back full force and showed how much they’d miss me. My friend Abbey held a going away party that had about 50 people there. It was incredible. And while I knew I would miss my friends, I knew I’d need a life reboot, and this helped immensely.
Going along with the relocation, I got a great job : After 8 months of interviewing, I was hired by Arcadia.io. (They were Arcadia Healthcare Solutions when they hired me, then renamed about a week in.) It was the perfect combination of things: a great company with a wonderful product, a great team working on something interesting that I’d learn a lot from, a manager who wasn’t just smart but was very aware of things like the need for gender diversity in tech, but also cared about the people as well as the work, good teammates, great pay, and great benefits (including unlimited PTO, pay for conference speaking, and more). It felt so good that I had to call several close friends and say “What is the catch? What am I missing?” One friend said “You’d be stupid not to take this job.” So, I took the job!
Almost immediately I reconnected with Justin Reese, the founder of Code & Supply (a co-working and community space for software professionals) as well as Abstractions, Uptime, and Heartifacts, all software conferences. I joined the co-working space, gave a couple of talks, was the emcee for Heartifacts, and joined the organizing committee for Abstractions 2. It’s been a great group for me so far, and I’m glad to connect to some good software people so quickly.
I, thankfully, knew a lot of people in Pittsburgh when I moved in, mostly from Slack communities or Twitter. Once I landed in Pittsburgh, I was quickly trying to join all the social things in town I could to meet up with the internet-based people I knew, as well as to find new friends. Some of them are below.
In early 2017, I joined the Kansas City Women’s Chorus. It was something artsy I ended up trying, not really knowing how it would work out, or really if I was even good enough to go in. Very quickly I started realizing that my imposter syndrome feels weren’t valid. When I heard myself doing different things than my section, often the director would correct the group and I was doing it right. Overall, I did three concerts with KCWC, and it gave me an amazing sense of confidence I never could have imagined having, and I felt more beautiful singing with those approximately 100 women than I had in a long time. (Oh, and I’m on a CD recording now!) So when I moved, I immediately joined the Renaissance City Choir, and by June 2018 I was doing my first concert with them, and even read a powerful coming out story during a concert, and got a standing ovation from it unlike anything I’ve had before. It was rather amazing!
I had jury duty in October 2017. Most people dread it and kept telling me to get out of it. I didn’t object, both feeling good to do the civic duty, but also knowing that the state paid $6/day plus travel/parking for it, but my day job paid me for jury duty anyway, so I felt better doing it when I know so many people couldn’t realistically afford to. It was a VERY mentally and emotionally filled event. It was a first degree murder case, but also had a twist to it. I was unanimously voted in as jury foreman too , and helped those 11 others come to a solid verdict, and later sentencing. I’m proud of myself for doing it.
I went to both my sister’s wedding and my friends Emily and Uli’s wedding in 2017. I was glad to be there for my sister. I also had the most fun time at “EmUli’s” wedding and it was so many great memories!
I tend to get depressed and sad in Decembers for a variety of reasons I won’t list here (though feel free to ask me about). I tried something different in 2017: I got a post office box and then asked the internet to send me postcards , and posted that address. I got well over 70 postcards and other cards, which made my December really great. In 2018, I went back to my hometown of Kansas City and spent over a week visiting friends. It did a great of job helping me even forget all the things that usually drag me down. While I wanted to do the postcard project and didn’t get around to getting the PO box again, it was fine. Maybe in 2019?
I told myself, especially after getting the new job, to make my health a priority. I’ve always hated dealing with medical clinics and such, but went back to my doctor at the end of 2017, then found a few one within 3 months of landing in Pittsburgh. I’m a type 1 diabetic, and my blood sugars were all out of whack because I kind of quit trying to manage it. So as of the end of 2018, my numbers are some of the best I’ve ever had, and expect my next appointment’s test values to surprise her at how well I’m doing now.
Speaking of the type 1 diabetic (T1D) stuff, I built an OpenAPS rig, and started using it to be my “artificial pancreas.” Besides being a fun thing to talk about (“what is that pouch on your belt?” “It’s my artificial pancreas. Want to hold it?”), it has been wonderful tool to help me learn about my body and how it’s working (or not working as the case may be), and have it help automatically regulate some of the medicine on its own. It seriously has probably been the single best tool I’ve had since this diagnosis over 6 years ago.
Oh, and I’m talking about my T1D now. I always hid it because of the bad stigma it seems to have in our society, but I think I decided to just be open about it now. I also joined a group of other Pittsburgh type 1 people: The T1Yinzers.
After a talk one day with my friend Nate Taylor, we ended up starting the hashtag #SpeakerConfessions, a way of admitting something about public speaking that we don’t normally talk about. Within a few hours it picked up virality, and thousands of people tweeted, both newer speakers and experienced ones, including some rather famous in the tech speaking scene. It was rather awesome to watch happen!
Financially, I rebuilt my savings account, paid off my credit card, started contributing a large amount to retirement, and started making a dent in the car loan in 2018. (The new job salary helped immensely!) I still feel like I’m behind on life financially (for example, my 401k is a LOT smaller than it probably should be for a 35-year-old), this job really gave me the first opportunity to make some major repairs to my financial situation.
After nearly 3 years after I lost my wonderful kittyfriend Waldo, I adopted Rorshach and Theodosius, two wonderful social and cuddly cats. They’re brothers who get along wonderfully. Sometimes I feel like was it a mistake to get two (sooooooo much food and poop and they take up so much of my bed), but they are great for me and great for each other, and I have the means to take care of two, so I wanted to do it.
Finally, in September 2018, I started soap making. It was sort of another “can I be artsy?” experiment, but I didn’t really want a bunch of terrible paintings or lopsided pottery. Soap is kind of a nice way to make good looking and smelling stuff that’s totally usable, but also can easily give it away to people. I’ve made several batches now, and some of them smell rather wonderful!

Stats for the Year:

2017:

Spoke at 4 different conferences
Organized 2 events and a conference
Wrote 18 blog posts
Interviewed on 1 podcast
Had 46 job interviews at 16 companies over 7 months
Traveled on 11 trips over 35 days traveling 27,472 miles to 19 cities (including layovers, according to TripIt)

2018:

Spoke at 6 conferences and 2 events
Organized 2 events and a conference
Wrote 4 blog posts
Interviewed on 1 podcast
Had 8 job interviews at 2 companies over 1 month (then was hired)
Traveled on 16 trips over 66 days traveling 21,144 miles to 25 cities (including layovers, according to TripIt)

Speaking

In 2017, I started getting my first invites to speak at conferences (as opposed to invites to apply to speak). And in 2018, I gave my first keynote (which I was told was really inspiring). And a bit of foreshadowing, I got accepted to speak at my first international conference , which will be in 2019.

In 2017, I also did something a bit different. A friend of mine was one of the producers for Listen To Your Mother, a nationwide series of shows where people read personal essays about motherhood. At the suggestion of my friend, I submitted an essay I wrote in 2013, and it was accepted. I read this essay to the crowd, among about a dozen other really powerful essays. Some were funny, some sad, some just deep (like mine). It’s not my normal type of thing, but I’m glad I did that too.

Talks (2017):

“I’d Like To Be A Mother Someday, But…” (Listen to Your Mother 2017 essay, gave once)
How to Start a Podcast (lightning talk, gave 1x)
The Power of Secrets (conference talk, gave 2x for total of 3 times)
Life as a Midwestern Developer (conference talk, gave 1x)
Intro to Hacking with the Raspberry Pi (conference talk, gave 1x for total of 7 times)
Pursuing a Passion Project: Struggles and Successes (conference talk, gave 1x)

Talks (2018):

“Doors” (keynote, gave once)
Was emcee for Heartifacts conference (2 days)
Building Your Team to Last (conference talk, gave 1x for a total of 3 times)
A Primer on Functional Programming (conference talk, gave 3x for a total of 4 times)
Maintaining Your Mental and Emotional Health While Job Hunting (conference talk, gave 2x)
I Built an Artificial Pancreas (lightning talk, gave 2x)
Was on a discussion panel for microcontrollers and embedded systems for a meetup group

Podcasts and Articles:

Hallway Chats podcast episode 29 (2017)
Published “Productivity and Mental Health” in The Human in the Machine (2017)
Mentioned in two friends’ blog posts (2017)
Mentioned in The Recompiler newsletter (2017)
Mentioned twice in the Technically Speaking newsletter (2017)
Screaming Into the Cloud podcast episode 12 (2018)
Interviewed for a Teen Vogue article (with 12 others) who had name changes (2018)

Other Event Involvement:

Volunteer with Strange Loop (2017, 2018)
Organizer for the Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas Women in Computing conference (2017)
Organizer and emcee for Heartifacts (2018)
Organizer for Abstractions (started in 2018, event in 2019)

What Could Be Improved?

This is a hard thing to really say. There were a lot of things that could probably have been improved, but some things needed to be but couldn’t. Probably the biggest thing I can think about in 2017 is to find better ways to do self care. I landed in a funk that lasted a long time and many life events weren’t going well, and I didn’t do much to fix it (and probably had a few bad side effects as well). I should have taken a lot more time to myself.

For 2018, the new job and move did wonders for me. At the same time, I hit the ground running very quickly and then didn’t take extra time for myself. So when I got worn out by the end of the year, it ended up being extremely hard to take a vacation when I needed it (partly due to busyness, partly due to work denying my requests). So while I needed the quick dive into being social when landing in Pittsburgh, I should have taken some extra time early to get adjusted to the new time zone, to just relax some, and to maybe run away for a vacation for a bit.

Public speaking has become a bigger thing in my life, and I really have enjoyed it. I do feel like I’ve fallen a bit more lax on my preparations in the past year. One of the things I’m wanting to do (and have already started for my January 2019 talks) is to go over them slide by slide, make sure they read well, present them to myself and make sure I know the material, and just overall make sure they’re top quality. I want 2019 to have really good, strong talks.

Finally, I also want to make my 2019 Year in Review post now, and add slowly to it over the course of the year. It’s hard to remember back to the beginning of the year.

Final reflections

It originally felt weird to try to catch up on 2017 and 2018 at the same time. But in a way they sort of work together. One was a year of things going wrong and one was a year of repairing those things. So it sort of worked.

I feel a lot more at peace with my life and how things are right now, which is not something I’ve felt for a while. It seems like most of my adult life has been blindly navigating whatever happens as it happens, and it’s only now that I feel I have a path to go on. I still don’t necessarily know where I’m going, but I do feel I’m pretty reasonably set up to be successful in 2019, and I’m kind of excited to see where things take me. (And there are a few things already in motion that I can’t quite mention yet, but I have some fun things to share in the near future!)

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I’d love to see your success posts too!

~ Sarah

Recap: Self.Conference 2018

Sarah Withee — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 16:22:23 +0000

Back in mid-August, I got the opportunity to speak at Self.Conference for my third year in a row. While a few things had changed this year, it still remains probably my favorite conference I’ve ever been to.

What I’ve Loved About It

On their website, they say “Self.conference is a mix of fantastic tech presentations and insightful soft talks in fabulous downtown Detroit. We’re filling two whole days with languages, tools, diversity, empathy, process, and team talks to help you expand your knowledge, meet other technically-minded folk, and immerse yourself in Detroit’s tech renaissance.”

The organizers say they strive for about 50% technical talks and 50% people talks. And I think this is a great combination. Most conferences I go to seem to have a small corner of the conference for the people (or “soft”) talks, but this conference embraces it. Because of that, I think it embraces the parts of software development that’s really important: the people making software, and the people using the software.

And it’s not just in the talks themselves, I find that all the side conversations tend to be really empathetic as well. I have always felt really comfortable at Self.Conference because I can always have a chat about tech things, but also about how important accessibility or taking care of ourselves. It’s an exciting refreshing conference amongst all of the other ones I land at every year.

What Changed This Year?

They switched venues from the Motor City Casino to the Greektown Casino. The benefit was location: It was right in the heart of downtown, so there was so much to walk to and do nearby the venue. The previous venue was almost just in a part of town that had nothing really near it. The downside seemed to be flexibility. The organizers told me that it almost was non-stop problems for them, and they’re definitely switching again.

For me personally, I relocated to Pittsburgh. This meant I was about 3.5 driving hours away as opposed to about 3-4 flying hours away. It made for a nice, reasonable road trip. I increased it a bit by picking up my friend Rae along the way and we did the trip together.

How Were The Talks?

Like always, there was so much great and insightful content that it made it hard to choose what to do! Some confs I go to have so many tracks and decision fatigue almost sets in. Here, there’s only up to 3 tracks at a time, so it makes it a lot easier to narrow down, though almost is more disappointing when I can’t go to another talk!

Rae Krantz – A Game of Theories: Why languages do what they do

While I haven’t seen Game of Thrones, I was curious to see Rae‘s talk, partly because I know her in real life and have heard about this talk, but partly because it seemed to appeal a bit to my polyglot side. While I missed a small bit of the beginning, I enjoyed seeing her dive into not how to program in them, but what the different statements and structures looked like and why they evolved into what they are. In the end, she compared them to different GoT characters. While I don’t know the story, I have heard enough cultural references to the characters to be at least somewhat amused by them.

Charlotte Shreve: An Introduction to Prolog & Why You Should Care

I learned after this talk that this was Charlotte‘s first talk, and I think she did great! Besides learning about Prolog (which I had mostly only heard about from older developers and references of its history in college) and how you might use it to solve some problems, she dived into why it was different than most object-oriented and functional languages you use now. She mentioned a lot about what I feel about being a polyglot developer myself: Knowing more than one language helps you think through problems in more diverse ways. And that’s why you should care!

Kim Crayton: Never Underestimate The Underdog: How To Use Perspective and Technology To Exploit Hidden Opportunities

I’ve followed Kim on Twitter for a while, and I’ve loved to see her insight to things, but I’ve loved watching her step up to call out some of tech’s diversity problems. In this talk, she talked a lot about Detroit and it’s past and present, and how the city formed some of the racial divides it has. She uses her experience as a former teacher to talk about how technology can be used to find ways to boost up opportunities to help people and how the more privileged people can boost up others to make people thrive even more.

Jeremy Searls: DIY IOT: Creating Connected Devices to Automate Your Live

In his first talk, Jeremy talks about how we can build random Internet of Things devices to help automate tasks in our home. With his experience as a firefighter (which basically gives him little to no hardware or software experience), he talks about how he built a device to let him know when the laundry’s done and how he took his coffeemaker and made it automatically fill up with water and brew it just from an Alexa command. It reminded me a lot of my Raspberry Pi talk on building projects, but I liked his spin on “I wanted to do a thing, I had no clue how, here’s how I did it and how I messed up a long the way.” It was a really cool way to show off what he learned.

Keynote – Nickolas Means: Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?

This talk fascinated me. The whole first 2/3 of the talk was on Three Mile Island and its nuclear reactor. He talked about how one of the two reactors headed towards a total meltdown, and he did it in enough detail that you literally knew all of the play-by-play moves that the crew did in that 24-hour time period. He described how a couple of wrong moves caused a chain of reactions that just made the whole situation worse and worse, and how it could have been stopped in a manner of minutes instead of growing to be huge problem. He did it without the complication of needing to know nuclear physics. In the end, he said it would be easy to blame some people for the problems of this, but… what if we changed it to “What destroyed Three Mile Island?” instead? He showed how every step that was messed up along the way was a systemic problem, not a mistake on the crew’s fault, which lead to what happened. Between the wrong kind of training to dashboards that hindered, not helped, and messed up parts that didn’t alert them correctly, no direct person was at fault for this. And if we can look at our software bugs and disasters in a similar blameless way, we can solve our problems faster, with less stress and drama, and everyone benefits in the long run.

Caleb Thompson: How I Built Software to Kill People

Caleb gave a talk that was not just interesting, but was done in a way that made me really reflective. He became a DoD contractor, and was asked to work on a research project. On the surface, it was interesting, and he had enough information to build it, but not much knowledge on how it was going to be used. Later down the line he learned his research was a precursor to a different technology, which later would be used by the military to track people down and kill them. He didn’t know going in that this would happen, and what would have changed if he did? What would have changed if he asked the right questions about what he was doing while it was going on, or before it started? He did this with almost no slides and just his narrative, which he delivered in a very well-paced, story-based way. It definitely made me leave with a lot more awareness of what we do, but also a sort of fear of sometimes how we use our emerging technologies in some disturbing ways. I will definitely be asking more questions about what my work will be ultimately used for in the future.

DeeDee Lavinder: How the Game is Played: Understanding Blockchain Basics

DeeDee gave her first talk as well, which I was excited to see. She talked about blockchains, but in a really well described way that didn’t revolve just around Bitcoin (which is one implementation of it, and the two are not the same). It’s a topic I’ve heard about, tried to do some research on, and got the basic idea of it without ever really knowing for the most part why this would be drastically changing tech. Her talk did a much better job of this than my research. She referred to some other examples of what people are doing with it, and even how to build blocks and build the chains with them. It’s one of those talks I love that help fill random holes in my knowledge that I never really knew I needed filled.

Ellen May: WIP: Debugging Depression

Ellen talked about depression, as both a thing she’s dealt with and how it affected her, but also as a way of showing how she’s evolved. She talked about how it’s really a process of working through it, and likely will take a long time. She also mentioned some resources to help, as well as ways for other people, teammates, and companies to help people going through depression.

Tori Brenneison: Strangelove.js, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Framework War

While I’ve never seen Dr. Strangelove, I’ve heard about it and know the basic premise. Tori took a fun approach of talking about the framework war (the “X is a better framework than Y!” fight) and showed a timeline of different frameworks, what made them different, why they came to be, and when they started to take off in popularity. Who won? Turns out the answer depends on how you look at the data, but… well, I kind of feel like I shouldn’t spoil the surprise. I will say the answer was not really surprising, but also kind of surprising at the same time.

The Hallway Track

Self.Conference has always had a great hallway track, the conversations that happen outside of the main sessions. I missed a keynote and a few talks in there (partly due to needing more sleep as well as some preparing before my talk) but again, have reconnected with some amazingly wonderful friends and made some new ones, and had some wonderful conversations about tech and non-tech stuff.

Finally, My Talk(s)

If you look at it one way, I gave one talk. If you look at it another, I gave three.

I closed out Friday’s sessions with everyone’s favorite topic: Job Hunting! In “Maintaining Your Mental and Emotional Health While Job Hunting”, I went in to my last 8-month job hunt, and how I knew this time needed to be different, and I was just looking for a new job. I also dive into how you shouldn’t just start looking for a job, but you should prepare yourself mentally first.

I later gave a lightning talk on my artificial pancreas, an IoT device built on the OpenAPS project. It uses some algorithms to help maintain some insulin levels that keep my glucose levels more steady. I’m planning to write a blog post about my life as a type 1 diabetic, about OpenAPS, and about how I kept quiet about this for so many years, but am wanting to speak up more.

Finally, at the suggestion of Rae, we did some lightning talk karaoke. It’s basically where you get a small pre-made slideshow and you make up the talk on the spot. It seems intimidating, but since you don’t know what you’re doing until you’re up there, it ends up being funny and silly, and not really stressful like you would imagine. I joined up with my friend Tori and we co-presented on Internet of Things. (And I let loose some rather great puns on the spot that I’m proud of.)

But going back to my main talk: I am kind of proud and not of my talk. The content was on-point! I’ll proudly say I think I did really well on coming up with this, especially since it’s been rolling around in my head for a while and it just took a while to get it into a form that was presentable. But I feel like my presentation of the content could have used some work. While giving it, I found some problems with how the slides worked (I thought I had duplicated slides but found out there were animation issues) and this caused it to sometimes go through material twice. I also ended up with a scratchy throat-thing that didn’t want to go away no matter how much water I drank. But in the end, many people came up and told me how much the material was great, and made total sense, and they had never thought of approaching job hunts and interviews in this way (including a few people confessing they were thinking of leaving their present jobs). So I felt good being able to share that information with them.

Conclusion

My third year of Self.Conference was great. I learned a lot, both in terms of tech-related things, but also in terms of how tech evolved over time, and how we tend to forget that what we do really has a history behind it. I learned more about empathy and using it in both our tech itself as well as in our daily lives. And I felt great being able to share another talk that I think helped people approach and think through a part of their career a bit better.

I will continue to recommend this conference as my #1 suggestion for anyone in tech!

If you went, or are thinking of going, I’d love to hear from you! Tell me what you think in the comments, or come find me on social media at @geekygirlsarah .