DEV Community: Jess West (she/her)

Celebrating CascadiaJS

Jess West (she/her) — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 23:19:07 +0000

Hey friends! We are super pumped to announce that the FIRST developer conference we’re attending as a Developer Experience team is something near and dear to (my) heart, CascadiaJS. CascadiaJS is a conference that has been traditionally based in Pacific Northwest (PNW). Last year, it went virtual, which brought together developers across the world, literally. This year, the conference team has tackled a new challenge: a hybrid event. We know how much goes into conferences like this and we couldn’t be more thrilled to support this community. In our minds, community is all about supporting and learning from each other. As we build our community for Lacework, we want to learn from the folks at CascadiaJS about how we can best support their needs.

A handful of us will attend and listen to what is happening in the community and we’d love for you to say hello! Our team will be attending virtually and in-person, so we hope to run into you and help cheer on our fearless speakers and organizers.

👾 Vatasha White
🏍 Tessa Kriesel
🎤 Jessica West

Now, we all know the real networking happens at the after-party, so we of course wanted to help be part of that community experience. We are proud to be sponsoring karaoke this year! Does anyone know any cool security karaoke songs? Asking for a friend… See you there!

🤗 LaunchDarkly is proud to be here at Codeland!

Jess West (she/her) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 11:50:19 +0000

HELLO CODELAND, we are excited to be with you alongside the DEV and CodeNewbie community!

Writing software is hard, deploying it shouldn’t be. We believe you should be able to deploy software without risk. LaunchDarkly enables development and operations teams to deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn't ready to be released to users. Wrapping code with feature flags gives you the safety to test new features and infrastructure in your production environments without impacting the end users.

When you are ready to release more widely, simply update the flag status and the changes are made instantaneously by our real-time streaming architecture. Check out how easy it is to get started.

Got Questions? Let's chat!

We'll be hanging out at our DEV Connect channel from 7:00a - 7:00p PDT today. We'd love to answer any questions you have about LaunchDarkly, so please swing by :)

Want more information outside of our live chat? Visit our Docking Station anytime!

Do you like space puns?

We do too and we didn’t even planet that way. Join us for a ride to remember at our upcoming event - Trajectory LIVE! We kick off our out-of-this-world experience next week and keep it going through August. There are going to be some universally applicable talks about feature management, we’ll pull you towards progressive delivery with more force than a super-massive black hole, and engage your inner Voyager as we explore the new age of software development and delivery.

Did we mention it’s free? Just like watching a meteor shower...and we are expecting an equal number of bright sparks.

Free Stuff 🎉

Want to learn how to get started with feature flags? Check out our “Effective Feature Management” book. Get a free copy of the book and a LaunchDarkly bandana shipped directly to your home!

Simply fill out this form (available for the first 100 signups):

Sign me up for the LaunchDarkly giveaway!

You must first sign in to DEV Community.

Opportunities at LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly supports the progressive delivery of your career!

Starting a career in technology isn't an all-or-nothing, one-and-done moment. It's a process that involves a lot of testing, trial, and experimentation. As a product, that's something we know a bit about. As a company, that’s how we got to where we are: By trying things until we found what worked for us.

👩‍🚀 We are looking for some engineers to join our team, could that be you? Check out some of the roles we have open:

Interested in what it’s like to work with us? Check out our some of our values: https://www.keyvalues.com/launchdarkly

Announcing CascadiaJS : PluggedIn

Jess West (she/her) — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:12:56 +0000

2020 --- What. A. Journey.

We have been working hard to figure out what we can do to best help our community and the people we have been working with in the Pacific Northwest. One of the ways we wanted to help is to move forward with our annual conference, but with a twist. This year CascadiaJS will come to you plugged-in on September 1st and 2nd. We are doing a themed week of content for our community and we are so excited to start sharing with everyone. Let’s dive in!

Speakers … Announced!

We have some amazing content and speakers lined up and are excited to release them. In traditional Cascadia-style, we are releasing them in a roll-out pattern. Please help us by welcoming our first set of speakers!

Stay tuned over the next week for more information!

Opportunity Scholarships

We have opened up our scholarships for our community to participate in our event this year. Traditionally we have always offered these to help off-set costs for those looking to gain access to information. This year is no different and we are working on ways to provide mentorship for these attendees beyond access.

Interested in being a mentor? Join our #mentors Slack channel!
Interested in applying for a scholarship? Review requirements and apply here.
Interested in supporting the scholarships? Donate towards the fund here.

Leading up to the event

Beyond the week itself, we want to kick off a few things to chat with our community! We will have a CascadiaJS Pre-Launch event in July. A prefunk so to speak! We’d love to have you join us to hear from Brian Leroux and James Quick. We will have more details on how to join soon, but mark your calendars for July 15th.

Sponsorship

Are you or your company interested in getting involved and supporting CascadiaJS this year? We have sponsorship opportunities still available you can review on our website or feel free to reach out to us at sponsorships@cascadiajs.com

We are so excited to bring CascadiaJS: PluggedIn with you! Follow us on Twitter for quick updates or subscribe to our newsletter for information.

To Virtual Conference or To Not... That is the question

Jess West (she/her) — Tue, 19 May 2020 03:19:53 +0000

Our world has (is) experiencing a very different shift in how to handle gatherings of all types. In the tech space, we have been evaluating how to handle conferences. When the COVID response escalated in March, the immediate shift for events happening within 1-6 weeks was either “abort mission!” or “let’s do this same set up, but online”. We’ve seen varying solutions and formats across different audiences. As we continue in this new normal --- it begs the question,

what is the best practice?

I’ve been part of a number of conversations both at work and in the broader community about what’s working, what’s not, and how we adapt. We even started an internal company poll asking our employees what format they would like to see. However, I thought it would be beneficial to do another sample, on Twitter. I posed this question last Friday and let the poll run through the weekend:

All this work and conversations around virtual conferences, and I have ✨opinions ✨.

🤓 However, I love data. And I'm curious to hear from others, specifically on format. So! Would you help me with a poll?

(🙏 RT for reach)

Would you rather:
— Jess Seattle West (@jessicaewest) May 16, 2020

First, I want to recognize how grateful I am for the engagement I received from this. I know people are tired from the week, and I appreciate everyone’s thoughtful responses. Reading through everything, I was able to distill some themes.

Why those poll options?

Yes, these times were specific. Some people were asking why those were chosen. The goal was to force a choice that mapped to a distinct priority for the responding individual. There were three main options (outside of a traditional eight-ten hour conference day).

Option A: Content in one week, but spread out past one day. This gives the feeling of accomplishment and engagement of “I went to this conference, I committed to it and here is what I learned”. It feeds that instant gratification of accomplishing going to something and having it “the one-and-done approach” and off your calendar. But, that’s a lot of screen time. This optimizes for the tactical engagement and the quick exchange of ideas and information.

Option B: Content spread out in a mini-series way. It lives past a week, so there is a commitment to see the whole thing, but in a way that’s digestible during your workday. This feeds the crowd of “I want to engage, but I can’t commit to more than 1-2 hours a week to it”. This could be anyone from a busy executive, to an engineer who couldn’t get time off, to someone wanting to break into this industry but has a full time job that doesn’t allow them to view a conference talk. This is a tactical approach, but with accommodations for the current pandemic. Still focused on the rapid exchange.

Option C: Content spread out even more than a mini-series, but in a way that maybe follows a release schedule or a theme per week. This engages people in a way that comes in and out of their work-lives, but is a consistent presence for longer than a month. This format is a long-term engagement. This approach is ideal for promoting discussion and the iteration of ideas a theme.

Option D: My favorite option. Other. (damn you Twitter, give me more options for my poll!) This is where we can open it up and hear from others on what’s in their hearts. Again, I’m really thankful for the conversation this poll sparked, hence the post now. Let’s dive into some themes.

Time Constraints

When we look at poll results alone we can see that the option of content being spread out over time (3 weeks in this poll option) was the 2nd top choice, by 35%. Having shorter times spread over a longer time makes it more accessible to different time zones, and approaches other audiences. Others argue that 2 hours may be too short a time to engage with an audience, based on the comments the sweet spot is between 2 hours and 5 hours. But there was a consistent requirement that the longer the engagement lasts the higher the bar for quality. ✨

However, an interesting counterpoint is that content spread out over such a lengthy period is no longer a conference. Many folks encouraged finding a different way to engage with audiences that is not replicating those in-person events that have gone away (at least for now).

Our’s is spread out over 3 weeks at 2 hours. I think it depends where your core audience is to pull off less days and longer hours. Should be mindful of time zone differences when you’re asking for more than a couple hours at a time.
— Sam Coren 🛸 is social distancing (@samcoren ) May 16, 2020

None of the above, let's make conferences for the remote/async reality.

All videos released at once. One track/week. Whatever length makes sense for the content. 1 week of chat rooms where all partners/speakers present for questions and discussion.
— Todd Gardner🍩 (@toddhgardner ) May 16, 2020

Tbh I’d probably be most interested in a single track over 2 days, but both at 5 hours. But I have a strong preference for single track.
— Becca Lee (@the_becca_lee) May 16, 2020

Hallway tracks and Unconferences

Something I think everyone can agree on, is that these conferences need a way for people to interact with one another. For many, this is the core reason they have gone to conferences in the past. Meeting like-minded people and having serendipitous conversations was such a significant value. Providing an outlet for speakers to interact with attendees and dive deeper into a concept from their talk. Allowing attendees to network is a significant part of what has allowed our communities to thrive at these conferences in the past.

Recognizing that need, and creating a way to engage with people regardless of your announcement, will be instrumental in our community success moving forward.

2 or 3 tracks over 2 or 3 weeks, with “hallway conversation” time built in.
— George Dinwiddie (@gdinwiddie) May 16, 2020

for what I am organizing, 3 tracks, 2 days, about 5 hours is what we are thinking right now. one of the tracks is unconference too.
— Taylor Barnett (@taylor_atx) May 16, 2020

I love that this prioritises the social/conversational benefits of conferences over the talks, while still relating to them. It has some problems to tackle (e.g. saving speakers from having to answer the same five questions over and over) but they seem mostly doable? Maybe?
— Yoz Grahame (@yoz ) May 16, 2020

Tooling and Options

While this poll focused on time slots alone, we have a number of conversations that spurred from it, but one theme was tooling. This is probably the number one question that comes up in conversations with event staff right now:

But what tool should we use?

We see options that have been traditionally used for video conferencing (GoToWebinar, Zoom) and then there are options popping up all over, like Vito (born from a popular ticketing system, Ti.to). There is even software attempting to replicate the conference experience with virtual reality booths. At the same time we are hearing conversations around Zoom fatigue and no one has quite found that sweet spot for how to have these types of events. Some responses mention options to engage with attendees and some are more “show me the right tool”. Both are valid and belong in this conversation, but tools will not solve all the challenges. I talk about this in another article, about meeting developers where they are and not relying on our in-person conversations to drive change.

You could do a video chat roulette for "hallway conversations" during that week, as well as "lunch tables".

You could do official speaker q&a submission, and have the speaker record a live broadcast answering, so that it still allows for follow up.

Lots of cool possibility
— Will Buck (@wbucksoft) May 16, 2020

I like the theory of replicating a physical conference, but the tooling isn't there for me. I'd rather have a curated series of high quality unique talks spread over several weeks
— 𝗘𝘄𝗮𝗻 𝗟𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗵 (@ewantoo ) May 16, 2020

Summary

So what can we take away from this? We have some work to do and we need to consider our audience. We aren’t going to physical locations anymore, so this expands our audience and also changes the dynamic of how we engage with people. Trying to fully replicate a conference experience is challenging. Ultimately, we need to recognize that this may not be possible --- that is perfectly fine -- and does not reflect a failure on anyone. Instead, focus on what you can do for your communities, both who can show up to your event during the time you slot and those who may look to consume the content from the event on their own timeline.

Tooling is not our problem, it’s going against our need to try and make things seem normal, when they are not. We can have some great virtual events /conferences /webinars /engagements /unconferences /hackathons /whatsamawhosits. We just need to focus on meeting the needs of our community both existing and new. Instead of looking at the checklist we had for conferences before, look at your goals and formulate a strategy around solving those.

We can think of this as an opportunity to refresh how we publish content to our customers and engage with our community. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, we can have a plethora of outlets and release types for our content. It allows us to serve our community in a different and more scalable way. We can absolutely do this. We already have the tools, the content and the smarts. We just need to work on doing what’s best for each other. In a year we are going to look back at all the activities that happened during this time and be reminded of how necessity and creativity led to innovation.

We hosted a 2800 person virtual conference after I posted this tweet.

I’d say it’s half true. There are some things you can replicate but you need to be really intentional about the quirks of doing it online.

I think both async and sync are valuable for virtual communities
— David Spinks (@DavidSpinks) May 16, 2020

#ToggleTalk : Deployment Strategies 🚀

Jess West (she/her) — Fri, 08 May 2020 16:12:56 +0000

Recap

This week we talked about deployment strategies. Besides being a favorite pastime of the DevOps community on Twitter (see: deploying on Fridays), this topic is especially interesting when we think about how it has changed over the years. We have iterations we go through as software evolves—what works, what doesn’t, how we implement things in different ways, etc. And it weaves into a common theme: Knowledge.

We know the quote “Knowledge is Power,” but Israelmore Ayvior takes this a step further:

“Knowledge is Power, Power provides Information; Information leads to Education, Education breeds Wisdom; Wisdom is Liberation. People are not liberated because of lack of knowledge.”

This leads to some interesting parallels between software, technology, and the people implementing it. With each iteration of the technology we have discovered or created, we are doing so with knowledge as people. From this, we have knowledge we share as “best practices,” and continue to learn and tweak the process to make it better. That wisdom comes from your understanding of something, which is a powerful tool that can create liberation. It can also create the opposite effect, gatekeeping.

As we learn in software, we are enabling power for some and gatekeeping for others. With deployment strategies, we have created better processes over the past 10 years, ranging from working with FTP servers to automating builds. The concept of deploying itself is intimidating; we are taking what we’ve created and letting it out into the world with hopes that it will be welcomed by the world known as the internet. “Does it work the way we expected? Will anything break with this update? Have we thought through all the challenges associated?” This among many reasons, is why we love using feature flags for our deployment—our testing in production—because it’s a safety net. It allows us to see these changes we made in a smaller scope, a safer exposure without impacting everyone else.

We take our knowledge, turn it into power, which leads to information for us to share with others. With all that philosophy talk, let’s dig into our questions this week and some of the themes we saw.

Questions

🏎 How frequently do you deploy?
💭 How have your strategies changed over the years?
🚀 What are you currently using for deployment, what do you wish you were using?

Highlight reel

Different types of Deployment

We had participants who deployed to local servers once a week, to every day. Seeing some companies having a continuous delivery process versus manual makes a big difference in their lives!

How frequently I deploy?: I try to commit every day and deploy to my company's server(s) every week now that we have one setup. #ToggleTalk https://t.co/o9TMAZAPi1
— Patrick Goulding (@p_goulding) May 6, 2020

🏎we deploy every day! ☁️all production apps I've worked on have used CD (thankfully) 🚀we are using the shipit-engine from @ShopifyDevs and it works really, really well. #ToggleTalk
— Lovisa (@biglovisa) May 6, 2020

Deployments changing over time

It’s interesting to remember how many of us did the FTP transfer of squint “I hope this works” and looking at how different things are today. Education truly does breed wisdom, it only takes one of those moments of deleting a file on production to learn how to NOT do it again and create the wisdom to influence future behavior.

My first "deploy" was for a website I made around 2002. I didn't know anything. The process involved copying and pasting files from my computer into the cPanel FTP thing. #ToggleTalk
— Lev Lazinskiy (@levlaz) May 6, 2020

Strategies over the years: I remember the first sites I built before @GitHub was a thing I would just edit the live site and whatever happened would happen... There was a lot of issues 😅 #ToggleTalk
— Patrick Goulding (@p_goulding) May 6, 2020

I remember upgrading phpBB on a live server for my second job because we had no other way to do it.
It took weeks and the entire forum was basically broken the whole time. #ToggleTalk — Lev Lazinskiy (@levlaz) May 6, 2020

Back in the day I don't think I even knew FTP came in an SFTP form. Let alone worked somewhere that had it enabled. The number of large corporates doing payments and money transfers using FTP ... I am sure they've all fixed that by now...
— James Turnbull (@kartar) May 6, 2020

Summary

Deployment strategies is a great topic for us to discuss as it can go to so many areas. This week focused on a lot of changes we’ve seen previously, however we could focus on any of these one topics and have a whole post about it! One of the important things to remember is there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to deployment for your team and project.

As we continue to build these technologies and practices, keep in mind how approachable they are to people. Remember to share your knowledge, not keep it to yourself. We make our industry better by sharing and enabling one another. And as builders, we can help by enabling our software to help, not hinder people and processes.

As always, thank you everyone for coming and participating in our talk this week.

#ToggleTalk: 🛠 Troubleshooting and Debugging 🐛

Jess West (she/her) — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 23:12:04 +0000

Recap

This week we talked about troubleshooting and debugging; Toggle and I love to talk about this stuff! Since we did resiliency last week, we wanted to continue to weave in the steps we have in software development. Often, we only look at these things when something goes wrong; however... we think it’s so much more. It’s a core part of what we need for discovery and growth. When we talk with junior engineers, this is one of the first things we are looking for beyond language knowledge. When you’re presented with a problem, what are the steps you take to try and solve it? From that challenge, comes a conversation. The conversation can delve into tools, processes, and general ideation on how to handle problems. When we posed that theme this week, we got a lot of responses!

Questions

😂 What’s the weirdest bug you've encountered?
🛠 Have a favorite debugging tool/process?
💡 Biggest lesson learned from debugging?
👩‍🏫 Fundamental beliefs on the debugging process
😫 Advice for when people get stuck?

Highlight Reel

Simple can be best

When you're just getting started and need to see what is happening, sometimes a quick console.log() can be just what you need. Regardless of your editor, you always have this available to you. Not fancy, not quick, and you’ll need a few of them – but they’ll get the job done!

🛠 Have a favorite debugging tool/process?
console.log(JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2)) I know it's not fancy, but it work 😅 — Carter Rabasa (@crtr0) April 22, 2020

TIL

On the flip side of this discussion: our Developer Advocate, Yoz, kindly pointed out all the debugging tools we had available to us beyond print statements. What was great about this response, was not only did he talk about why, but he gave us a demo. (No, he was not prepped ahead of time – he is just that plugged in!)

The problem is that adding *one* console.log() might be quick. But it’s almost never just one. That screenshot has at least FIVE, including the type that feels the most shameful whenever you have to use it:
if (...) { console.log(“yes we went down this branch OK”) — Yoz Grahame (@yoz) April 22, 2020

Advice

One of the amazing things about community in general, which we love, is helping each other out. This week we heard from a lot of people on the advice column, regardless of experience, how you can move past a problem! We heard everything from naming variables, to process and (literally) changing your environment.

My main tips for people learning:
Have a project - actually build something. You learn so much more than learning in abstract. If you're struggling with some code, extract that code out on its own. Get it working, then apply what you learned in the larger codebase. — Judy2k (@judy2k) April 23, 2020

Experiment as you learn, give variables meaningful names, with Python 3.7 make use of type hinting.
— shawn (@sbmccarth) April 22, 2020

My biggest lesson, fundamental belief, and my best advice if you're stuck debugging is: Changing your view often leads to an answer!
Ways to do that: 🚶‍♀️ Take a walk around the block 🦆 Try explaining your issue out loud 👀 Look for similar problems 👩‍💻 Change your color scheme https://t.co/fsSI8Ub50m — Ryan Lynch (@shiftyp) April 22, 2020

People and Processes first

This was a real treat: Jennifer graciously gave us an amazing thread on all things debugging. However, we want to highlight a few key items here which no one else quite keyed into. Beyond the actual tools we use for debugging, we need to take a step back and look at the people and environment we set for developers to debug and write code in the first place. This involves training, empowering, and sharing knowledge with your team. More importantly, as a leader, be sure to not take the problem on as an individual, even if you are the most qualified. Use this as a teaching moment, and distribute the workload. It opens up the problem to be solved in a different way, and gives an opportunity for your team to learn.

One of my fundamental beliefs about debugging is that you have to be prepared. If you are new to a company/environment/technology, you need to talk to folks and build up the set of tools and techniques that apply. #ToggleTalk
— Jennifer Davis (@sigje) April 22, 2020

So the "what to use" isn't super interesting, but we had looked at TONS of tcpdumps prior to this. Having the space/time to do so while not also dealing with the intricacies of high impact incidents was critical to figuring out what happened #ToggleTalk
— Jennifer Davis (@sigje) April 22, 2020

Next, I worked on leveling up everyone on the team to be able to recognize the symptoms so that we could minimize the impact of the stampede. This meant coordinating response and NOT immediately doing all the work myself. #ToggleTalk
— Jennifer Davis (@sigje) April 22, 2020

A Funny

Well, we only got one funny story this week (darn it!), but we found it doubly funny as it had a recursion irony involved. By trying to debug, they wrapped the entire method in an if debug enabled case, which caused the program to not start in production and well, you can imagine that didn’t work well. Maybe a case for LaunchDarkly to do this test in production… 😏

Oooohh a fun bug, speaking of logging. Many moons ago we worked with a junk logging framework where debug was really slow even if it was not logging. So we would check for debug with an if. When in dev the app worked when in prod, Nope. The if wrapped too much code causing a bug.
— shawn (@sbmccarth) April 22, 2020

Summary

This is a big theme and one that we probably could have talked about all week! Troubleshooting and Debugging are at the core of what we do as developers. Oftentimes, we can spend more time troubleshooting something than we do writing lines of code. One of my teammates said it best, “Writing 10 lines of code in a day, truly is a victory.”

Want more?

Guess what? We run this each week and if you missed it this week, we’d love to hear from you next week! We’ll change the topic and let you know through the hashtag #ToggleTalk. Please join us if you can, next Wednesday! Sneak peek… we’re going to be talking about Chaos Engineering. And if Twitter is not really your thing, you could check out our Test in Production Twitch Stream, featuring Casey Rosenthal as our guest next week!

Back to Basics: How to DevRel without Travel

Jess West (she/her) — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 02:25:20 +0000

Developer Relations has an image problem. The job itself is an ambiguous catch-all for activities ranging from coding to public speaking, and everything in between. People spend an exorbitant amount of time arguing about defining DevRel: what title should they have, how to measure it, who has the better program and/or team, and on and on and on. Amongst all this discussion, we have individuals who come on to these teams from a variety of backgrounds for a single purpose: to make developers' lives easier. One of the ways to do this is by speaking at conferences. It's not the only way, but it is one. Somehow over the years it appears we have over-indexed on this singular facet and forgotten about the other aspects of Developer Relations. At its core, Developer Relations should be exactly what it sounds like: relating to developers. And how do you do that? You go where developers go. You engage with developers on their level of expertise and with the tools that you both use as developers. Tools found mostly on the... Internet.

The truth is, not all developers go to conferences. In fact, many of them don't have the means, or time to attend. Some of them will watch a video after the fact, but most are likely to be found deep in Stack Overflow. When they are not researching how to solve their bug, they are digging through blog posts to an eloquent solution for the problem they are currently facing, or watching a hands-on-tutorial for some new technology or a novel way of doing something.

So with this pandemic, I have great news! Developers are still using that trusty tool called the internet.

Old School

I've long idolized some of the early Developer Relations teams and what they represented. You couldn't tell the difference between a developer and a developer relations person because they were doing very similar things: coding, working on content and occasionally going to conferences. I loved that they were so authentic and able to reach developers where they were, naturally. These teams were doing everything from maintaining docs, sdks, tutorials, running and participating in hackathons, to answering questions on Stack Overflow. They were good at their job because of their authenticity, willingness to help and ability to jump from one project to another. There weren't many companies that had developer relations, but the ones that did had some pretty solid teams.

New School

We are now in a different era where many, many different companies have developer relations — —for better or for worse. We have also grown the number of conferences and hackathons significantly. From that, we've brought on a whole onslaught of developer relations professionals with a broader skillset that have helped us grow and evolve into pioneering new ideas and different areas of reach. The easiest way for these teams to feel they had value in their reach was to go give a talk, whether that was locally or getting on a plane. And because of reach, the bigger the talk, the better. And to increase reach, the more talks you could give, the better. "Bigger, better, more" became the name of the conference game. The more conferences there were popping up, the more plane tickets, talks and people they had to hire, and well, you get the idea. An illusion was created: to be effective in DevRel, you had to be on a plane.

Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten our core purpose: meet developers where they are all the time — — online, not just where they go once a year, at a conference.

The travel problem

There is a ubiquitous cost of conferences that no one talks about — — and it's not just limited to fiscal revenue; it carries personal, social and environmental impact. Don Goodman Wilson referenced this concept about two years ago in his discussion regarding our utilitarian view of flying and our decisions to travel. Review more here. There is a toll to travel, not only to our environment and our company’s bottom line but also to us individually. They are called road warriors for a reason: it is a trek. Quite often this is what we see online, where Developer Relations people talk about #devrellife, in which people are living out of their suitcases, not getting enough sleep, eating poorly and taking selfies on the plane. This all takes a toll — — not only on our bodies but on our personal and social well-being, which is not sustainable.

I like to use food as an analogy. Travel is like dessert: It’s fun, it’s exciting and I love to have it in my life. However, I don’t need it in my life and I certainly don’t need it all the time, because that’s not sustainable. We need fruits, vegetables, and proteins, which help balance things out so we can have dessert and then enjoy it more when it does come around! While travel is a great add-on for our impact as Developer Relations, it's not the core activity that brings value to the position.

Of course, this looks different for everyone: for me personally, I know I can bring value through coding or writing a blog post at home, going to my local gym and sleeping in my own bed — — these are all of the things that I need for a sustainable lifestyle. Then when I get to the opportunity to go to a conference, I amplify the impact of these activities. Here I am free to enjoy the satisfaction of my dessert, sans cavities.

Ultimately, we don’t need to travel to do our jobs well, and quite frankly we never have. Many developer relations programs specifically focus on not getting on a plane. James Governor mentions Stripe’s policy of fly less, write more in one of his talks and how excellent they are at their developer experience because of it.

Here are the questions you need to ask yourself: Is the ROI of attending a conference as high as a strong following on your written content? What about bringing a trusted resource on Stack Overflow. More generally how trusted are you as a community member?

The ugly truth is: the grind of travel is hard. And it may not have the highest ROI.

The Pandemic

So here we are in the midst of our COVID-19 crisis and there are a lot of conversations happening around how to “recreate” conferences and the Developer Relations job. We have pushed things to the summer, fall and then straight canceled many others. But the truth of the matter is we don’t know when this will be over. We don’t know the peak and the full effect it will have. Who knows when conferences will come back, and if they will even come back the same way. There is a real chance that this is the last thing to return to normalcy, whatever that may look like.

But at the core of everything, canceled conferences do not end Developer Relations —— they create an opportunity for growth. This pandemic is giving everyone the chance to reset back to the basics.

It’s not about conferences, and it never has been.

The skills that we came into developer relations with in the first place is what I like to call flexing our “Dev Rel muscle”. We can reach developers through our code contributions, our content creation, and our online community. With all of this, we can still do our jobs and do them well. Because developers, just like everyone else, are still online.

I would encourage us all to take a good hard look at our activities for the rest of the year and in general, think about the impact we are having as individuals on our developer community and for our company. We have plenty of things in our toolkit to boost our outreach during this pandemic and it's not just online conferences. As Developer Relations, we know how to code, we know how to write, we know how to be on a microphone. There is so much we can do with that trifecta alone from the comforts of our own home that can make such an impact! We don't need a fancy set up that costs hundreds or thousands to create. We just need a problem to solve and a good story to tell around it.

Tips for Onboarding New Hires Remotely

Jess West (she/her) — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 16:54:46 +0000

I’m no stranger to remote work. I’ve been onboarded remotely and have onboarded remote employees before. But I have to say I’ve never been a part of onboarding someone fully remote, with my onboarding partners-in-crime also being remote, in the midst of a pandemic. As we are adapting our processes and strategy at LaunchDarkly, it’s moments like these that you truly see the team come together. This post explores the process we’ve adopted for remote onboarding and how it has evolved. It also shares some lessons we’ve learned that we think will help other companies and leaders facing similar challenges.

It takes a village
Internally, our onboarding process starts immediately after the offer is signed. Our People (HR) team creates a Clubhouse ticket (project management software) that assigns tasks and due dates for everything ranging from granting the employee system access with IT to giving them branded swag to booking all their core meetings. Our Ops team does the lion’s share of the work in areas that, in other companies, are often left to the hiring manager. Part of the process is assigning a buddy from another team to help be a resource for the new hire once they are here. So, by day one, they have three key people to talk to: Ops, a buddy, and their manager.

This is all our normal process. Traditionally, we do our first week “on-site” in our Oakland headquarters, which allows the new hire to feel out the culture of the company, meet colleagues, have water cooler chats, and my personal favorite, enjoy 1:1 walks along Lake Merritt.

So, how do we recreate this experience virtually? It starts with logistics, lots of meetings, and a little bit of extra care.

What you can do for logistics
You know how people always say thank your IT person? Be sure to thank your Ops person too. Both these departments are doing a lot of extra work to ensure our remote work situations are solid. At LaunchDarkly, our IT and Ops teams have clearly documented in Confluence (a program we use like a well-oiled machine) the process changes they’ve been making in response to the all-remote work paradigm. Here are a few things you can add to your process:

Detail out your office supply policy (including links to specific supplies on Amazon.com) and build a process around it. E.g., does the employee order these supplies, or does the Ops person? Make it clear!
Double-check that swag order—where is the new hire based, what is their clothing size, can you ship it to them, etc.?
Ensure you pair new hires with buddies who have enough bandwidth to spend time with the new hires; especially right now while people are juggling caring for kids, new work environments, and other stressors.

What you can do as a colleague
Take extra care to welcome your new colleagues! Reach out via Slack and invite them to those virtual happy hours, coffee chats, and brown bag lunches. Slack can be intimidating with all its channels and leave you feeling a lot like the new kid walking into a cafeteria, not knowing where to sit or what to say. Make it as welcoming as you can, remembering it was your first day/week at one point as well.

What you can do as a manager

Our role as managers is even more critical right now as we need to ensure our team is feeling safe, supported, and ultimately set up for success in their role. Wrapping your new hire in a blanket of support is huge. Starting a new job is intimidating. Starting a new job in this pandemic while isolated can be even more so. It’s your job to make sure that’s not the case. Here are some things you can do that are “extra” but will help your employee feel more connected.

Send out a welcome email introducing your new hire, a fun fact, and where they are based.
Pass around a card to be signed (for our upcoming hire, we started a card in one city, and shipped it around until it was all signed). These things require prep work, but they are worth the time and effort put in.
Prep teams about your new hire and what they will be doing (share their 30-60-90 day plan!)
Ask individuals to touch base with them the first week.
Help with introductions throughout the week via Slack channels, DMs, and video calls (like you would if they were at a desk and someone was walking by!).

This may feel like overkill, but it’s better than not doing enough. Double down on your 30-60-90 plans, be sure to include a small project on week one to give that employee a win. Make sure this is a visible win to others outside of your team. At our core, we all want to do a good job, let’s make sure we are helping our new hires do the same.

Lessons Learned
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” From all of this, we’ve learned a lot about how we can improve our internal systems. We are not perfect, and certainly don’t claim to be. However, we are nimble, hardworking, and determined to create a great user experience for our employees.

We are taking this opportunity to grow and see how we can do better as a company to make sure our employees feel truly included, regardless of where they are located. Have any tips to share? I'd love to discuss here or on Twitter! Thanks for reading, and we will make it through this, one day at a time.

10 reasons to Attend Trajectory 2020

Jess West (she/her) — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 09:18:59 +0000

TL;DR
Trajectory is back for year two, and it’s going to be astronomical! We are so excited to bring you some out-of-this-world content, celebrate in our Oakland community, and have some stellar conversations around better development and release practices as an industry.

Need some reasons to attend? Here are ten.
1) Learn from industry leaders on how to empower teams
2) Stellar workshops with Space Camp
3) Space-themed block party with food trucks, libations, music, a brewery take-over, and more
4) Oakland and Jack London Square in May (Hello, 🌞!)
5) Swag and swagger (in the form of some sweet, sweet knowledge)
6) Free copy of DevOps for Dummies (and an opportunity to have it signed by the author Emily Freeman!)
7) Headshot booth 📸
8) Philz Coffee, nuff said
9) VIP access to hearing about upcoming releases and plans from LaunchDarkly
10) Lawn games (wooo cornhole!)

Who, what, when?
By now, some of you may have heard the chatter about Trajectory, our annual software conference coming up in April. One reason we are excited about this year’s Trajectory is the content we are expecting. We will see TWO days of content, kicking off with Space Camp, a workshop series led by our developer relations team. The sessions will dig into everything from getting started with feature flag management to experimentation and even integrations built with LaunchDarkly. For day two, we have some incredible speakers covering topics such as architecture and operational practices, easing the burden of migrating legacy applications, and what’s next in software development. The audience will have a chance to draw inspiration from changemakers in technology.

We are beyond thrilled to have industry experts and community leaders like Liz Fong Jones, Emily Freeman, Ana Margarita Medina, and James Governor sharing their experiences and predictions for 2020 and beyond. Each of these speakers brings a unique story and experience that we hope will inspire and educate our community and create thought-provoking conversations.

Reflecting on last year
Last year was our first year doing Trajectory, and we learned so much. We heard feedback from customers and wanted to take that into everything we are doing this year. We heard loud and clear that you wanted more stories from folks having success with LaunchDarkly’s platform. So, we have speakers from HashiCorp, H&R Block, Xero, Honeycomb, and more telling their success stories with LaunchDarkly. You also asked us for more time with experts and hands-on sessions. If this is your jam, be sure to join us for Space Camp on April 29th (the day before the main conference) for hands-on labs and training.

Don’t worry, are still keeping things fresh and fun! Last year we had Photo booths and Observabil-tea (Honeycomb's fun tea and conversation space) and flossing parties, oh my! This year, we are upping our photo booth game to doing headshots for attendees! (You can finally stop using that portrait-mode selfie for your profile photo). We heard how much attendees loved the Observabil-tea space, so we decided to do a full block party, including a take-over of Oakland United Beerworks. There will be refreshments throughout the day and spaces for attendees to have meaningful conversations about all things related to empowering teams to fearlessly deliver software faster. The flossing parties… well, let’s just say we’ll let you be the judge of your own dance party. 💃🕺

Location, location, location
The location and venue for this year’s conference is amazing, and we are super excited about it. Some of you may be familiar with their sister location in San Francisco, but Bloc15 is opening up a brand-new event venue here in Oakland. And we are thrilled to help welcome them into our community by being one of their very first events. In the spirit of this venue’s name, we are taking over the block! We have Bloc15, Esports Arena for Space Camp, and Oakland United Beerworks all for you, our Trajectory fam! We love this location for many reasons, but one is it’s in the heart of Jack London Square and a hop, skip and jump away from the San Francisco Ferry. Needless to say, we’ve been doing market research for everyone during our site visits. 🍷

For those who have not been to Oakland before (yes, that includes you, friends across the bay), let me tell you, you are missing out. As someone who just discovered the city across the bay, I’m quite enamored, and I’ll tell you why.

🤔 Did you know...
🦀 Lake Merritt is a natural saltwater lake and the first wildlife refuge in North America?
🎨 There are hidden painted Gnomes throughout the city?
🎢 Disneyland was inspired by Oakland’s Fairyland?

So there you have it! We’re so excited to host Trajectory again and we hope to see you there! If you needed 10 other reasons, that are themed, we wrote an acrostic poem. There are 10 letters in Trajectory, coincidence? I think not...

T antalizing talks
R adical revelations
A stronomical assessments
J ovial jaunts
E ducational errors
C elebratory cacophonies
T ransformative testimonials
O rbital observations
R ighteous responses
Y early yammering

Hope to see you there!

T-minus 9 weeks and counting...

Jess West (she/her) — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 21:43:28 +0000

com·mu·ni·ty
/kəˈmyoonədē/

"a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals."

You can define a community through a shared interest or by the strength of the connections amongst them (hello conference buddies!). You need a posse of people who are alike in some way, who feel some sense of belonging or interpersonal connection.

At LaunchDarkly, community lies at the heart of what we do. LaunchDarkly was created to enable developers, in one fashion or another. We want to enable developers to reduce risk, test in production at reasonable hours, and deliver their code and features fearlessly. So, when we think of our community, we are not only thinking of LaunchDarkly customers or people who have heard of us. We are thinking about all the developers out there who have to ship to production, meet deadlines, and guarantee that “yes, this code works on not just my computer”.

We incorporate this in many ways with our company values, whether it be celebrating success as a team, supporting our community through things like Code Nation, or, most recently, creating the LaunchDarkly Foundation. The latter helps our community in a different way, supporting non-profits through donations and/or staff time. In this way, we can help make an impact on our society and not just through our product.

Another part of creating a healthy community is asking for feedback. One of the ways we do this is through things like our NPS survey, in which we review scores and comments.

Edith, our CEO, is incredibly diligent about reading the feedback that our users in our community provide. If you don’t follow her on twitter (@edith_h), she does something fun with a “QOTD” (Quote of the Day), which, fun fact, the quote comes from the comments section in the NPS survey! Pro-tip, this is how you can become Twitter-famous, or at the very least for LaunchDarkly. Who knows, maybe someday we can get that magical checkmark…but I digress.

The QOTD tradition is born from the deep-rooted desire to help give value to the community and openly check-in on feedback. In the spirit of having an inclusive community, we want to hear from you, our community, our comrades! We invite you to celebrate and learn with us at our annual conference, Trajectory (just nine weeks away!).

And so…the countdown begins!

We. are. so. dang. excited.

Our developer relations team wanted to start this countdown with everyone, and what better way to do that than some sweet swag and internet fame? Starting next week, we will have a contest where you can enter to win a ticket to Trajectory(!) and some VIP limited edition swag. We will announce the theme at the beginning of each week and give you instructions on how to enter, and then we will announce the winner at the end of each week! Expect bad space puns, sweet content, and more!

Interested? Be sure to follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn to tune in for what we’re cooking up. Be sure to nep-Tune in... (I told you that bad space puns were coming) 🚀

But on a more serious note, we want to hear from you, our community. We are developers building for developers, trying to make our everyday lives more enjoyable so that we can indeed deploy on Fridays. And if you want to hear more and don’t have time to participate in our contest, we have Trajectory tickets on sale now! I’ll even share my super-secret-not-so-secret code for a discount: JESS50. Hope to see you online soon!

Announcing 2019 DinosaurJS Workshops

Jess West (she/her) — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 13:16:05 +0000

Friends, I'm so so excited to announce our workshops this year! We have done workshops the past two out of three years for DinosaurJS and we've learned a lot. One of those is that attendees and organizers both, have fomo. Like, all the fomo. One of the reasons we did the single track is so that everyone can experience the talks that our speakers worked so hard at and you don't need to choose. Now, workshops are a bit harder to do that for with a single day; however this year we are changing things a bit to help with the fomo.

We will have four workshops, lead by four incredibly amazing human beings.

😻 Dealing with my Emotion, a CSS in JS Workshop 😻

Manny Carrera IV and Will Klein, Workday

In this workshop, you’ll learn the ins and outs of writing CSS in JS! We’ll take a React-based app with classic stylesheets, and step-by-step, migrate to CSS in JS using Emotion (https://t.co/5IFDWRYjjF). We’ll cover both the benefits and the trade-offs of managing styles in JavaScript. Not only will you learn all the ways to leverage Emotion, you will become a Style Master!

🔥Web Performance with Firebase 🔥

David East, Firebase

"How fast should my site load?" It's a simple question, but one that doesn't have a simple answer. There's many pieces to web performance; it doesn't matter if you're using React, Angular, or slicing PSDs to tables (Okay, don't do that). In order to understand the performance of your site you need the right tools and more importantly the right mindset. This workshop will help you grow that mindset while building a website in three stages. Stage one: Learn important concepts around web performance, such as latency and bandwidth. Stage two: Measure web performance (using Firebase Performance Monitoring) and learn about common perf metrics like FCP. Stage three: Diagnose problems and deploy fixes. At the end of this workshop you'll be able to look at Firebase or the Chrome DevTools and understand what's causing poor performance. We'll also touch on tools like Docker to deploy serverless backends on Cloud Run. So bring your laptops and get ready to be able to really answer "How fast should my site load?

🛡 TwilioQuest 🛡

Dominik Kundel, Twilio

This isn’t your typical technical workshop. You won’t show up, sit down, and sit through hours of PowerPoint. You're the boss of your own learning agenda. Choose what you want to participate in, at the pace you prefer. TwilioQuest is an interactive, self-paced game where you learn how to Twilio. TwilioQuest introduces Twilio products, features, and concepts while rewarding you with experience points and loot. There's no faster way to master Voice, SMS, Video or our other products. Whether you’ve been writing code for decades or you just started a bootcamp, you can come to level up your development skills. You’ll learn how to get up and running at scale with guidance and support from experts.

🚗 Go For Non-Go Developers 🚗

Brenna Martenson, Imagine Analytics

Go is becoming an increasingly necessary tool in the belt of “languages you should know to be relevant.” Although the beauty of the language is in its simplicity, the transition from JavaScript or Ruby can still be a little bumpy. In this workshop, we’ll work through the basic of Go, paying particular attention to pitfalls you may encounter transitioning from a language like JavaScript. This workshop is designed for developers with little to no Go knowledge, although collaboration is a key part of not-having-a-shitty-workshop-experience so all skill levels are welcome!

Will we see you at DinosaurJS this year? Late bird tickets are still available! And as part of the dev.to community, we'll throw in a special discount for you. 💖🦖

DinosaurJS Opportunity Scholarship

Jess West (she/her) — Wed, 22 May 2019 22:52:38 +0000

Opening up 2019 Scholarship Opportunities

It’s year four for DinosaurJS and I can gratefully say we have had the amazing opportunity each year to provide scholarships for underrepresented person’s in technology. At our core, we’ve always believed that everyone should have access to information, regardless of class, state or any other factors. We do our best to have an inclusive conference with everything from blind speaker selection to ensuring dietary restrictions are met and speakers feel completely comfortable and supported. This year is better than ever and we’re very excited to open up our application. We’ll be accepting applications now through June 10th.

We would like to extend an invitation to those underrepresented groups; women, LGBT+ folks, people of color, people with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged individuals interested in learning about JavaScript and partaking in this community; to apply for a scholarship. We have two days of content, networking events and plenty of time to meet mentors and potential new employers and friends.

Pictured are two ladies who were able to attend DinosaurJS in years past from scholarships, then made dinosaur skirts!

You have one thing we need you to do… Fill out this 📝 quick form 📝 and if you’re eligible you will be included in our lottery selection! Apply now so we can get you approved ASAP! All scholarship selections will receive a free ticket and a few will have travel covered as well; please include if you need assistance with this in your application.

Looking to help someone out?

These scholarships are done by joint effort from sponsors and community, so thank you to everyone who helps make this possible. 🙏

We have opportunity enthusiast tickets available, so if you’re able to purchase a ticket for you and someone else, we appreciate your help in bringing more people to our conference.

If you’re a company and looking to help sponsor scholarships, please reach out via roar@dinosaurjs.org and we would love to chat!