DEV Community: Claudia

Nevertheless, Claudia Coded and Pushed on!

Claudia — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 10:04:35 +0000

It all started back in 2006, that's when I enrolled in college to study computer programming. I was excited that I finally had the courage to take the step, since a lot of people I knew, my parents included, had discouraged me because I was a bad student throughout high school.

It's true I hated studying and loved doing more creative stuff. But I always had this thing with computers even from a young age.

Getting into tech

College was though and I had to drop out after going through a very traumatic experience, so it took me a while longer to actually get into tech. A couple years after I initially enrolled in college I finally started an internship as web developer.

Not much later I landed my first full-time developer job. When looking back at that time I have a lot of regrets. Mostly about not taking better care of myself and not standing up for myself.

At that time I was still recovering from that traumatic experience I went through a couple years earlier. But I was so motivated to start working as a developer.

My first real experience as a developer

I knew I had a lot to learn, it was my very first job after all. I quickly learned that one of my direct superiors thought that women shouldn't be developers. He gave me hard time by making me feel dumb when I didn't get something, giving me impossible deadlines, which of course I tried to make by working as much overtime as possible. I didn't have any teammates to help me, they all had their own projects and deadlines.

And then came the time that everyone of the dev team got to go to a local dev conference, everyone except me... When I asked my superior about it, he just laughed and said that it wasn't a place for me. That I wouldn't gain anything by going to the conference... so simply implying that I was too dumb to learn something from such an event...

Not long after he fired me. My initial plan was to stay there for 3 years and gain the experience before moving on. That didn't really pan out.

It was the start of years and years of personal struggles... Today, I am still trying to heal from those times when I didn't stop to take care of myself and just kept going until I just couldn't anymore. At some point I even started to hate coding as a profession.

Advocating for myself looks like…

Not letting myself get pushed into situations that I know will be a setback to my health and mental wellbeing.

In the past I often let myself get pressured into doing jobs that I knew where a bad match for me. And also situations where I didn't know what to do when I felt that people treated me very different from my male colleagues. Being invited to the table but being ignored by everyone there...

These situations and jobs often resulted into very low self-esteem and taking time to rebuild it afterwards. I had to learn to trust my gut the hard way.

My biggest goal is…

Creating a community that supports fellow women who code with their struggles in a male-dominated sector, until there is no need for it anymore.

👩🏿‍💻👩🏻‍💻👩🏾‍💻👩‍💻

In 2017 I came up with the idea to start a local community for women who code in Belgium 🇧🇪. After a shoutout on Twitter I found some partners in crime to set the idea in motion, that's when women.code(be) was born. (pronounced as women dot code be)

What started as an idea to organise women-only events and an online chat group, evolved into a community with volunteers and guest bloggers, a monthly newsletter, a variation of events such as our TechTalks, and interviews with women who codes!

Looking back at all those years of struggle, today I can say that I am glad that I'm able to help others with the experience and knowledge I gained over the last decade.

I was also able to rekindle my love for coding after taking a (long) break from it. Redefining my boundaries and goals, now, I only code for myself as a hobby and for projects I really believe in.

Happy International Women's Day!

Facilitating retrospectives with a remote team

Claudia — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 16:32:11 +0000

Lessons learned from trying to become a better leader for my teams

You might already be familiar with the term retrospective or sprint retrospective, but if you’re not:

The Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.

So now that you know what a retrospective is, I can tell you more about it.
For 2 years I worked as a product/project manager with a remote team, where I had to learn how to organize and run sprint retrospectives.

My only experience with retrospectives before that was from when I was a developer. The retrospectives here were only held after project delivery and I had to write down 3 to 5 positive and negative things about the entire time I worked on it. I found that pretty hard at the time to remember all those things that happened during those months and to write them down. So a lot of valuable info got lost.

Also, I dreaded those retrospectives meetings! They were boring and felt forced in some way. I decided that I wanted to do better now that I was in control of facilitating retrospectives!

Preparation first

I started by doing some research before I actually started organizing my first retrospective. Here I learned that a retrospective for our team would focus on the sprints (as it should) but also a bit on the personal well-being of the team.

I also learned that a retrospective should be held in a safe environment where everyone feels like they can share their experience. Even if not everyone agrees with someone’s experience. So there definitely should be a mutual respect amongst team members.

After learning those things, I started questioning my team for input and from there on we came to an agreement about the format for our retrospective. I’ve lined up the base questions we used to ask ourselves during each retrospective:

What went well?
What went wrong and/or was frustrating?
What can be improved?
What do we need more of?
What do we need less of?
Special appreciations
Suggestions

Point 3 to 5 could probably be reduced to one column, but we chose to break them into tiny bits because it helped the team really think about those things.
So often a memory was triggered, that otherwise might’ve been forgotten.

The special appreciations column was dedicated to team members showing appreciation to other members of their teams.

So how exactly did we use these questions?

At first, we started out with a spreadsheet that I templated, but… it was messy. And a bit later we moved on to using Trello instead.

Why Trello you might ask?

Firstly, it has a structure of columns and cards, that was already a big upgrade to spreadsheets. And it felt more like the traditional post-it retrospectives I was familiar with. Secondly, you all can work on the same Trello board at the same time without getting distracted by what others are doing. Also easy to see if someone is already posting something you might want to post. And third, the Trello Power-ups made the retrospectives more interesting and easier to facilitate.

Ok, maybe one more… lastly Trello is free!!! But they offer more features for paying customers.

One of the power-ups we used was the voting system. You could just hover over a card and press v on your keyboard and it added a thumb mark to that card. The number of votes on a card would indicate that other team members felt the same way about this topic. So that made it easier to see how big of a deal something is.

Pro-tip: vote quickly by just hovering over a card and pressing the 'v' key on your keyboard

Another power-up we used was the giphy plugin. Gifs to express your feelings or to simply say something like “Happy Birthday” to a teammate.

All these elements helped to improve the atmosphere of those retrospectives.

Flow of our retrospective meetings

At an appointed time all team members called in for a retrospective. Everyone opened up the Trello board I provided, which only contained a couple of columns with the earlier listed questions for titles.

Gathering experiences from your team. (approx. 15 — 20 mins) To gather those experiences the entire team (me included) started adding cards in the columns they had a related experience with.
Voting on experiences that you shared or feel sympathetic about.(approx 10 min tops) After that we started with adding votes, every team member voted on the cards they felt similar about. This would only take up a couple of minutes, so it all went down pretty fast.
Discussing all cards on the board. (approx. 30 to 40 mins) Last but not least, we would discuss all the topics on the board as a team. Which took a big chunk of our time, but it was often worth it. It gave me better insights into what my team members were experiencing and what we should/could improve towards our next sprint. Another benefit is that it also helped us to bond as a team since we left some room for casual remarks as well.

Things learned

Through our retrospectives, we learned when people needed some extra help to get them on their way. f.e. when someone new on the team was still learning react, another team member would be there to give some extra guidance.

Or when things became shitty because the specifications changed and components that were already planned out, had to be revisited and redone completely. At least the retrospective gave the team a bit of room for venting.

These are just a few examples, but a lot of stuff happens when you work on a project for a long time. And not everything is within your immediate control, but it still has its impact. On moments like that, I think it’s important that people can vent their frustrations and then start fresh.

Also showing extra appreciation to your colleagues even for small things can be just that little extra push of positiveness your team might need to keep them going. I mean who doesn’t like appreciation?

So you see, even if you have a distributed team, you can still make your retrospectives interesting and valuable with just a little help of a tool and some guidelines.

Feel free to use the Trello retrospective template that I created by making a copy.