Building a Great Tech Resume: Optimizing for Humans and Machines

Inspired by what was initially a disagreement in Virtual Coffee about what makes an optimal resume, Abbey Perini and I joined forced and created a talk about how to make the best resume for both humans and machines.

Building A Community For All People

At the request of the conference organizers, I smushed two talks into one: Building a Community For Beginners + A Group For All People. I gave techniques to build user groups that are welcoming to both beginners and marginalized groups within tech. Given November 10, 2017 at Elixir With Love and a slightly updated version at DjangoCon 2018.

Building A Community For Beginners

How do you foster new developers within the community? I will tell you how I grew PyLadies Boston from zero to a thousand by focusing primarily on beginners. Given February 18, 2017 at PyCaribbean.

"Are you having trouble getting beginners to stick around in your user group? What's the best way to help people who are just getting started with Python? Since I started PyLadies Boston in 2013, I've learned a few lessons about the best way to help out beginners and cultivate a welcoming community.

A Group For All People

Can exclusion sometimes be a positive thing? This talk covers how smaller exclusive groups can actually increase diversity in the larger inclusive groups and end up benefitting the larger community! Done with Adri Mills. Given September 15, 2014 at AlterConf Boston.

Job Hunting Basics For Programmers

I was invited to speak at "Your Future In Science" at Dartmouth College. They were interested in a talk on portfolios and resumes, so I put together a talk discussing what is expected of programmers in particular, but also did a bit more generalization in the actual talk. Given April 26, 2014 at Dartmouth College.

Parsing Job Listings: What All Those Words Are Really Saying

I was asked to give a short talk on the topic of diversity at a Women Who Code event in Boston on June 23, 2016. I decided to cover job listings and discuss how some phrases, though they seem benign, can turn people away and keep a company from building up a diverse workforce.

Writing User Stories For Engineering

The purpose of this talk was to educate product managers on what makes a good user story from an engineer's point of view. There were three engineers, so the talks were 10 minutes long each, plus a Q & A at the end. Given March 29, 2016 at Boston Product.

SQL! Fun, Delight, And Only A Mild Amount Of Terror

I love SQL and have noticed that a number of junior devs aren't well versed in it and over-rely on the ORM. This tutorial is my attempt to share the love. I cover table creation, primary and foreign keys, CRUD, joins, selects, where clauses, and functions. It takes about 2 hours. Given August 17, 2016 at PyLadies Boston.

Caches: The Reason Your Computer Is So Darn Fast

Since most of the PyLadies don't have a traditional CS background, I decided to give a lightning talk on the basics of caching. Given November 22, 2016 at PyLadies Boston.

#startuplife

An all-emoji presentation that covers the various lessons that I have learned working for startups. For each slide, I described the actual events that happened in a fairly humorous manner. Given November 18, 2015 at PyLadies Boston. In the video, my talk starts at 16:47.

A Uninterrupted video of the lightning talks that takes place on PyCaribbean 2017

Python Modules: Random and BeautifulSoup

A quick lightning talk discussing what modules are and how to use two common ones. Given August 13, 2013 at PyLadies Boston.

Super Fast Intro to Object Oriented Programming

Lightning talk given to introduce new programmers to the concept of OOP. I used pictures of baby animals to help break up the code. Given June 11, 2014 at PyLadies Boston.