Today I attended the first Write/Speak/Code event in Los Angeles! It was a one-day conference focused on empowering more women in tech to share their knowledge by speaking at conferences, writing articles, contributing to open-source projects, and all that good stuff.
My main takeaways:
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A renewed motivation to continue my work with teaching and organizing tech meetups! I was full of the warm fuzzy feels when a couple people gave me a shout-out, thanking me for introducing them to this community and encouraging them to learn to code.
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Now I’m actually going to submit a proposal to the GitHub Universe conference! (I missed the original deadline for their CFP, but a friend at today’s event told me that they extended it!) I also got some encouraging feedback on my topic of GitHub as a learning management system or as a teaching tool more generally.
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I met lots of interesting new people, caught up with some old friends, and met a few online acquaintances in person for the first time!
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Now Second Spectrum is on my radar for future events, since they’ve clearly gone above and beyond in their efforts to give back to the community and help increase diversity in tech.
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For one of the group exercises, I thanked a few people on Twitter who inspire me. That’s something I don’t do nearly as often as I should!
Before I forget, I also wanted to highlight this tweet on computer science and knitting (featured at today’s event), which totally made my day:
Your periodic reminder that knitting is a two-register counter machine, and is therefore Turing-complete.https://t.co/sWIWvZApp9
— mhoye (@mhoye) December 19, 2016
And this was one of my favorite group exercises, where we shared our topic ideas, shared positive feedback, and practiced accepting compliments by simply saying “That’s right!” or “F*#& yeah!”:
Loved this exercise at @WSC_LA #OwnYourExpertise to practice accepting compliments by saying either "That's right!" Or "F*$% yeah!" lol :) pic.twitter.com/yVVu8WAebj
— Liz Krane (@LearningNerd) July 16, 2017
Fun times! After the event, we stopped by to play a game of Dominion with our friend who just returned from Japan, who’s also throwing a party tomorrow to celebrate his return and watch “Game of Thrones” together. Then we bought ingredients to cook some more al pastor style pork – this time we doubled the recipe to bring some to tomorrow’s party!