Archives for September 2015

September 29, 2015 By Lisa Ghisolf Leave a Comment

Generating Blog Topics

This entry is in the series 2015 Scholarship Recipients

Blog topic generation is often an Achilles’ heel for me. The options are endless, but what do they mean to me? Will I make a point, a difference? Educate, humor, share a useful experience? WSC2015’s “Topic Generation” talk covered the variety of talking points to inspire useful, engaging content.

The topic types offered run the gamut, and can give structure to even the vaguest ideas:

How to do this, fix this. Sharing how you fixed a nagging issue or work through a task is great for SEO.
Quick hit. Whether a photo or simply a bit of wisdom, your blog post doesn’t have to be an epic tale.
You should do this, because… Opinions on how to approach a problem.
We do this and it works. Case studies are a lot of work, but great examples of your expertise in action.
Success story. I love to share successes, and they’re great SEO fodder.
Hero’s journey. The typical story structure: This is how it is, and this is how it should be. Often a call to action, there’s a stated problem, the vision, and the proposed path to get to the vision.
Intro to technology. Invariably, there’s someone who can learn from where you’ve been, no matter how simplistic.
Process. Your best practices can inspire others: How a team works together, how to build an app, how to fix an issue.
Philosophy. Your way of working, and the reasoning, is also enlightening.

From the “Find Your Expertise” talk, I also found helping others to be a great way to frame a blog topic:

Teach things you know.
Make things easier to learn than they were for you.
Ask the first question so someone else doesn’t have to.
Teaching teaches you; break it down into pieces.

Expressing one’s expertise so it aids others can be a great exercise and lead to blog topics, speaking topics and more. And from this list, I have more than a few thoughts to inspire a slew of new blog posts.

Looking at Bootcamps

I am seeking to get into a coding camp — yes a boot camp. I am unemployed at the moment after working a temporary contract as an application administrator for a few months. It was a good experience getting into media publishing, but I was limited to doing more software testing and not closer to learning or using my programming skills. I decided now is the perfect time to make sacrifices.

I have researched and found several programs ranging from 8 weeks to 19 weeks. It is really hard to know where to go, if you have the right fit for the camp, or who will accept you into their camp culture. Some of these workshops gives you pre-work to do before you can even get an interview. I can understand why an immersive program would do that, but it also puts emphasis on what can you do without any instructors. Often you feel like you are being put through the mill to learn a skill on your own anyway. Feelings surface, like the programming world has a secret society and only a certain criteria is supposed to apply for it and maybe you will get lucky if you are picked to join. I wonder, if I am directed to go to Coursera and Codecademy, then why not encourage me to do all of the free programming classes online? I am sure it is possible to learn it all on your own.

I did learn some coding on my own, a dabble here and there, but there is something uplifting and empowering when you are around other people. Sitting in the beginning of your quest to code by yourself can hamper your ability to network and collaborate with others. I support online and in-class collaboration to effectively develop skills, ambition, and creativity. I find that learning everything online sometimes keeps you boxed-in where you do not reach out to learn from other sources or talk with others learning with you. I find it can get boring if everything is online. A classroom full of like-minds drive each other in a certain way, where sole learning online can take you only so far. I took an SQL course online with a great instructor and I soared, but even after did really well. However, I felt like it wasn’t enough because I was out of touch with other students and what the possible demands would be when I went to look for jobs to start my career.

What are your thoughts on the option to learn coding solely online or in a classroom setting?

September 22, 2015 By Carmen Andoh Leave a Comment

Gender Diversity in Tech

This entry is in the series 2015 Scholarship Recipients

How keeping and hiring more moms can help the Gender “pipeline problem.”

Ignite talk given for DevopsDay NYC on May 1, 2015. Transcript of this ignite talk below (or what I originally intended to say but mumbled through it). 🙂

When we talk about gender diversity in tech, and we talk about solutions to the pipeline problem, I’d like to turn our focus to one part of the pipeline: mothers.

I want to preface that this subject cannot be discussed in a 5-minute ignite talk, it’s a very personal decision. I’m not trying to change anyone’s minds or suggest one lifestyle over another, but hopefully we can start to carry better perspectives that can help our companies and our families.

So moms- everyone focuses on the early “get more girls coding” as a pipeline solution, but where the real opportunity lies is in moms: The reality now is that 8 out of every 10 women will become a mom in their life. Statistically this means if we want to talk about the life-cycle of women in tech, talking about motherhood is very, very relevant.

Now for the majority of you here in this room, you aren’t going to become mothers, but there’s a high chance that you’re either a co-parent, thinking about parenthood, maybe even worrying a bit about it. There are also hiring managers that could benefit from actively recruiting moms.

Moms are awesome to have on your Ops, Infrastructure, and Dev teams. They can juggle multiple projects, perform under stress, create systems that work and get them OUT THE DOOR. Many moms roll with the punches, we are NATURALS at continuous integration/continuous deployment (my daily build of getting 3 kids up, ready, lunches made, and out the door to school ALWAYS passes :-)). We test in production more often than we can count, and rarely do we get down time, we deeply feel you, @sadserver!

And we can work REMOTE! One recent awesome thing that has happened is the ability to work remotely. This opens up enormous doors for moms and their families. I rarely have to take a family sick day. I can flex my hours outside of on call (#dadops, it’s ALL you when I’m on call!) and I can move to suburbia without it having to disrupt my career. I’m often shocked by how few moms are out there doing remote jobs, when the technology/tools is just… it almost is like MADE for that, right? Amirite?!

Also, one of the things that attracted me to DevOps is its inclusivity and integrative mindset. It deeply cares just as much about the people, and understands that silos and closed systems just do not work.

So WHY do we compartmentalize our lives? Why do we try so hard to keep “work” and “home” separate in every way? I’m not talking about syncing your ops pager to your baby monitor (or duct tape if you’re lo-jack… that’s cool, no judgements). But what if integrating the two was actually a GOOD thing? Our own bodies have separate systems to make them work, but they all are integrated or else we’d die, even nature understands the importance of this, why can’t we?

In re-thinking how your experiences at home inform and enrich our experiences at work, we can be a better parent/partner and colleague. And the effort and integrating the two make BOTH better. I am a much better worker post-motherhood than pre-mother. Conflict-resolution, empathy, resilience, humor, perspective, efficiency, decision-making, and especially confrontation. Sometimes there will be situations at work when you will have to confront someone. I am not a confrontational person at all, but as a mom, when someones messes with my kids… the lioness in me comes out! But I can also be nurturing as well, and this is something that has helped me at work. And between confrontation and nurturing and the spectrum in between, we will have those moments and have to be comfortable with those moments and knowing when to use them, and I wasn’t before I was a mother.

Speaking of knowing when to do what — one of the things that being a sysadmin has helped me in my #momops endeavors: wisely deciding when to invoke priveleges as root. Because in life, we will always have pick our battles and be very careful when to sudo or not!

Often we get stuck in this “either-or” mindset. “Either I’m a mom, or I’m working, but I just can’t be both.” But we have long lives, we’re going to be living a long time, we are going to be a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and we’re going to be doing all of it simultaneously. So among the many roles we will play in our life, we will be: a parent, a partner, and we’re going to work. And if you look at this infographic, the parent timeline to be actively engaged in parenthood is a lot shorter than the worker/working timeline. So slow and steady wins the race.

Infographic based on the work of psychologist Donald Super called “the Career Rainbow”

I look at the (predicted) retirement age will probably move up to 70 by the year 2050. This means I have 35 years left of work, but I have maybe 10–12 years of actively being involved in my kids lives before they fly the coop.

I leave you with the regrets of the dying. I’m sorry, we can talk all about how to be awesome at work, but we’re never going to regret on our death bed that we didn’t work harder, or we didn’t have better uptime. The things that matter most will have nothing at all to do with the things that occupy our work stresses of today.

Limits, like fear, is often an illusion. We are only partial to the limits we place on ourselves.

So a gentle reminder: limits, like fear, is often an illusion. We are only partial to the limits that we place upon ourselves. If we say we can’t be moms/hire moms to be awesome sysadmins, SREs, Software Developers, Operations Engineers, etc, then we never will be. So let’s drop the fears and the illusions and make tech more inclusive.