March 25th, 2009
I’m going to buck the trend and not name names on my post for Ada Lovelace Day 2009. Instead I want to salute the women of the Ubuntu Women project for making participating in Ubuntu and in Open Source software in general just a little more supportive, friendly, and welcoming. Unless one comes into our spaces to troll or harass, in which case the banhammers are swiftly dealt :)
Over the years (and it’s been years now!) I’ve hung out in #ubuntu-women on freenode, participated in the mailing list, and run into U-W participants at conferences around the world. Through this, I’ve gained an invaluable support network, a place to vent to my peers, a great group of male allies (by which I mean guys who support the U-W project), and a bunch of fantastic friends.
Ada Lovelace Day is all about role models, and I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of women to look up to than the ones I hang out with every day in #ubuntu-women. Thanks for all the great conversations, and let’s keep working hard on bug number 1!
I would be remiss to not mention my friend Behdad Esfahbod’s post for ALD, because he picked me to write about. I’m delighted and honoured that he wrote about me. ETA: looks like Joey DeVilla and Karen Fung did too!
-Leigh
March 9th, 2009
I gave my first Ignite talk last week at DemoCamp. If you’re unfamiliar with the format, you have 20 slides which advance automatically every 15 seconds, giving you a total of 5 minutes to talk. It’s a fun format, but I was amazed at how much more quickly those slides flashed by when I was in front of an audience than when I was practicing.
My slides were mostly photos, and I had notes co-ordinated with them. I’ve put the presentation on Slideshare, but they don’t share presentation notes well, so I’ll include them here. The bullets are numbered the same as the corresponding slides. Read them really fast and you’ll get an accurate impression of how my talk went (at least until the video gets posted, ruh roh). Slides and notes below the jump.
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March 8th, 2009
I gave a talk a few weeks ago at SpoofIT, the IT Security club at UOIT. I referred to a number of links and resources during the talk but haven’t had a chance until now to post a list of them. I’ve also written up a little summary of the talk for those who missed it. I owe a huge debt of inspiration to James Arlen’s talk at The Last Hope, which you can download at the hackermedia archive or on bittorrent at the HOPE tracker. It’s the one titled “From Black Hat to Black Suit”. He’s been doing this a lot longer than I have, so go watch his talk too :)
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January 22nd, 2009
Two of the most important books I’ve read in my entire life are Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s “Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation – and Positive Strategies for Change” and the follow-up “Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want“.
They’ve inspired me to make significant changes in my life – negotiating the salary for my first “real job”, challenging contracts and business practices that I didn’t think were fair, and generally making my life way more awesome by asking for – and nearly always getting – what I want.
Yesterday, for example, I sent a note about the MOO cards I ordered to their support desk asking for a replacement set of cards because they had misprinted mine. It was a small issue, and they offered me a half-off coupon, but I insisted that they send me a whole deck – and guess what, they did. Kudos to them for solving the issue, and to me for asking, and then asking again.
I’ve created a Twitter account called @askdaily, inspired by these books and this particular incident, to share this kind of “happy negotiation moments” – mine was little, but I’d love to retweet people’s (particularly womens’) successes with job negotiations and promitions, contracts, car repairs, sales negotiations, housework splitting, whatever the happy moments that people get from asking for what they want out of life.
-Leigh
January 7th, 2009
It’s more likely than you think!
While some people are very frustrated by the occasional spamminess of Twitter -> Facebook posting, and others posit that Facebook will eventually kill Twitter because the “conversation moves there”, I just like being able to update both places at once and don’t really care to make predictions either way.
Instead I want to post a quick field guide to Twitter for Facebook users. Not because they should particularly go ahead and sign up, but to make clearer what all the @this and #that’s crapping up their news feeds are. Because they do tend to open dialogs and conversations, but can be confusing sometimes too – I definitely think about how something will work on my FB feed before posting to Twitter.
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