January 24, 2020

Procrastination

I’ve had a fantastic week of meeting with colleagues and friends, getting to know some of my organisation, brainstorming ideas for next year, working out how to prioritise and plan, being handed greater responsibility and freedom…

January 20, 2020

2019

Right so yes. 2020, hello. One of my 2020 resolutions is to get back to my personal blog. Weekly. Yeah right. Let’s aim for weekly and be happy with monthly.

For my first post let’s do the obligatory look-back-over-last-year. Not because it’s trendy (I’m 41 now, I don’t care about being trendy any more), but because it’s super important for me to understand what I went through and what I achieved last year (every year), otherwise I get caught up in the hamster-wheel of the-next-thing-and-the-next-thing-and-the-next-thing. Progress should be celebrated, not just ignored for the next item on the ever growing, ever pressing TODO list. Also, looking back helps me to plan the next year. Doesn’t have to be super-planned, but setting some goals, objectives, ideas for which direction I’d prefer to go in helps me decide how to prioritise that ever-growing, ever-pressing TODO list.

September 27, 2019

Me Mum

I didn’t see what an enormous impact Mum made on my life, because she was always there. There’s a quote in the book Good Omens: “It’s for the same reason you can’t see England when you’re in Trafalgar Square” - Mum was a constant, important, dependable presence for my whole life.

I wrote something for Mum while I was on the plane from Spain to spend what was to be our last two weeks together. I’d like to share some of that with you all now.

September 27, 2019

Ode to a Resting Warrior

This July my Mum passed away, apparently cancer was the one opponent she couldn’t beat in an argument. Mum had a huge impact on my life, as you might expect, not only personally but professionally too. Maybe I’ll talk about that some more in time. For now, I want to publish the poem my very talented cousin Izzi Giles wrote in tribute.

July 3, 2019

Code Review Best Practices

This article was originally a guest post for FogBugz.

As developers, we all know that code reviews are a good thing in theory. They should help us:

Find bugs and security issues early
Improve the readability of our code
Provide a safety net to ensure all tasks are fully completed

The reality is that code reviews can frequently be an uncomfortable experience for everyone involved, leading to reviews that are combative, ineffective, or even worse, simply not happening.

Here is a quick guide to help you to create an effective code review process.

March 29, 2019

Speaker Tips - Focus on Either Content or Delivery

When you’re a new speaker, or just starting to consider speaking at conferences or user groups for the first time, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the things you worry about when delivering a talk.

March 15, 2019

Speaker Tips - What to Wear

For years I’ve avoided talking about the topic of what to wear when presenting. I didn’t want to cover it because I didn’t want people to think that I only worried about this topic because I was a woman. I also didn’t want other women to inherit any of my neuroses around deciding what to wear. I’m the sort of person who always enjoyed thinking long and hard about what to wear the next day at work, and I know that’s not how everyone works.

March 14, 2019

Speaker Tips - Wearing a Roaming Mic is More Complicated Than I Realised

I realise I have a bunch of experience and advice for speakers and potential speakers that I simply haven’t written down or shared. Here’s the first piece on things to consider that you might not have thought about. Note: as usual, my advice is from the point of view of a woman (me) and is aimed mostly at women, but also as usual it’s probably useful for others to know too.

April 20, 2018

What Can Conferences Do To Attract More Women Speakers?

Now I’ve been speaking at (mostly Java) conferences for a while (six years now), I get asked to present at a lot of conferences. Obviously all these conferences are mostly interested in my terribly educational talks, but it’s also because I’m a technical woman and there aren’t very many technical women speaking at conferences.

In my experience, conferences want to do the right thing - they want a diverse line up of speakers, they want to attract diverse attendees. Often this is not as easy as it may seem, and frequently conferences are Twitter-shamed for not having enough women speakers. When it gets to this point (and often before), conferences frequently ask me for advice on speakers they could invite, and how to attract more women.

April 2, 2018

Being a Developer Advocate at JetBrains

Mandatory initial exclamation about how little I have blogged here lately. Over a year without updates, oh dear! But a) I have been blogging quite a lot for the IntelliJ IDEA and Upsource blogs, and b) I had another baby, which kept me quite busy.

So on that topic (more or less) I get a lot of questions about my job: what’s involved in the job, what’s it like working for JetBrains, what does a Developer Advocate do, what’s it like working remotely etc etc. Given I also rather generously¹ recently offered to answer people’s questions about my job, I thought the most scalable way was to write-once-read-many, i.e. write it in a single blog post for everyone to read.

November 4, 2016

What Can Men Do

So, I wrote a long email to the London Java Community in answer to an excellent question: “What can men do to support Women in Technology?”.

It’s a bit of a brain dump, by no means comprehensive, and is in answer to a specific question in a specific context, but I’ve been asked to make the information public so it can be useful in a broader context. So here it is.

September 16, 2016

JavaZone 2016

It’s been a while since I wrote a conference write up. The short version of “why” is because I got a bit bored of doing it. Plus, I found I was attending conferences as a speaker “on the circuit”, and my experience of hanging out, catching up with my friends, chatting to other attendees to see what they’re up to and so forth, didn’t seem as useful to share with people who might want to find out whether a conference is worth attending from a content or atmosphere point of view.

But I feel compelled to blog about JavaZone. I presented there back in 2013, but every year since then haven’t made it for one reason or another (the fact that it’s near my birthday in no way impacts my scheduling…). I made the effort this year, and I’m so pleased. Now I’ve been to many more conferences, of various sizes, various themes, all around the world, and I can definitely state that JavaZone is up there as one of the best conferences around.

Why?

August 1, 2016

A Year? Really?

So I came to the blog to update my upcoming events (at least something stays up to date) only to find it’s been nearly a year since I last blogged! This is terrible!

It’s not that I haven’t written anything in a year, it’s that a lot of my writing energy goes into stuff for the actual day job. Which is good, because that’s pretty much what I wanted from the day job, but the blog makes it look like I don’t write any more.

So I’m going to cheat. Here’s the stuff I’ve written in the last 12 months.

August 4, 2015

Java 8 MOOC - Session 3 Summary

Last night was the final get-together to discuss the Java 8 MOOC. Any event hosted in August in a city that is regularly over 40°C is going to face challenges, so it was great that we had attendees from earlier sessions plus new people too.

July 31, 2015

Java 8 MOOC - Session 2 Summary

As I mentioned last week, the Sevilla Java User Group is working towards completing the Java 8 MOOC on lambdas and streams. We’re running three sessions to share knowledge between people who are doing the course.

July 27, 2015

What to look for in a Code Review

I wrote a post for the JetBrains Upsource blog about some of the things you should be looking for when you do code reviews (and some of the things you should not be looking at).

July 21, 2015

Java 8 MOOC - Session 1 Summary

The Sevilla Java User Group is working together towards completing the Java 8 MOOC on lambdas and streams. As part of this, we’re running three sessions during the course so we can, as a group, ask questions about the lectures, get help with the homework, and (if we’re feeling very smart!) help people who may be struggling (or might not have watched the videos).

July 18, 2015

Interviewed by InfoQ

While I was at QCon New York (probably my business conference this year!) I was interviewed by Ralph Winzinger for InfoQ. It felt like a short interview at the time, but we covered a lot of ground - Java 8, Java vs other JVM languages, the effectiveness of the JCP, and the future of Java.

Video and the transcript are available on InfoQ.

July 2, 2015

My Path To Evangelism

So, I get asked a lot about how I got into technical advocacy / evangelism¹, so it seems like the most cost-effective way to answer this question is to write a post about it. Warning: it’s a long one!

May 22, 2015

Java at 20

I was asked three simple questions about my thoughts on Java turning 20, and ended up writing a guest post for Voxxed. No wonder I can’t seem to find the time to write these days.

May 21, 2015

Android Xtended

You may have noticed that the more I go to conferences, the less I write about them. I could claim lack of time, but the fact is that all my write-ups will be something along the lines of “Loved <city>, went to talks that made me think, met interesting people, gave a talk or two that seemed to go well”. Not sure if people get bored of reading that, but I get bored of writing it.

That’s not to say I’m bored of conferences. On the contrary - since I work from home, travelling to new places and meeting Real Human Beings keeps me sane. Plus conferences are fun.

But I went to a conference on Saturday that makes me feel compelled to write something, and not just because it was organised by my two fellow Sevilla JUG organisers. @IsraKaos and @RGDav are both doing more Android day-to-day than server-side Java, so this is an area they’re interested in learning more about. Not content with organising Android events every other month, they decided they had so many interesting speakers they wanted to have speaking here in Sevilla that they wanted to run a whole day, single track conference, on behalf of GDG Sevilla. Android Xtended was born.

March 12, 2015

Blind CFPs - a Postscript

Since publishing yesterday’s post, I’ve had a lot of great comments, so I thought I’d write yet another post to answer them.

March 11, 2015

Are Blind CFPs Really The Answer?

Off the back of yesterday’s post, I received a number of comments and questions around blind CFPs (Call For Papers - usually to get into a conference you submit to a CFP) for conferences. I often hear it said that a blind CFP will fix, or at least improve, the diversity imbalance at conferences.

I don’t believe this.

March 10, 2015

I'm so tired of it all

We work so hard to promote equality, to fight for the rights of people who are not middle-class white men, and time and again it just feels like we’re not getting anywhere. International Women’s Day highlights the issues that face women all around the world, and make our women-in-tech problem look like a genuine First World Problem, and yet we can’t even get that right.

January 29, 2015

The State of Java

I think living in a beautiful city in a fantastic climate has its advantages. Not just the obvious ones, but we find people unusually keen to come and visit us on the pretence of presenting at the Sevilla Java User Group (and please, DO come and present at our JUG, we love visitors).

This week we were really lucky, we had Georges Saab and Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro giving us an update on where Java is now and where it looks like it’s going in the future.

January 9, 2015

New IntelliJ Tricks I Learnt Part 2

Apparently, I’m all about Continuous Learning - after I wrote the last post about IntelliJ Tips, I carried on through my trawl of the documentation and, of course, discovered a load more things I didn’t know. And this is all just in the Quick Start section!

So here’s the next batch (although once again I’m not sure how many are only applicable to IntelliJ 14). All shortcuts are for Windows unless otherwise stated, and Mac users should be able to replace the Ctrl key with Cmd in all these cases.

January 7, 2015

New IntelliJ Tricks I Learnt Today

Day three of my brand new job - woohoo! One of my first tasks is checking the documentation of IntelliJ, since I’m already a “Power User”, to see if there’s stuff missing that someone like me might want to see. Firstly, a confession - I’m not sure I’ve actually read the IntelliJ documentation before. I mean, really read it. Of course, I’ve dipped into it when I needed to know something, I’ve searched for help with specific items, but like many developers, I tend to use something first rather than read the documentation first.

But I’ll tell you what, today I’ve learnt a whole bunch of useful things IntelliJ can do that I hadn’t previously known, and they’re the sorts of things you would only stumble over if a) you read the docs (pah!) or b) you watched someone else using the tool and saw them doing something you didn’t know was possible.

December 11, 2014

Developers want to be heard

I wrote a piece for the Java Advent Blog, about how developers aren’t just communing with the computer, they also need to feel listened to by real human beings.

Read it here

December 10, 2014

New Year, New Adventures

Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying “the MongoDB people”, and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced a technology product; to discover what impact working in an open source fashion has; and to level up my advocacy skills.

December 9, 2014

Improving Speaker Diversity

Last month at Devoxx I was in a session discussing what we can do to encourage more diversity in our speakers (specifically, although not limited to, increasing the number of women speakers). I’m going to outline the things I remember being discussed, although as usual we did not find the answer to the problem, only identify some issues and explore some options. This is a very chaotic blog post, because if I don’t post it now I’ll never post it, and it’s better if my thoughts are scrawled down and posted than if this all goes to die in my drafts folder.