Keynote

This was my first time attending Write/Speak/Code and it was an amazing experience. Not only did I learn useful information for advancing my career I delivered my first Keynote talk. I put together a few highlights of the event below:

Overview

The event took place at The Chicago School of Psychology in Chicago, Illinois. It was my second time in Chicago and I forgot how amazing the food was, so yes I ate well. The conference was split into two tracks: First-Timers and Alumna. All attendees were together for the morning/evening Keynotes and lunch. Then we split into our two tracks and attended “workshop-style” sessions in various areas surrounding writing, speaking and coding.

Android ladies at #wsc2016conf Come say hi if you’re @WriteSpeakCode pic.twitter.com/UHuXRSYH52

— Yash Prabhu (@yashvprabhu) June 15, 2016

Attendees

The conference is open to all who identify as women. Their mission is to empower women developers to become thought leaders, conference speakers, and open source contributors. So the experience level was across the spectrum, many women were just entering the field and others were very experienced developers. So it was great getting to interact with such a diverse group of talented people.

Who came the farthest to #wsc2016conf? Woman from Alaska is the winner!! pic.twitter.com/jUOlQpI5du

— WriteSpeakCode (@WriteSpeakCode) June 15, 2016

Takeaways

So there were a few sessions that I derived a ton of value from, one was about “Ask vs. Guess Culture Communication”. This talk discussed the nuances of the different communication styles, as well as strategies for bridging the gap between the two. During the discussion phase we talked about being successful when pair programming with someone who may have a different communication style from you and I really appreciated the following suggestions:

Do a Pairing Retrospective
Include lots of “I” statements
Establish a baseline for why you’re pairing
Use a Timer ~10 minutes for the “driver”
Swap writing tests and code

Then during the “Project Discovery Workshop” I was blown away by the many helpful strategies provided by Annie Passanisi. For instance, when you’re working on a technical blog post and you would like feedback how should you approach it? Well, here are some of the suggestions she offered:

Only ask people you trust to review your work
Send them the request with a list of questions to answer, like:
Did it answer all of your questions?
How can I provide more value?
What new questions came up for you?
What was your favorite part?

I also really enjoyed the information shared during the “Salary Negotiation” talk. Ashley Powell showed how men and women often negotiate differently and that leads to men consistently making more money than women even though they have the same experience. So it was great to see ideas for how to negotiate when you’re job hunting as well as when you’re looking for a raise. One thing that really stuck with me was that you don’t have to be “aggressive” to negotiate, just go with what works with your personality. Whatever you do, it doesn’t hurt to just ask!

Exactly what to say when negotiating from @AshleyPQPQP, I find this so challenging to do. Great advice! #wsc2016conf pic.twitter.com/qVAHTsAi2C

— Annyce Davis (@brwngrldev) June 18, 2016

With all the information that was being shared during the conference, I appreciated the fact that I still had time to step away and grab some ice cream with a good friend.

Taking a break from #wsc2016conf to enjoy some ice cream with @brwngrldev pic.twitter.com/88Vu1P1pmA

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) June 17, 2016

This was my first time attending an all women conference and it was just as many have said before a transformative experience. I left feeling empowered to do even more great things and to be okay with doing nothing at all.

Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with my Speaking Adventures. Until next time…

In Part I of this series, I discussed what it takes to prepare your own video course. In this part we’ll talk about the tools and processes you can use to plan for and record the actual videos. So let’s get started…

The Slides

So in many cases you will want to have an introductory slide(s) before perhaps switching to the application or code that you want to demonstrate in the given video. In my case, I prefer to use Keynote, a presentation software from Apple, in order to create the slides for my course. For the majority of the videos I would have an introductory slide which allowed me to introduce the main concepts that would be covered in the video.

Simple Introductory Slide

Then as far as providing content for the actual slides, I would try to keep the slides free from clutter. This would include using fitting images or diagrams when appropriate and then just talking about the information instead of having a long list of bullets. For example, I could have a slide which contains a listing of the benefits of automated testing, or I could use a simple slide with an image (see below) and speak to the benefits. Which one would you find more appealing?

Use images if possible

The Script

On to the script. Have you ever listened to a video tutorial and the person seems to be rambling or loses their train of thought often? Well, having a script will help to alleviate this problem. It doesn’t have to be anything extremely involved. I used Google Docs to store the scripts for each video.

Each file consisted of the title of the video and a chart with two columns: Action on Screen and Audio. I would put a screenshot of what would be showing on the video in chronological order and then what I wanted to say about that portion of content in the Audio column. This helped me to stay on track and make fewer mistakes during the recording of the videos.

Recording

Finally, recording the videos was the easiest part of the entire process. Since I had everything prepared in advance, I would just open Camtasia and make sure I was using my headset for the recording and push record. I had a list of things I wanted to make sure I did however, before recording, and that consisted of the following:

Turning off all Messaging Applications
Turning off any Notifications
Setting the correct resolution (1280 x 720) for my display
Closing the door (no outside noises)
Hiding the Dock on my Mac
Properly place the headset and microphone

In Part III of this series, I’ll share what I did to help market my course.

Check out Part I if you missed it!

Write/Speak/Code 2016 Recap