Past Womxn Level Up Meetups

This is a talk for engineers that have been in the industry for a few years and may be looking for something new. I’ll touch on algorithms, interview prep, but mostly how to overcome doubts and fears that might be holding you back.

Following Mannah's talk, co-organizers Catherine and Amanda will be hosting a conversation and AMA. Come with any and all feedback, desires for future talks, and questions for your co-organizers! We can't wait to welcome you back at our first Womxn Level Up event of 2021.

An intersectional view of inclusion requires considering class. Michelle will share a bit about her own background and how her experiences led her to found Techtonica. Then she'll outline some common patterns among class straddlers to prepare attendees for inclusive collaboration in the workplace.

Everyone deserves to earn the fair market value for their work, but how can you know if that’s really happening? One of the best ways is to ask your coworkers what they make. I’ll share my tips and tricks for starting these conversations, we’ll get some safe practice, and you’ll leave with more comfort and confidence talking about pay.

We'll discuss what it's really like to be a prominent womxn on the internet. The positives and negatives. The why. And how we can all help the internet be just a little bit safer for everyone.

Within a few short years, Cypress has emerged as a popular framework for end-to-end testing. Marked by a browser-based runner, asynchronous behavior, and readability, it offers a robust way to automate, particularly for front-end components. This talk will walk us through some common use cases, as well as some limitations (such as Electron vs. Chrome capabilities). It'll also dig into how Quality Assurance engineers might utilize the library differently from full-stack developers. Lastly, we'll look at Cypress' compatibility with non-JavaScript frameworks like Rails.

There's an undeniable wage gap for womxn and bipoc. Today, we're experiencing not just this existing wage gap but an even greater raise gap in fundraising for womxn and bipoc entrepreneurs and business owners. Through data storytelling, we'll explore the intricacies of these inequalities, and how we, as technologists, can support one another to create an inclusive society by design, while summarizing the fundamentals concepts of data visualization

The world is on fire. The global pandemic, economic collapse and racial injustice have called us to change with the changing world. Your life is so different from 3 months ago, such tremendous growth as we navigate a world of uncertainty. We are now creating a new world. As we work to make the world better, we have the opportunity to define for ourselves how we move forward individually.

In this one-hour workshop, we hit refresh. We reflect on how far we’ve come since March. And we focus on what we want to be and have by October 1, 2020.

This is goal-setting 2.0, designed for women in tech and everyone who balances tight deadlines against having what we want. Different from SMART or GROW goals, this interactive and highly actionable workshop focuses on successful best practices based on research from thought leaders Dan and Chip Heath.

We start with what you want to have, then who you need to be (or, how you might need to change), what you need to do, and fastest ways to get it done.

Leadership coach and activist Josephine Bellaccomo, author of Move The Message: Your Guide To Making A Difference and Changing the World, will guide you to uncover beliefs that may be limiting or sabotaging your success. This interactive workshop shares practical tactics, strategies and tips so you can have an extraordinary and successful Q3 and beyond.

*please bring a journal or notebook – you will be writing 😊

Connect with Jo and learn more about her via LinkedIn, Move the Message, or Twitter

When you feel aimless or dissatisfied in your career, it’s often because you have no idea what you’re looking for. Without a clear idea of what you want to do, you get antsy about leaving your job, focused on external measures of success and distracted by shiny jobs. How are you supposed to stop doing what you think is “right” in your career and start doing what’s right for you? If you’re not clear about what you want, there’s no way you can convey it to anyone else. Come learn how to stop falling into jobs based on circumstances and start making decisions intentionally that are right for you.

There’s bias in algorithms - how does this happen? In this talk, we walk through a step by step example of building a prediction algorithm, focused on areas where bias could be inadvertently introduced. We then look at when algorithms were used to make biased decisions, and what we can do about it.

How can we be happy being average when so many DevOps strategies are created by much larger companies for much bigger problems? Understanding the limits of our resources and deciding how to concentrate DevOps for our needs is essential to successful processes at a smaller company. We will explore what it means to be average using the best example: me.

How to create a cohesive language between design, engineering, and product teams through Deductive Component Language.

Historically, women’s value came from ‘making a good match’, her worth measured by being a good wife and child bearer. As women entered the marketplace, we were placed in competition with men, molding ourselves into men in pencil skirts.

This stifles the natural creativity and innate power of being a woman. You see the success of others and feel discouraged and frustrated. You know you have great gifts, but when you try the strategies of the men around you, you feel like you’ve been put in box too small for your spirit.

This is costing you health, sanity, money and massive success on your own terms.

In this talk, Julie shares:

• Understanding the difference between feminine energy and masculine energy and how to use each effectively in your job or business
• How feminine energy has been historically devalued in the work arena, and what it costs us and our employers
• Tips to activate your Feminine Power Centers making you more creative, better at solving problems and more able to think outside the box so you naturally bring more value to the workplace.

Deana will energize you to capture that daring spirit within you and chase after what you want. Sharing her own experience of overcoming a conviction that held her back, she illustrates how we live a life that is either limited or unlimited by our beliefs. With research, storytelling, and appealing visuals, she shows you self-empowerment strategies to increase confidence in your own capabilities.

Are you looking to do a Rails upgrade this year? The Rails core team has been hard at work this year on security, bug fixes, and oh yeah, Rails 6! Come learn about multiple database support, parallel testing, Zeitwerk, and all the new features coming to a console near you.

Senior Software Engineer Greg McGuirk will be presenting a round up of all the exciting changes to Rails that happened this year already.

Are you ready to make what you know you're worth and set up yourself up for a successful negotiation from the first conversation?

If you are a yes to this but unsure where to start or how to navigate this conversation powerfully, WorkWell knows what you need. While you've likely heard before that negotiation is an "expected part of the process", knowing hasn't made a difference when it comes to shutting down the panic butterflies that take flight at its mention. But you deserve to get the knowledge that will lead to your ideal career growth.

Join WorkWell coaches, Whitney and Lucy, for an engaging workshop on salary negotiation where you will not just learn what you should do, but you will get to practice in a safe learning environment. They’ve coached 700+ people into high paying tech jobs and negotiated hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries and know exactly what it takes to land both technical and non-technical roles at a company you are actually excited about where you make what you deserve!

Are your nerves stopping you from achieving your true career potential? Change can be scary but making that next uncomfortable jump can also completely transform your career. During this talk, I will share how I navigated my own untraditional career transition and how embracing my nerves helped me to jump out of my comfort zone and welcome untraditional opportunities. You’ll be craving that feeling of nervousness by the end of this!

Making relevant software starts with understanding the humans using it. Many teams (and products) suffer from a gap in goals between typical design and development roles. Learn how to bridge this gap by aligning on a common goal - the needs of your users. In this introduction to human-centered design, we'll cover the fundamentals of the methodology, and specific techniques that you can use to shift your thinking from system efficiency to user needs

Malicious actors on the internet are constantly probing and scanning for potential vulnerabilities. Their activity generates a huge amount of "noisy" packets that are not legitimate attempts to connect to services but may be the first scouting step of a cyber attack. This "internet background radiation" is persistent, consistent, and loud. In this workshop, we'll support participants in standing up software to observe internet background radiation from AWS machines, and we'll enable them to perform basic analyses on what they see and report out on those findings. Participants will walk away with an understanding of how internet scanning fits into the landscape of cybersecurity, as both an omnipresent source of attacks and as a powerful defensive tool.

Gina will talk about building an inclusive culture and creating pathways for growth and success at Blockstack. She organized Blockstack's Level Up: Women in Emerging Tech - A mini-series that provides an outlet for professionals in the USV network and beyond to learn from those who are "two steps ahead," hearing their stories and gaining tangible skills to enhance their careers along the way. It delves into the art of creating space and making one's voice heard in emerging industries. By learning from those who have seen success, we hope to empower women in tech and inspire new leaders for the future.

The fastest way to get me to change the topic in a conversation is to compliment me. I will twist, turn, and segue into weather, sports I don’t understand, or Marvel Comics conspiracy theories before I will acknowledge a compliment. I will suddenly become a fount of wildlife trivia, take up jogging, or pretend I’m getting a phone call. I’ve always been like this, but when I transitioned into engineering, I started to notice the people around me doing it, too--especially people who fell into underrepresented groups--and I started to get mad. Why is it so hard for us to value our own work like we value the work of others?

In this talk, we’ll explore what it means to value our personal and professional achievements, and how higher self-worth makes us better teammates and empathetic leaders. We’ll talk about the many ways in which I have failed and the lessons I’ve learned as I began to care about and for myself. This talk will feature jokes (humor is my preferred coping mechanism) and hand-drawn slides (to keep anyone from looking too closely at me). More importantly, the audience will learn how valuing ourselves leads us to value each other.

This talk doesn’t end with an epiphany. It doesn’t end with revelatory tech or a link to a download. It ends with two simple words that are a seed for something bigger: be brave.

In my past year or so of team leading, I've helped lead my team through migrating our application from Heroku to Kubernetes, kicked off both small and large projects, and put out numerous customer fires. Along the way, I've learned some lessons about how to lead technical efforts in unfamiliar areas, how to push through challenging problems, and how to level up everyone on our team.

Many software teams are aware of the benefits of using feature flags in their development workflows, but the friction of adding and eventually removing flags from a codebase can prevent teams from fully benefitting from a feature flag management system. While LaunchDarkly helps to greatly improve many aspects of the management process, developers still struggle to add, maintain, and analyze flags in a codebase, especially in large numbers. Surprisingly, the answer to this problem may be found in the popular UI library React.

Therefore, in this talk, I will use real world examples and live demos to explain how products like Trello leverage built-in functionality found in React and LaunchDarkly to drastically reduce the friction of adding, removing, and analyzing feature flags.

I am a middle-aged Black man and I'm willing to bet that you are not.

Feeling like I don’t quite fit in has given me a unique perspective on tech, community, and the future of what it means to be an engineer. Let's take this opportunity to explore identity, culture and how we might shed some light on our blind spots.

As of ReactConf 2018, classes are out and hooks are the future! Come learn about the newest React feature - what they are, how to use them, and why you would want to use them. We'll do a demo, discuss tradeoffs, and have time for Q&A.

How much extra work are you doing when dealing with bad communicators? It might be more than you think. In this talk we'll learn a few tricks to take the load off of you, while also helping others develop their own communication skills.

Authentication is HARD. Getting it right is painful. Getting it wrong can end your business or start your new career as a security expert. So let someone else do the heavy lifting. OAuth, while it sounds scary, is one way to get out of the authentication business.

Being involved in the tech community. It's something that may seem intimidating at first, and is easier said than done. This lightning talk covers what "being involved" means as well as some of the Hows, Whys, and Common Concerns that people have when considering it.

Augmented Reality (WebXR) is a new set of web APIs we can use to create engaging experiences in mobile web. Great Augmented Reality experiences require your apps to be performant and well designed. In this talk we will explore what are the capabilities that are ready to use, what is coming in the future and how to get started with WebXR APIs.

"Be more proactive" is feedback we've probably all heard at one time or another. But we also know that all projects are not created equal. Simply taking on more work doesn't always equate to career growth – in fact, it can do the opposite. And to complicate the matter, the most impactful projects are not always the most sought-after. This session is designed to help you identify meaningful work in unlikely places that will ultimately boost your visibility inside your company, have organization-wide impact, and maximize your career growth.

With more and more devices needing to understand the world around them, from robotics, to drones, cars, VR and phones, there are many different ways for computers to perceive the world. Suzanne Leibrick from Intel RealSense will discuss various different methods of scene perception, from time of flight, to structured light, to machine learning approaches, how they work, and the benefits and tradeoffs between methods and how to choose which might be best for your problem space. This talk does not require any prior knowledge of depth or scene perception.

Have you ever asked someone to do something, and they hear the exact opposite?

Why do miscommunications happen? Does knowing why matter? And more importantly, how do you achieve your original desired request?

If you want to learn more ways to influence those around you, this talk is for you! You’ll learn about different causes for failed communications, and different workarounds you can apply for different failure modes. Come to this talk to add another tool to your communications toolbox.

Meet Red. Red is a reducing lemur, and he loves to sum things using the reduce method. The problem is, with Ruby 2.4+ and the sum method he's starting to think reduce isn't that useful anymore. Distraught, Red asks his master for advice, and she sends him off on a grand journey to learn the true powers of the reduce method by reimplementing various methods from Enumerable.

Join Red on an illustrated adventure through the land of Enumerable as he learns to map, select, find, and more using his trusty reduce.

If you're new to Ruby and Functional Programming, this is the talk for you.

We in tech tend to be ambitious achievers. Having said that, working in tech can be quite chaotic and stressful. Mindfulness is the bridge that can connect us to the gift of presence and help us continue with positive momentum and energy.

We'll initially walk through the difference between meditation and mindfulness. Lida will identify some meditation styles that have (not) worked for her, and would work for you. She'll also help you design a personal, effective, and ideally regular meditation routine.

Angular and React are both great. Angular provides a defined structure of MVC while React provides a lightweight rendering mechanism. Often times, an application will have legacy code in AngularJS but teams will want to build new features in ReactJS. In this talk, we will use an AngularJS legacy application and develop new features in ReactJS, one component at a time.

We’re told on a regular basis to monitor the performance, speed, responsiveness, memory, and general health of our websites, with the ever-present threat of down time hanging over our shoulder. But how often do we pay this same attention to our own physical and mental health?

As a Type 1 Diabetic, it’s a little more front-of-mind, as it’s not just about how much exercise I’ve gotten in the last month, how healthy my diet is, or how much of a workaholic I am… It’s about what the ratio of sugar to insulin is in my bloodstream at every moment of every day. It’s about making sure I’ve got a spare insulin pod, my test machine, a granola bar, glucose tabs, and my trusty sidekick Ember Dog (with all of his accouterment) at all times.

But just because I have to be more aware of certain things doesn’t lessen the importance of paying attention to general physical and mental health, which come with their own set of potentially deadly side effects. In this talk, I’ll touch briefly on my day-to-day life with diabetes, and then segue into what the past few years have taught me about mental and physical health.

Have you ever wanted to make the static content on your web pages more dynamic, but weren't sure where to start? Come learn about how to get started with CSS animations and why developing animated content is worth your time and energy.

By now, we know how metrics can help us monitor our applications and it's infrastructure, but I wanted to go one step further to understand the value of metrics. In this talk, I'll cover how I measured my code and used it to become a (slightly) better game developer.

The winds of change are blowing in Silicon Valley. In the time of #MeToo and #TimesUp, women are more ready than ever to step into leadership and thrive in systems that have historically not set them up for success.

One piece of advice have been long been told to hard workers of all genders: ""just go heads down and you will eventually be rewarded."" In a purely fair system maybe, but that's not how it works in the real world. Women have to advocate for themselves, and developing public speaking skills is one of the best strategies to take control of your own career.

Jennifer Kim, former Head of Employee Experience & Development Lever, will give a talk on why women more women should embrace public speaking, no matter where you're starting from. In addition to her People duties, Jen also led Diversity & Inclusion at Lever, and her work led to the company reaching 50:50 gender balance across the company.

While React is known to be quite speedy, if you’re not aware of some performance gotchas, you can end up with a slow moving application that won’t meet the needs of your users. This is especially true for large, UI heavy React Apps. This talk will first give an overview of web performance and the tools available to help identify issues. Then it will dive into React-specific performance concerns and provide fixes that will keep your app feeling fast.

The #MeToo movement has taken over the country by storm. But now, what’s next? How do we use technology to further the movement and help survivors of workplace harassment, discrimination, and retaliation?

Join BetterBrave to dig into solutions that can empower more survivors and allies to speak up and get the help that they need.

Kubernetes is the latest and greatest way to run your apps in production. Let's take a look at how we can scale a simple web app as it receives traffic and explore some of the basics of Kubernetes.

Are you looking for innovative ways to develop your engineering skills? Do you care about the state of our communities? Do you agree that companies recruiting engineers will likely use your Github account to see whether you are actively coding? Then this talk is for you. Join me as I tell my story about improving my coding abilities and overall knowledge of agile development while supporting a Bay Area non profit to improve one of its core annual programs. You will learn a powerful strategy for improving your resume, your linkedin profile, or even find work while you're not working, all the while giving back to your community, and working towards landing your next big gig.

As engineers, we build pretty cool apps. Once users start using our cool apps… well, we run into the fun process of discovering errors. Keeping track of these issues can get messy, getting alerted is stressful, and measuring it can provide you with an overwhelming amount of information. So, how do we combine all these things to make our cool apps work even better than before? In this talk, we’ll dive into logging, errors, and metrics, and how to use them to create the ultimate superpower of OBSERVABILITY!

Have you ever been in a work situation where you just couldn't hold back the tears or tempered your emotions because you wanted to maintain your work persona? This session will address the touchy subject of emotions in the workplace. You'll hear all about the negative impacts of emotions in the workplace and learn why you shouldn't care. You'll learn how to stop feeling terrible when you cry at the office and how to celebrate a victory when you have one. Together we will redefine strength and weakness and learn to thrive emotionally.

The world of software development has profoundly changed since the discipline was first identified more than 50 years ago, yet today we still fundamentally model it the same way we did then: as a variant of engineering, manufacturing, or science (depending on who you ask). These models have helped us build a lot of useful stuff. But in the last 5 years, we've discovered that we're in a new world, facing more complex problems that none of those models help with. These problems are largely sociotechnical.

• - Why are some devs way more productive than others?
• - How will a new team member affect our throughput?
• - What’s the right mix of refactoring, new feature work, and bug fixes?
• - How can a manager support a diverse team & set them up to succeed?

For this new, more complex world in which we’re making software, we need new, more powerful models. Livable Code is a new model for software development, based on one crucial insight: these days, people are the most difficult part of software. Starting from that, we’ll construct a model for thinking about codebases and teams fundamentally different from that of “engineering,” and see what new insights it can give us, both on the social issues our teams face, and on our technical issues. Let’s describe software as it is actually practiced - warts and all - and seek concrete ways to improve. Our world is changing - but we can change with it.

I financed a 2 year sabbatical out of my own pocket, didn't go broke, leveraged it into 6 years (living in Mexico, Hawaii and the Philippines) completely out of the tech sector and then came back, pretty much where I left off. I highly recommend the adventure.

MySQL offers a lot of metrics. A lot is an understatement. If I were Scrooge McDuck, I could swim in a vault filled to the brim with MySQL metrics. If each metric was a folding chair, you'd be wishing it was Wrestlemania. So how do we prioritize which metrics we monitor?

Even if you're new to MySQL or you primarily use another database, the metrics that matter will give you insight into your database. This talk is friendly for beginners as well as DevOps experts who are buried in metrics. We'll talk about the four most important metrics and where to find them in MySQL.

When you are looking for a job, everyone will tell you to leverage your network. A strong network can increase your access to professional resources and employment options. But how do you create a network that leads to opportunity? How can you ask for something without coming across as needy? How do can you forge connections that feel organic and genuine?

This session will clarify the process of growing your network. Through anecdotes we’ll explore how people connect, how relationships evolve, and how professional opportunities emerge. You’ll leave with five specific strategies for growing a network that is not only strong when you need it, but provides ongoing value and energy for everyone involved.

Have you ever been frustrated with Jekyll or Hexo? Do you want a little more control than you get on Medium? Do you like rolling your own thing?

In this talk I am going to show you how to build a static site generator for a simple blog. In the course of this we will talk about the differences between static and dynamic sites and the benefits of both. I hope to convince you that writing your own static site generator is by no means as daunting as it sounds and makes for a super fun and educational side project.

From managing your job application pipeline to offer negotiation, this brief talk will cover all the important aspects of your non-technical interview. You'll leave here with a handful of resources to help you value yourself in this job market as well as tips and best practices to efficiently power through your next job interviews. Those that can master the non-technical part of their interview will find they receive more (and better) offers than average.

Join Ryan in learning about Data Flow and State Tree management with Redux. During which, we will learn some common patterns for setting and accessing data in the state tree, as well as present some new patterns we are trying out at Mavenlink.

What do careers in sales and engineering have in common? What does being a fighter pilot have to do with being in the infantry? This talk will explore how you might use - and not shy away from - other career experiences in your current endeavor. Insight and empathy can often come from seemingly tangential things.

Peter will discuss his learnings over the 2-ish years he spent taking a hackathon project from proof-of-concept to a first-class member of the Mavenlink stack. Changestream captures change events from the MySQL binlog and transforms them into JSON that can be consumed anywhere.

Writing software for a living comes with numerous perks, but for many, getting to career bliss is tough. Luckily, there are many resources available to new coders, such as free online resources and even coding bootcamps. However, after you've landed your first software job, the help starts to thin and it's often hard to move forward with your career. So, if you've successfully entered the field of software engineering, but are feeling stuck, this talk will cover a variety of practical strategies that will help move your career forward.

If you've ever felt like you've spent a lot of time building the wrong thing, it might make sense to start your development with an acceptance test. Watch and listen as a I "um", "like", and "uh" my way through a talk on how I learned to love writing Acceptance Specs.

We've all experienced it: a coder our company just hired comes over to ask questions about the codebase. This coder might be a senior dev new to our codebase or a junior dev new to coding in general. How do we efficiently answer questions and teach in an effective manner.

Most of us haven't gone to school to learn how to teach. Yet, teaching is a part of most programmers' daily lives. With this talk, you'll get some tips and tricks on how to become a better teacher. And by learning how to teach, we'll also learn how to be a better student.

In a world where code breaks all the time for no discernible reason, which way of catching regressions will reign supreme? Why even write tests at all? What does it mean?

In addition to discussing the 'how,' we will examine the 'where' and 'why' of testing your code. Philosophizing will occur.

Many people and teams struggle with sharing ideas in a safe way that allows them to be heard while affording the audience insight as to the level of commitment to those ideas. How can we better communicate with each other when presenting ideas and solutions? In this talk, a simple strategy will be demonstrated and explored.

Webpack seems to have taken over the JavaScript world, and people are singing its asset-compilation praises everywhere. No need to include tons of script tags in your HTML! No more worrying about dependency ordering! Now you can smoosh all your files together into a single asset! It's the future! You've taken a look at Webpack's docs. They are confusing, and the API is obscure. But did you know Webpack's core functionality is so simple you could write it yourself? No, seriously! If you understand closures in JavaScript, you can understand Webpack. If you've wanted to use Webpack but were intimidated by how complicated it is, this talk is for you. We'll walk through a step-by-step example, turning a repo of separate files into a single asset by recreating Webpack's process. You’ll leave with a super-solid mental model of Webpack and the ability to read its output and debug like a pro.

Have you ever wished for more feedback from colleagues to help you get better at your job? When’s the last time you offered helpful feedback to someone else? Imagine an entire company fluent in the daily practice of giving and receiving constructive feedback. Would your experience improve? What does a team lose when feedback doesn’t flow?

Feedback conversations can be difficult. But giving and receiving feedback pushes us to the edge of our growth potential, where the biggest payoffs occur. Join this session to grow your career by learning how to get real.

There's a lot that goes into making an app secure and it can be overwhelming to make sure you've done everything right to keep your users' data safe. However, remembering just two concepts, authentication and authorization, can go a long way in keeping your app secure. Sadly, many developers confuse the two, either forgetting both, or unintentionally including just authentication. In this talk, I'll briefly explain authentication, authorization, why it's crucial that each are included when building a secure app, and how you can use existing Ruby gems to make your users' data super safe.

Come learn how to get the most out of your conference experience, whether you're a speaker or an audience member! We'll talk about useful preparation methods that will help in either case!

Animation doesn’t just make pages look fun. It’s also a helpful tool for engaging users, providing real-time feedback, and presenting large amounts of data in an easy-to-understand fashion. Come learn about different approaches to adding animations to your websites and web apps. We will focus on modern JavaScript libraries, such as GSAP, and cover how to build animations that meet your needs and impress your users.

"How do I become a senior engineer?" It’s a question every bootcamp grad will ask. Most engineers look at advancement through a lens of increasing technical skill. More than ever, though, being “senior” means more than just parsing Ruby in your sleep. As our companies grow and as our industry grows, seniority means helping new teammates and colleagues advance their own skills. It means knowing how to teach. You don’t need Matz-level knowledge to be a great teacher. With social awareness, a dash of psychology, and some proven approaches, by helping others learn, you’ll earn senior-level respect.

Techniques for building more accessible applications