Puzzles can be well defined problems - products aren’t well defined. They’re an evolution and ongoing dialogue with customers to determine the puzzles needing to be solved. This is further reinforced by puzzles already solved by the “Rest of the World”
Abstraction and (especially) SaaS is incredibly powerful for companies. You don’t need to “know how to build a pencil to write with it” you can focus on the problems your biz needs to really solve!
The biggest obstacles to change aren’t internal - they are the outside forces looking to minimize change. These are systems and customers at are latched on to old APIs or databases.
Products are about designing change and involving all the right stakeholders.
Observability is *key* to product change. Products need to know who is using them and how they are being used. Lacking this product evolutions will be painful and slow.
For this community mentorship isn't just about the technical knowledge (which is important) but there are some specialized needs for career growth. Additionally, imposter syndrome (a big issue in tech) can weigh heavy for formerly incarcerated individuals.
Some useful tips for Technical Education regardless of a mentee's background.
"Don't disparage the mentee's educational path" is a big one IMO - more and more folks are entering tech from non-traditional backgrounds which is *awesome*
Had issues joining via web so I'm going mobile. In to the panel just in time for intros whew! Moira Bohannon, Mercedes Hall and Patreece Spence are all speakers with Beth Dickerson hosting. All from Elsevier.
Definitely appreciate the intros including pronouns #vGHC#GHC20
Workshops at #vGHC#GHC20 are the more 'interactive' version of virtual events this year. We're getting started with some audience polls to better understand demographics.
Lots of folks coming from SWE and a broad distro of folks across their career stage.
Next session at #vGHC20 for me is pretty pertinent: Male Allies: The One "DEI" Thing a Male Ally Can Do Today - a panel including Glenn Block, David Graham, Jason Thompson, and Jeremiah Chan.
Sobering stat: study by the patent office 12.8% of patent inventors are women. The percentage growth in this area is actually slowing down.. only 2% growth in 15+ years.
This isn't just about recognition for patent creation there's a financial impact as well.
Another stat: 9 of 10 venture capital dollars goes to while males according to our moderator Ha Nguyen. Through Spero Ventures she's working to help make those numbers more diverse.
I'm *really* excited about the next session on my list: Applying Accessibility and Gender Sensitive Design Strategy to API Design with Anwesha Bhattacharjee.
I tend to think of Accessibility == UX so it will be great to see a take on service build out.
This session is geared towards folks in B2B, a product manager/designer role familiar with Design Thinking or are building out a public facing API catalog.
My take: probably pretty important for internal API creation too!
Ethics in software development can be tricky - data may be used in unintended ways. As software devs it’s not always easy to think of these possibilities when we are so focused on delivering “the service.” #devopsdaysphilly
There’s a double edged sword at play - we may not know the usefulness of data points until we have them. But from a privacy perspective we should only be grabbing data that’s relevant to providing the service #devopsdaysphilly