Public speaking terrifies me. I’ve been lucky enough to listen to and be in the presence of great speakers at various forums whose eloquence, composure, and passion for their topics have blown me away. I’ve left in awe, but also felt that I could not be as awesome as they are. After reflecting on it, I learned I shouldn’t try to emulate what makes them a great speaker. Instead of “be more assertive” or “shout louder”, I’ve had to find my own style and cultivate confidence in a way that’s true to who I am.

I’m not the type of…

Public speaking is a major fear for so many people — ranking higher than the fear of heights, clowns, spiders, snakes and, apparently, even death. I can believe this, as I would say I felt more nervous at my first proper speaking “gig” than I did when I got married, or jumped out of a plane. Now, I have a job which requires public speaking on a regular basis. Why would I, as an introverted, autistic, ISFJ-T, put myself through this, I hear you ask, and why should you?

Putting yourself out there and getting up on stage has a…

Over here at Better Allies, we’re collecting stories. About software teams who have made simple changes towards a more inclusive culture. It could be a tweak to their daily standups. Or new Slack loading messages that remind the team how to be better allies. Or something else. Anything that makes a difference.

Read on to find out how one team took a suggestion for creating a more inclusive culture and ran with it. And the impact it had not only with their team, but for the tech events they attend.

We want women and members of underrepresented groups to do…

In part one of this series on lessons learned my first year of public speaking, I covered the submission process and getting started. Next up is what to do when a talk is accepted or scheduled.

Getting my first “Congratulations your talk was accepted” email is one of the best emails I’ve ever received. And the acceptances that have come after that first one are just as exciting.

The amount of time you have between an acceptance letter and delivering a talk will vary, generally I’ve found it’s been about two months. …

This year I set a goal to do more public speaking at conferences. I’m no stranger to speaking in public, my first career was as a teacher, I’ve worked in sales, and have spoken at numerous corporate and customer conferences. I’ve submitted a couple Call for Papers (CFPs) in the past but was rejected and honestly was a little discouraged.

They had rejected my talk because I worked for a vendor. The conference did not want sales pitches. …

In May, I had the privilege of speaking at Self.conference in Detroit about a topic dear to my heart: how people in the tech industry can effectively support student women in tech. The premise? Well, current efforts to invite student women into the field of technology face two major problems:

1. There is a mismatch between student women’s goals and what tech companies believe those goals to be.
2. Not all women in tech who identify as “students” are included in these efforts. …

I’m not an extrovert. I’m not very good at making conversation with people I’ve just met. If I make the decision to speak up in a meeting, I have a 15-30 second debate in my head about my word choice and whether I should say anything at all.

So when people ask me, “How did you start speaking at tech conferences?” The answer is always, “I dunno… I just started doing it.” That statement could not be more true. …

In 2016, I spoke at 17 conferences across the US, Canada, and Europe.

It was the first year I’ve had any sort of success with conference proposals — a combination of a few language-agnostic talks that I could submit to a wide variety of conferences and suddenly getting a bit of recognition.

To an outsider, it looks like I suddenly hit huge success and was accepted or invited to speak at any conference I wanted to.

I assure you, I was rejected from far more conferences than I spoke at.

Thank you for submitting your paper to speaker at NgCruise…