This edition was held in Paris and, among other things, featured the best food I’ve ever had in a conference hall. Yes, OpenStack was quite a boondoggle for many people, for years. I hung out with some friends, participated in a hair-raising session about the OpenStack community (20+ contributing companies, each with its own fork of the software – it was clearly doomed), enjoyed spending time with my friend Robyn who had come for a visit from Switzerland, but I also very distracted by an imminent diagnosis of breast cancer.
This was also the conference where I heard for the nth time the complaint from women in engineering about how insulting it is to be mistaken for “the marketing chick.” I got to the mic during Q&A and, with my voice shaking with rage, pointed out how sexist and demeaning this attitude is. As I exited the room, a man came to thank me for speaking up on behalf of marketers.
I recently gave a talk at at internal Amazon conference for tech writers. I was a technical writer from early in my career, and still consider tech writing one of my foundational skills. In the talk, I hoped to provide some insight to other technical writers about their own skills, and how those could be used in other roles. I’m sharing all that information here, in case you also find it useful. (It was an hour-long talk, which makes for a very long blog post!)
In March of this year, I spoke at the Southern California Area Linux Expo (SCaLE), a conference I’ve been attending for years and highly recommend for its kind community, and great people and content.
I’m submitting this talk to other conferences, and it will evolve over time, so I hope to get a chance to continue refining it and sharing what I know with more people.
People tend to stay with Ericsson for many years, some for their entire careers – which can make it a little weird to be a newbie around here. There’s a lot I still don’t know about this huge, complex, historic company, and I really didn’t know what to expect when … well, let me tell this story in some kind of order.
I started with Ericsson in June, 2014, in a business unit (Cloud & IP) that was only just being formed. I was immediately thrown into the thick of things, and was loving my job: exciting challenges, great colleagues, lots of travel… In fact, I was in Paris at a tech conference in early November when I got my breast cancer diagnosis. Being told that you have cancer is very, very scary. Wondering whether your job may be at risk because of your illness makes it all the more frightening. I knew that I had great benefits at Ericsson, including very good health insurance. I also knew that the state of California, where I live and work, has a law protecting employees and their jobs in case of catastrophic illness (your own or a family member’s) – but that law applies only after you’ve been in a job for a year, and I had been an employee for less than six months.
