My life in tech

Note: This page is being continually updated. Don’t miss the lessons learned at the end.

How I became a tech writer, and what happened after that

1988

• Into Africa: Desktop publishing goes to Cameroon

1991

• How I Became an Italian (Tech) Journalist
• How I Got My (First) Job in Italy

1993

Publish Yourself on CD-ROM

1996

• Adaptec CD-R discussion lists

1998

• Adaptec/Roxio newsletters

1999

• Adaptec in Seville

2000

• CeBit
• Roxio party

2001

• The Evolution of a Technical Writer – Bringing Documentation Into the Web 2.0 Age
• Leaving Roxio

2005

• Consumer Electronics Show
• International Broadcasting Conference

2006

2007

^ Intervista al RomeCamp, a cura di Elisabetta Locatelli per dolmedia.tv.

• (Some of) What I did at TVBLOB
• My history in customer service
• Sun Broomfield August
• SNIA SDC September – the first conference I filmed for Sun
• Web Women Weekend, Lecco, October

2008

• Open Source Grid & Cluster Summit, Oakland
• Sun Community One, San Francisco, May
• The OpenSolaris Developers’ Summit, Santa Cruz, May
• Go Game at the OpenSolaris Developers’ Summit
• Visiting Sun Bangalore
• Bollywood, Bangalore
• Open Storage Summit
• Sun offices in Eagan, MN October
• Sun’s SC08 Student Party, Austin, November

2009

• The First Colorado Front Range Girl Geeks Dinner, Broomfield, March
• South by Southwest, Austin, March
• CommunityOne, San Francisco, May
• Innovating Employee Engagement/Executing Social Media for Internal Communications, Chicago, June – invited speaker on Utilizing Social Media Tools to Build Engagement and Community
• FISL – Porto Alegre, Brazil, June – co-speaker on Using Video to Communicate About Open Software
• New Zealand Ministry of Education, Wellington, New Zealand, July 2009 – series of presentations on social media and video
• Kernel Conference Australia, Brisbane, July
• Community Leadership Summit and OSCON, San Jose, July
• Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing – poster session on video, Ariza. Also interviewed about video and community for Ed & Ashley’s 5 Minute Show.

• Oracle Open World, San Francisco, October
• Front Range OpenSolaris user group meeting, Broomfield, October
• Solaris Security Summit at LISA, Baltimore, November
• SuperComputing

2010

• Community Leadership Summit West, Bay Area, January – Unconference session leader, Community Video
• NAB, Las Vegas, April
• Workshop: The Changing Role of Technology Marketers – WITI Summit, Santa Clara, June
• Sun Product Management Team meetings, MPK
• The last Sun Tech Days, Hyderabad
• Farewell, MPK – August
• Employees Making Videos webinar for Communitelligence
• Oracle Open World, San Francisco, October
• LISA 10, Santa Clara
• The Faces of Sun farewell video, November

2011

• What I did at Joyent
• Joyent miscellanea

2012

• SCaLE 10x
• dtrace.conf
• Using Video to Communicate Technology, talk at FISL
• ZFS Day and illumos Day
• NAB

2013

• Open ZFS Developer Summit
• Marketing your tech talent at the Monktoberfest
• LISA 13 and metrics workshop
• Women in Advanced Computing Panel, USENIX LISA 13

2014

• Joyent retrospective May
• Joined Ericsson
• Stockholm June
• Marketing your tech talent talk at OSCON
• That marketing thing (that I do)
• Stockholm and Ericsson September
• OpenStack Summit Paris
• LISA

2015

[more to add here]

2016

• The Techies Project, April
• Visit to Facebook’s Prineville Data Center, August

2017

• Dockercon
• First week at AWS, Seattle, June
• AWS Evangelists’ Summit, Seattle, July
• Marketing Your Open Source Project, Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, Los Angeles, September (not filmed, but there’s a writeup and slides)

2018

• Marketing Your Open Source Project (the AWS version), Southern California Area Linux Expo, Pasadena, March
• AWS Summit Milan, March
• I Will Survive: How Deirdré Straughan Built a Career in Tech Without Being An Engineer, May 2018 (I was a guest/interviewee on my friend Melinda Byerley‘s podcast, Stayin’ Alive in Tech)
• EkoSystem Day, San Francisco
• Amazon Linux 2 launch, San Francisco
• Unconference session on marketing open source at the Community Leadership Summit, Portland, July
• VMworld, Las Vegas, August
• Dreamforce, San Francisco, September
• My Career Evolution from Tech Writer to… Many Things, internal Amazon tech writers’ conference, Seattle, October
• All Things Open – Marketing Your Open Source Project, Raleigh, October

2019

• Marketing Your Open Source Project, AWS Summit Berlin, February
• Marketing Your Open Source Project, AWS Summit Milan, March

^ Marketing Your Open Source Project, OSCON, July – slides

• Marketing Open Source (builders’ session), re:Invent, Las Vegas, December

2020

2021

Deirdré leaving is absolutely @awscloud's loss. This is an opinion held by absolutely everyone who has ever spoken to her for more than five minutes. https://t.co/IpmtVXRdag

— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) August 20, 2021

“Inbound to @awscloud is free, outbound is very expensive” is about to stop being a purely customer-side problem. pic.twitter.com/wffgikouPY

— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) August 27, 2021

Lessons learned

About being a woman in tech

• The Bi-Professional Couple: A Conundrum Close to the Bone
• Twenty Years of Being a Woman at Tech Events
• Sex and Tech
• Giving Women Credit
• Men, Women, and Salary Negotiation
• Toxic Things I Once Believed
• Remote work (or lack of it) is a diversity issue

About tech in general

• Long-Distance Working – A Tale of Two Companies
• Remote work, in good times and in bad
• Letting Go of a Beloved Technology
• Red flags in interviewing: How do they treat wait staff?
• “You Can Always Go to a Startup”