Have you ever wondered about what makes a good abstraction vs a bad one? Do you want to examine potential reasons why efforts to develop abstractions at a company or in a project take hold, and some don't? Or what it takes to develop an abstraction that reaches beyond the technical corner of your company or project and becomes something that helps actually shape how you think about the entire problem?
Understanding the process of developing abstractions, especially as a leader, is really about understanding the process of grief. Even if you get to build the abstraction, it won't be the one you pictured, or envisioned. You're going to need to take the seeds you've born, carefully curated, and lovingly built up over time... And watch them die. To build an abstraction is to hold the heart of your humanity in your hands. Plant your soul into the ground, and be reborn.
In this session, I'm going to introduce my thoughts on abstraction, how it works, why it sometimes works and why it sometimes doesn't, and how one can actually take an abstraction and flesh it out to the point where it takes on a life of its own. With that, you should be able to have a better grasp on how ideas can take root in a way that bridges people and domains together.

Hazel Weakly

Hazel spends her days working on building out teams of humans as well as the infrastructure, systems, automation, and tooling to make life better for others. She’s worked at a variety of companies, across a wide range of tech, and knows that the hardest problems to solve are the social ones. Hazel currently serves as a Director on the board of the Haskell Foundation, as a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation, and is fondly known as the Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm (a popular Mastodon instance). She also created the first official Haskell “setup” Github Action and helped turn it into an active community-maintained project. She enjoys traveling to speak at conferences, appearing on podcasts, mentoring others, and sharing what she’s learned with the world.
One of her favorite things is watching someone light up when they understand something for the first time, and a life goal of hers is to help as many people as possible experience that joy. She also loves shooting pool and going swing dancing, both as a leader and a follower.

Systems thinking is the macro behaviour that we must understand in analyzing our world. A system always produces what it is designed to do, even if that isn't at all what we meant it to do!

Systems are self-maintaining, and contain balancing and/or reinforcing feedback loops.

We'll look at how these work, and what happens when they fail. You'll see how to apply systems thinking to the systems that are all around us.

This is an introductory talk to the world of Systems Thinking, condensed into 45 mins plus time for questions at the end.

The strongest tech skills don’t necessarily guarantee success. To get the best from those around you—and maximize your own influence—you need to boost your tech skills with soft skills. Luckily, small changes in the way you work can produce big results.
In this free webinar, Jacqui Read, author of Communication Patterns: A Guide for Developers and Architects, takes you on a whistle-stop tour of patterns and techniques to improve your visual, verbal, nonverbal, written, knowledge, and remote communication skills. You’ll learn communication soft skills tuned specifically to a technical audience, which you can easily integrate into your existing workflows for quick and transformative results.
You’ll learn how to:

    Use soft skills to boost your technical skills
    Explore visual, nonverbal, written, knowledge, and remote communication skills
    Integrate communication soft skills into your everyday workflow for transformative results