Heartifacts

Give Feedback Fearlessly

Constructive feedback can be difficult to receive gracefully and even harder to give effectively. In this session, we'll discuss why peer-to-peer feedback is necessary for a healthy team dynamic, introduce techniques for sharing feedback with team members, and work through example scenarios.

Shine Theory 101

The Devastating Importance of Lifting up Others to Lift up Ourselves

Our society has a toxic habit of encouraging jealousy and bitterness when it comes to others' success. This talk covers how to let go of resentment, embrace others' achievement, and strengthen friendships in a culture where others can feel more like competition than confidants.

MomOps And Feelings

Tech is finally becoming more open to talks about mental health but there's something we aren't talking about enough — the mental health of new mothers. As more women get into tech, we need to discuss how to make this transition easier on them & steps they can take to help themselves.

Overcoming Your Fear of Failure

Have you ever been too afraid to try for an opportunity because you feared that you wouldn't get it? In this talk, you'll learn more about some of the causes of fear of failure, along with clear strategies that you can use to overcome it and advance within your tech career.

The Mental Impact of Tech Interviews

It's time to refactor tech hiring. Lengthy technical interview processes frustrate tech workers and can have a negative impact on mental health. While it is almost universally recognized that technical interviews are broken, the impact they have on tech workers are not being recognized.

Hacking Your Emotional API

Being a good developer isn't just about slinging code; we're part of a community. Interacting with others in a community means feelings are involved.

In this talk you'll learn how emotions are affecting you by modeling them as an API and looking at the code.

Burnout and the Cult of Busy

Our culture glorifies busyness, and perhaps the worst of it can be found in the tech industry. Workers at startups brag about how much they work, and how little they sleep. Engineers forgo lunch for more hours at their desk, social media is riddled with #hustlin and #riseandgrind, and everyone is available at all times. This kind of stress is bad for employees, and bad for business. This talk will cover the importance of self-care, avoiding burnout, and ways to set boundaries to protect your health.

Harry the Hedgehog Learns You A Communication

We know how to communicate — we do it on a daily basis, so why spend time perfecting something you feel you already know how to do? Well, what you say and how you say it impacts how you are understood and how others perceive you. In written communication, a single missing comma can wildly change the meaning of what you said. In this talk, we'll walk through 5 tips that improve how you communicate. Using real world examples, we'll show how common these pitfalls are and how to overcome them. You'll leave armed with the ability to positively impact your relationships through how you communicate.

From the Ashes

Rebuilding a Career after a Breakdown in Mental Health

Mental Health issues come in all sorts of forms and sometimes they can be big enough to cause disruption to your career. This can look like a job change, a leave of absence, an industry shift, or a change of duties. When this happens, how can you move forward in a healthy way? The speaker will share her story of health breakdown and the subsequent crash and rebirth of her career, as well as the lessons that she learned along the way.

How Not to Review a Pull Request

There are many opinions and techniques for reviewing code. Instead of boring you to death with another philosophical rant, we will explore what not to say to your co-workers through examples. Once our journey is complete, we will have tools to help recognize these non-constructive behaviors before hitting send. Areas of interest will include team trust and safety, active and passive aggression, and creativity blockers.

Risk Based Testing

Creating a Language Around Risk

Creating a common language lets us create stronger teams and reduce stress — I will show how to use the terminology of risk based testing to create a language to use in your every day work life with pictures of my cat who is super adorable and there's also possums.

Continuous (Self) Improvement

Dealing with ADHD

Following DevOpsDays Hartford, my own mental illness took over for a couple of days. Like the past, it took me out of commission, but the lessons I've learned through dealing with myself, plus dealing with other complex systems, helped me recover faster and with less fallout.

The Intelligence of Instinct

Fear isn't a gut feeling. It's your brain delivering critical information derived from countless cues that have added up to one conclusion. This talk will explore fear, instinct and denial. And we'll look at how we can start to view "feelings" as pre-incident indicators.

Hanging out with some new furry friends

C&S loves pets and therapy dogs make great new friends. At 2:15 pm on Friday, April 20, we'll have some therapy dogs for folks to meet and greet and pet.

Cognitive Distortion workshop

This workshop will introduce cognitivive distortion and teach how to address it.

Cognitive distortions are exaggerated or irrational thought patterns believed to be involved in the onset and perpetuation of psychopathological states, especially those more influenced by psychosocial factors, such as depression and anxiety.