Lightning Talks Day Three with Kojo Idrissa

Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Vince Salvino. I am with Code Red. We have a Django and Wagtail hosting platform and we specialize in Django. And uh I I'm uh one of the founders from back in the day. So uh I have a passion for small businesses and all that kind of stuff. I love that kind of hustlers and everything. So um I'm going to tell you how to start a business in five minutes. Step one, don't do it. Just kidding. A talk's over. Okay. I'm very cynical, so that introduces me But no, seriously, step one , one thing to know is that it will fail. There will be times of feast, times of famine. Your business will fail and you will have to rethink it at some point. But the positive of that is that some things you try or some things you do will succeed.

Speaker 1: Um, and I call that finding your niche. So once you find your niche, or if you haven't started yet, but you already have a niche in mind, Great, you're ahead of the game. You gotta find your niche and grab hold of that and just spend some time grinding it out to really uh develop yourself in that niche. Uh the second piece of advice is it will be expensive, so keep costs low, keep things simple as long as possible. And assume that you will make zero income for the first year. You might make some, but just plan for that and have a little bit of savings before you go into it. Get a line of credit as soon as possible. Don't necessarily use it, but if you can get it, someday an opportunity might come down the

Speaker 1: pipe and you'll have the ability to pounce on it. Step three, and I learned this the hard way, is wait to hire your first employee. Don't hire that first employee until you have at least three times their salary and revenue already to cover that. Being my right hand is not a job description. Yeah, you got to figure out exactly what they're gonna do. And it will be really hard to train that first person. You're gonna learn a lot more than they will. So a funny story about that is I hired our very first employee back in the day. We had a big client that they were going to work on. Two months later, the client had a budget change and we lost that project. So now I had this employee sitting around So yeah, learn that the really hard way.

Speaker 1: The fourth thing, and I and this sounds like something you would hear in a really cheesy TED talk, but seriously. Everything is people. We're kind of tech brained, so we're oftentimes in this bubble, but like everything, customers. The the paycheck, the incomes, everything comes from a person. Even software is made by people to be used by people. Like everything runs entirely on people. There really is no software. It's not real. And people need systems. And by system I mean literally like checklists, processes, things like that. How to fix a bug, how to do a sale, how to talk to a customer. If you can distill that into a checklist or a process, it's going to make everything go so much smoother.

Speaker 1: The technology is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what software you're using. You've got to have the process, you've got to have the system for it. And the fifth thing and the most important thing is if you build it, they will not come. So get your first customer before you launch. And that sounds kind of backwards, but if you have somebody you're working with or someone who's a really good fit to work with, That can be your first customer, and that's really gonna make a world of difference in your business. This kind of goes back to the people thing. All sales are referrals. So even if you say, well, we're going to use ads and we have online platforms and we're all full digital and that, it's like ultimately there are people clicking those ads and they're going to ultimately ask,

Speaker 1: Who else is using your product? So everything is a referral. And on that same note, this is uh you know more cynicism here. Other businesses with worse products are going to beat you to the sale. So don't get disheartened. They're winning those purely based on relationships. Anyone who's worked in the corporate field knows this. Someone with a worst product is going to win the bid. So just keep building those relationships. And uh ending on a positive note here, you can do it. Uh honestly, you can. It seems intimidating, but you are smart. You are capable. And even if you don't have the confidence right now, you can develop that. You can become an unstoppable person, but you really have to just believe in yourself and push forward and just, as I say, jump off the cliff and do it

Speaker 1: One quick note, a book that was super helpful and a really quick read. I I don't really like reading, but a quick read, The Emyth by Michael Gerber, check it out. It's like a basically like a pamphlet and it will really give you a lot of good advice. So that's it. Thank you.

Speaker 2: I've been involved in uh organizing and attending African PyCons um for nearly a nearly a decade now. And um they're events that have their own special challenges, um particularly financial ones. So that's PyCon Namibia from earlier this year. and it was uh there were oh uh 90 people for three days and the total conference budget for everything and catering and financial assistance was less than seven thousand US dollars. And we finish the conference with a uh budget balance of just over 100 US dollars. So that's the kind of figures that we are dealing um with.

Speaker 2: Now, like all other Django cons and PyCons and Python events, um these events in Africa every like those everywhere have to be places of safety for their participants. They have to make uh meaningful and effective attempts to um uh to provide that safety. And that's why we have codes of conduct, for example, and why it's something that's right beyond the community's mind. Now, if you look at this map, or you'll find many maps like this of LGBT rights across Africa They tend to look a bit different because they're showing slightly different things. But in this picture, yellow and red and orange shades are not good. The law is against you. Grey means that homosexual acts are

Speaker 2: not outside the law, but recognition is uh is lacking. And it's actually a little bit more complicated than that, than There are multiple nuances that the map's not showing that we can't go into. But it's a picture that we can start with. If we were looking at safety rather than the law, it would be even more uh complicated. And you can see now why the question of attendee safety at Python events in Africa acquires an extra edge for people and it brings a challenge for organizers of those events because people can ask questions. They have asked and they're entitled to ask, why should we support an event taking place somewhere that LGBT people are not safe? For

Speaker 2: and some of those people are literally asking, why should I encourage a Python event in a place where I am not welcome, where people like me are l literally being murdered for who they are. And honestly You cannot blame people for asking such questions for even for not wanting to support an event in a place like that because Even for them simply having to a answer that question or being confronted that with that question is upsetting or or offensive and there are some things that everybody has a right to recoil from And it's been an issue for us organizing DjangoCon Africa in Zanzibar, in Tanzania, which is not an LGBT-friendly place. And I couldn't blame someone for not wanting to support that or even for being positively against it.

Speaker 2: But I think it's fair to answer those questions, but we must not just ask those questions only, for example, about African events. Only about some countries or some people. We should be asking those questions about our own places and events as well. So what what is safety for black people For Africans, for example, or Muslims in the USA or visiting the USA perhaps for a conference. Because violations and humiliations do occur, and I won't tell you about them, but I know of them. And they occur because the places are unsafe. And sometimes participating in our events means coming through those unsafe spaces for some

Speaker 2: people. It can be hard to see that because people who suffer violations and humiliations tend not to tell you about them. And I don't expect just to cover a really complicated subject in just a few sentences, but just to these are real questions that if you're in the Netherlands or in the USA or Italy Perhaps it's those countries need to come with some safety warnings for certain visitors as well, not just African ones. But I want to do something more than that because It's not about just where safety is, but about creating safety at our African pythons, uh Pycons, there will be a code of conduct

Speaker 2: and people will stand up and assert that code of conduct So I've been at an event in Namibia in 2017 where an undergraduate in front of a minister of health and senior officials from the university by the way Namibia is a country where homosexual acts are still officially punishable by law and explain the code of conduct. Not just saying that we don't tolerate discriminatory language, but saying we welcome everybody, whoever they are, LGBT people. and asserting positively what kind of a place that is, telling people, telling everyone, you're you're amongst us, you're with us, and you're safe here

Speaker 2: And that's a kind of courage and commitment that is being demonstrated by people in our Python community around the world asserting the global Python community values, sometimes in complicated situations. And Pycons aren't safe just because um Uh harassment is not tolerated, they're safe because people are actively working to create these positively warm and welcoming um environments who are they are investing those spaces with that commitment and courage and when they do that They also give courage to the people who are in those spaces and they create a space that radiates courage and values out into their wider communities.

Speaker 2: So That seems to me really um important because it is important sometimes for us to say that's not what we do here. But the other side of that, which I think is The really positive side is when we are able to say, or people come up and say, this is what we do, and this is how we are, and that is what is happening in. African pycons and other African events. And I think that's why they should be supported even if they're in places that themselves are not safe. Um I would like the other organizers and attendees and people involved in DjangoCon Africa to come up.

Speaker 2: And join me here for a moment just so you can see us and see them. So some of us There are other organizers and people here and around the world. Kojos , a contributor, a participant, if not an organizer. Noah, Dawn, Abigail, and Sheena from different parts of the world all doing the same work for you in the rest of the world. So thank you very much. And but there's one this particular DjangoCon

Speaker 2: is doing exactly the same work. And I haven't seen so many African and black faces, non-white faces at a as a proportion at an event anywhere outside Africa and that also has taken effort and commitment and a kind of courage because I know it costs money and to do that. You've got to make some choices. So thank you. Thank you, and thank you, everybody.

Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Andrew Michar and I want to talk to you about strategies for a long-running side project. This is a lightning talk, so we gotta go fast, so I hope you're ready. Here are my strategies. Doc, you, men Te shun. Documentation. So I'm here to encourage you to write more documentation for your side project. But I'm not just gonna say write more long-form docs. These docs can be helpful. But I also want to encourage you to think about why we want to write more documentation and other forms of documentation we can write for our SOG projects. So for the why, it's to provide you context when you have to leave your side project to the side for a little while and maybe pick it back up later, or maybe it's just a little piece of that side project that you haven't seen in a while or haven't touched in a while

Speaker 3: So in addition to capital T, capital D docs , let's think about other forms of documentation we can use to help us provide ourselves with that context. First, tests. Tests are great because they can provide you what the code should do, what the code should not do. And then also if you find bugs in your code, you can put them into regression tests Which can help you prevent running across bugs of that type in the future. So write more tests for your side projects as well In terms of issues and discussions, when it comes to GitHub, I don't use discussions a whole lot, but I prefer to use issues for side projects So instead of having a long running to-do list, plain text kind of file, I prefer to write up my features as issues

Speaker 3: And so descriptions are optional. So if I don't know what I'm going to do, that's okay. Just putting in the feature as the title of the issue is great. Eventually I can fill in the description with context. And when it comes to the comments on the issue, I can make comments of, oh, I tried this, it didn't work, or I got halfway through this and had to move on. So here's where I'm at, here's what I think the next step might be And that way when you pick the project back up, you'll know where that is. And then in the long run, you can connect those issues to your commits, and that way you can have additional context for those commits that didn't make it into your code base. For more about this pattern, Simon Willison had a great blog post and talk about this. If you Google the perfect commit, you can look that up. He has a lot more information about it. I thought he did a really great job. I really like what he had to say in that one.

Speaker 3: Another version of documentation is code comments. So this is not a substitute for great naming across your project, which can also provide good context. But there are certain parts of your code that you that great naming won't help and that could use that extra little bit of context. So here is a choice of algorithm. Why did we choose this algorithm? Other things that I find inside projects will often happen to me is kind of why the order of operations of a bit of code or something like that. And oftentimes what will happen is I'll write it. Of course the code is brilliant because I wrote it, it makes total sense. And then I come back a day or a week or a month later and say, uh, why did I do it that way? And that's when I'll usually add a comment to say, oh, this is the context for why this looks the way it does, if it's not intuitive, and in if I'm not able to refactor it into a way that is more intuitive.

Speaker 3: So you may be thinking to yourself, Andrew, these sound like good strategies for any software development project. And you would be correct. However, I just wanted to highlight them for side projects because I think they pay for themselves in the long run in giving you that context because you never know when you're gonna have to put your project aside for a little bit. and come back to it and won't remember what you were working on because perhaps your day job took up time or some other emergency. Um And to wrap up, uh I'd like to give this maybe as a deeper talk and go into more context of all of these things. Uh so if you have any thoughts about those or other strategies for long-running side projects, uh feel free to reach out to me. I'll be here through the sprints through the rest of the week and you can reach out to me on Fostadon or at my website. Thank you.

Speaker 4: Thank you very much, Andrew.

Speaker 5: Hi, my name is Amanda Lundberg and I am human. I am also a captioner and have been providing real-time captioning in this room for the entire DjangoCon Tess Stevenson was here. Thank you. Tess Stevenson was here the first two days, and she's on her way home to see her kids right now. We are with Whitecoat Captioning and we love captioning for you. Cool. Alright. Right now another human, Peel, is sending the captioning script I wrote for this talk. I must stick to the script since he's not quite learned the keyboard in the last two days. Thank you, Peel. So, what am I doing back there?

Speaker 5: I'm writing on a little keyboard. This is a picture of the layout of the shorthound stand keyboard I'm using. As you can see, it's missing a lot of letters, but that's okay. I can write simple words Cat is K-A-T, that makes sense. Fish is T P E U R B. That makes sense. Okay, maybe not, but it does if you know that T P is an F and E U is an I, and R B is a sh sound. Make sense? I don't write everything out. I use brief forms. Here I've outlined perspective, S-P-E-B-G-T, or S-P-E-K-T. since B G is a K, and infrastructure, T-P-R-A-S or F-R-A-S, remember remember the F from fish. I can also write phrases in one corded stroke on the keyboard at the same time, T-A-E-U-P-L-T.

Speaker 5: Yeah You get the picture. It's not as complicated as it sounds, trust me. One place to learn lots about Steno is from Miss Steno on Instagram and TikTok. She's Whitecoat Captioning's social media manager. Her name is Vanessa. And an overall excellent human. Definitely follow her. This is how I write this one. Everyone wants to know how this is written. I write it in three strokes of what in English would be super. Names are often the hardest to write, so when an organizer asks you for slides or a word list, your answer is yes! Even if they aren't 100% complete, anything we can get ahead of time helps. Some of us in the stenography community are working hard to diversify steno.

Speaker 5: Similar to software development, it's an amazing career where once you have the basic skills down, you spend the rest of your career getting better and learning every day. I am thankful for them to the next generation of stenographers coming in who are changing the game and making us all stronger. I know that you also want to learn Steno, and guess what? You can! There is a free software, Plover, an open source community at openstenoproject. org. Yes, you can learn Steno. I believe in you. Feel free to stop by and say hi at any time. I'm in the back. And since Kojo isn't next to me yet I also want to add a pet tax. We foster for our county shelter to help save lives. Like most shelters and rescues, they are currently over capacity.

Speaker 5: Volunteers, fosters, adopters, and funds are always needed. So here are my current adoptables, Max and Suki. Thank you very much.

Speaker 6: Yes I am. Hello everybody. Nice to be here. Um so I'm Sheena. Nice to meet you all. I work for a place called Umusi, which is in South Africa. It's a non-profit and we do education Our purpose is to reduce social inequality in Africa through digital education. It's kind of a big thing to get right, hoping maybe some of you can help. So Why would you want to mentor or teach? There's a lot to it. For me personally, um I like this is this is my way of thinking about life and how to live a good one. I think that the true measure of success is based on the number of people you've helped and how much you've helped them. So this isn't an original Sheena thing. This is something I got out of a book and I was like, cool, I'm just gonna keep that forever

Speaker 6: because It works. Um yeah, so again, Mike, why would we want to do this? Currently there's a very big skills gap in tech. There's an oversupply of junior level developers across Africa. And I think as as far as I know, it's the same here. It's the same like in a bunch of different places. So there's loads and loads of junior devs who want to get jobs, who can't get jobs There's loads of organizations that are looking for mid-level and higher devs and they can't find enough. And so the juniors are kind of stuck out there and unsupported. And AI is changing things. There is a lot of hype, but there is also a lot of change. So like I use AI when I code and it speeds me up. I need less help. This is great. But it isn't that great for a lot of other people

Speaker 6: And then when it comes to learning, like again, AI can do freaking fantastic things. It's also a really big foot gun for people learning how to code. It's a new crutch. and a new way to kind of limit the limit a person's ability to take on harder problems because they, you know, like. If you only learn how to solve problems at this level of complexity and you don't even understand how to do that fully yourself, then things get challenging. So we need to get we need to address this and we can address this with knowledge. So get juniors more skills, get kids to play with code early. That's also a really, really powerful thing. Like I was very lucky I got to start coding as a teenager. A lot of people, probably a lot of people in this room started coding as kids,

Speaker 6: and that's fantastic. That's not something that people yeah, it's it's a privileged position position to be in. But there's more to it. So a lot of the time it doesn't matter who you know. I mean what you know it matters who you know and I'm sure many of you have heard that before, but it's really quite legit. Um who likes podcasts? Yeah? So there's this podcast called Hidden Brain. Who likes that one? Yeah, it's pretty great. Um very well researched. Fantastic. Um there's an episode I listened to like a little while ago. I couldn't find the link to it in time for this talk, otherwise I would have shared it. But um If you look at a population, you look at the lowest 10% of earners and you look at the highest 10% of earners and you say like, what does it take for somebody to move from that bottom group to the top group?

Speaker 6: It's not what you know. It really is who you know. You're most likely to move from the bottom to the top if you know somebody in the top. So Like if you form a mentorship relationship with somebody, then a lot of good things can happen. People with privilege are in a position to open doors and make opportunities. So I think privilege is a tool. Use it as a tool to open doors for other people. Then there's also a lot of benefits to the mentor. So if you're teaching somebody, then it hardens your own knowledge in a big way. So like if you're quite new to this whole coding thing, out of breath. If you're new to this whole coding thing, then um you might feel like you aren't in a good position to teach, but teach somebody who's newer, teach a kid. They'll ask you all these crazy questions and you're going to have to think about what you know a little bit differently and you will get better.

Speaker 6: You'll also learn about new tools and techniques. So if you mentor like a hungry young developer, they are going to bring you stuff that you've never heard of before and you'll be like, huh, I have no idea. I'll get back to you. And then get back to them. And you'll learn a bunch that way. Oh, he's looming. Um, you'll level up your communication skills as well, which is quite a big deal. I mean, tech is opaque and that's a problem. It's very difficult to communicate about even within tech a lot of the time. So if you can talk about it effectively, that's good for you. It's about who you know. Again, if you level up a young junior dev and they end up like this has happened to me. I've taught a lot of people. They bring me opportunities. They're like, hey, Sheena, this thing came up. I thought of you. I'm like, oh lovely. That's fantastic.

Speaker 6: And other good things. So there are lots of excuses that you might make about why you can't or won't or whatever. I think the toughest one is not knowing how to teach. It's a learnable skill. And I have links to a bunch of different volunteering opportunities. You can grab this, follow the link, you'll see a list. If you have any opportunities that aren't on that list, put them on that list and maybe it'll be useful. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Thank you, Shina.

Speaker 7: Hello, I'm Marcelo. Going to give this talk. First, I'm from Python, Paraguay. I help to organize that community. You can drop a follow to that handle. And uh this is a mandatory slide for giving talks outside. Yeah, that's Paraguay. The TLD is dot pie, but you can't buy just a dot pie. So let's begin with the talk. The idea of this talk is to uh give a little context of um my situation and maybe could help somebody. Well in 2014 I had a few uh IT desk job uh or help desk jobs

Speaker 7: almost no professional experience coding, just hobby of freelancing freelancing coding. And that's wh when I heard about I didn't know at that time that you could work remotely for a company in the US. I have a friend that was doing that and I asked him How to do it. In my case, my challenges, he told me, yeah, you need to have you know your resume, your experience, you need to show what you know to uh you know what you know to do And you need to speak English. So those were my challenges, especially the language at that moment and still now. So we can fix it? Yes, we can So uh

Speaker 7: starting with the with the resume, uh what I uh learned is that uh what should be in your resume is that what you what do what what you know to do basically uh obviously if you have experience put it there but also what do you know to do Regarding the format, that is also interesting. You just can Google TechCB template and you're going to find some really good ones. and the ones that uh you know companies like. Well, so the main problem, no experience. So let's build some proyectitos, that's little project, but it's fun to say in Spanish. So uh you can choose uh there is a lot of uh examples of how to start uh uh

Speaker 7: of le of There are a lot of lists of little projects. I found this one. It's uh uh it I think it's really cool to st uh for starting, but it could be a little simpler maybe uh you can start um doing something something else. In my case uh I just start uh doing some projects that I think that it were fun. In this case like I just did like an um this was an um an app to like an application to download music It just downloads from some sites and but it has an interface and I here I can show that I know how to uh write a GIV and also a terminal application.

Speaker 7: I also put that like in my portfolio. I was starting to create my portfolio. I put it like what technologies that I use and also the link to them. So As I say that some sometimes those lists are a little, I will say, uh boring or simple. I will say that one thing that uh for what a good idea for uh for a little project is something related of your interest of your hobbies. In my case I did a few like uh this is a Twitter bot I like to tweet so I create a Twitter bot that Tweets like an average user in a comment section in a news site. I had to do a lot of stuff to that. One good thing about uh to do about that is also document that

Speaker 7: I create a blog post about that experience and also put a nice readme in GitHub. I think that helped a lot. Also, uh, this is a site to the for the US dollar exchange rate with the Paraguayan Guarani and has an API. Well regarding portfolio format, I first I you can use GitHub, but first I use Jasa PDF with um you know with some screenshots some technol uh some the short description that the technology that I use and that worked well. Well regarding coding and technical interviews there is a lot of sites where you can practice that, that is another part that is I think it's important.

Speaker 7: And where to look for, I'm going to share these slides in the Slack channel, don't worry. And Paul. So uh to make it short uh it's going to take some effort. Uh build some projectitos for your portfolio uh tell what you know to do in your resume, apply to jobs, it's a numbers game. You need to apply, apply, apply, and you're going to get. And the requirements are just a wish list from the company, are not mandatory. Thank you.

Speaker 4: Thank you. Well done.

Speaker 8: Well, obviously, Kojo already started, and for all of us who are here, um it's actually been a privilege to go through and sit under everybody else's wisdom this week to go through and see people who have advanced in their craft and who have gone through and who have done amazing things with Django and the open source community. This talk is going to address more people that are kind of in my scenario. I've been through imposter syndrome, some strategies for that, but there will be some points for those of you who have been an absolute blessing over. the last few days. So a little bit about me. Me and my wife are from the Louisville, Kentucky area. I originally was born in Georgia and spent some time out in Montana. So

Speaker 8: Fun times out there, beautiful country. In addition to our two children, our family includes three cats, Toothless, Totoro, and Zubat, who ironically look exactly what their names describe them as So unfortunately, I did not have three pictures of my kittens in order to go through to share for the pet tax, but I will upload them later if anybody. Is interested. But prior to coding, I studied theology. And as many of you guys may know, that is a huge career jump. And there is actually almost very little skills when it comes to coding that transfer over. So I began coding with Python and Django mid-2020. Um, as the pandemic went by, I had a another child on the way,

Speaker 8: realized that in the words of Bertrand Russell Um theology and philosophy didn't really buy bread for us at the moment. So it during all the uncertainty of 2020. I went online, began looking into coding, found a couple of articles on Django, and the community was so amazing that I continued in order investing my time in order order to jump into Django. So this of course brought the inevitable, the imposter syndrome. So I know that these were some of the questions and lies that I was asking myself the entire time. Maybe some of you have faced them. Some of you guys that are or guys and girls and anyone else who is online

Speaker 8: probably is going through and wondering, hey, am I still struggling with these or is there a way to overcome them? There have been multiple blogs, there have been multiple websites, there have actually been entire talks and conferences on this. I am not going to answer this question in five minutes or this dilemma. However, I do have an unexpected tool, and it is coming from a place of humility as we go through and we learn. and advance in our careers. So for those of us who are struggling with anxiety in general Humility provides an honest self-awareness and evaluation to contradict doubts that we have. So it's very important to clarify.

Speaker 8: Humility is not self-degradation. I know a lot of people will say, oh, I'm just being humble and then talk themselves down. No, that is not what humility is about. Um we are going through and of course when you come across a scenario when the code refuses to compile or we make a mistake or we are caught up in the negative self-degradation spiral. our vision and awareness can become clouded, and there are many friends and colleagues and mentors who will try to give compliments and encouragements. This f the first temptation is to act like we haven't accomplished anything at all and often We talk ourselves down instead of receiving praise or compliments. And the fact is that when you come from a humble approach, you can recognize that while I'm unable to do something

Speaker 8: I'm unable to do it right now. People who give you compliments are saying, hey, I've gone through and you recognize that you have achieved something. That's great. Take the compliment. Realize that as you're going through and as you're struggling, that you're making progress Humility allows you to go through and to inwardly observe where you're at and where you're going. Humility also encourages those around you. Does anybody remember the HBO Max test email from 2021? That scenario? All of you guys that are here that have this knowledge and this experience, I can tell you that it meant more reading the comments of developers who went to encourage this young intern that sent

Speaker 8: out this message than anything Admitting to our mistakes allows everybody to see that we are human and allows us to go through and allows us to teach and instruct from a point of kindness and care. And then just as a reminder, humility is a discipline for everyone. So no matter where you are in your coding journey or development journey, just remember that it you can't become humble overnight. And I hope that you go through and that you found this helpful. Stay humble, friends.

Speaker 4: Thank you very much Yes, hello everyone

Speaker 8: in person and on the internet. Um

Speaker 3: yeah, so like uh like we said, I I figured I was inspired by Deborah's talk earlier this week to just talk a little bit about a meetup that I've been a part of for Well, it feels like an impossibly long amount of time. And I think it's as many of us know, especially relevant for like an open source community. Uh Sheena was just talking about how networking is so essential for people to build careers and to build really anything. So I figured I'd just uh share some observations and thoughts. So uh Shy Hack Knight is just one example of this that I happen to be a part of. You know, they say write what you know. Um so what is Shy Hack Knight? So You may or may not be surprised no shy hack night happens in Chicago. That's where the shy comes from. It's not you know, anything else like that

Speaker 3: And that's a free weekly event that we have in Chicago where people can build, share, and learn about technology and tools that help and support the public good. Generally in person, like pre-pandemic, this is very, but we typically had around like 80 to 130 people attending each week. Um during the pandemic, of course, it was variable for all sorts of reasons. Um we had unprecedented levels of attendance at times and also very small levels of attendance at times, but we switch to being online only. And then in this sort of post-pandemic era, we do once a month a hybrid event in person. The rest of the weeks are online. Usually around 30 to 50 in person, although that has been creeping up over the past year. Online around like 10 to 20. So

Speaker 3: some of the tips that I wanted to share today are around missions and values. So we're kind of active in the civic tech public interest technology space. I'm happy to talk to folks about that afterwards who are familiar or would like to be more familiar. at least here in the US, that space has been uh falling apart in some ways, uh in terms especially in terms of local meetups. Uh one of the things that has helped us over time has have uh we had consensus driven mission and values that we established that helped us stick to our guns when we are under pressure from other organizations uh to become a part of them or be supported by them. Those organizations have since like stopped supporting all the meetups uh that are all over cities in the US and leaving those people kind of without that structure.

Speaker 3: So that is like really helpful, or to put it in techie terms, it's easier to refactor your code after you've proven your use case and your value add, you actually know what to go ahead and fix and organize. These are our values. I don't have time to go through them now. They're on our on our website too. But hopefully you can take a glance and see the sort of things that I'll be talking about. Also, one thing that's been really helpful is we always introduce everyone in the room. We have everyone go around and do three-word intros and share their pronouns. It really helps you see like uh the vast variety of people that are in the room. And as a person who came into this space not knowing how to code, it was really helpful for me to see that not everyone in the room is, you know, some Uber programmer, there's often journalists, data scientists, or just people who just happen to be curious.

Speaker 3: This is like really important and I try to like have a very questions-focused interaction with folks. And taking the long view, these people over time can go from just visitors who are there for the free food to experienced developers who help you run your event, which is what happened to me. Oops. Some of them even get married and have kids. You know, those kids might end up being volunteers someday too. So just really uh it's a simple, easy thing to do that helps everyone feel included. Similarly, like it's helpful to organize from the bottom up. The brief history of Shy Hack Night is just an informal gathering that then got slightly more formal. A few years ago we incorporated as a nonprofit, but that was always kind of in a uh as needed basis. Um and

Speaker 3: I can speak more after this talk about that in detail. We have breakout groups and projects that people work on that are self-directed. These are some people that helped figure out that we should be a nonprofit in 2018. This was our first board. This is the current board. And one of the other things that's really important that I want to put out is to highlight diversity. Diversity makes your community stronger, more resilient. keeps the event interesting and it helps to grow the community in an equitable way. During the pandemic, we saw our community was still able to thrive and grow and I think a diversity was a huge Huge part of that. Um I'm running out of time, so have food and fun. I like I said, I started going to Shy Hackney because it was a weekly event that had free food and interesting stuff, and here I am now.

Speaker 3: Um so We'll go straight to the summary. Start and keep things simple. Develop and maintain strong core values. Be open and actively prioritize diversity accessibility. Have fun, seek meaning in the things that you do. Okay, good. Thanks. Um

Speaker 4: well done.

Speaker 6: Thanks everyone. My name is Leo Suarez. This is actually an accident, but this is kind of in the same vein as uh Eric's talk. Um I wanted to talk about a civic tech project that I'm working on. Um I'm also DT Raleigh uh on all the socials. I live nearby in Raleigh, North Carolina. I have been volunteering with a group called Code for the Carolinas. We are a group that meets online and kind of works with municipalities in North Carolina and South Carolina.

Speaker 8: Again, civic tech. Um, I've seen some of the same issues Eric just brought up about post-pandemic and pre-pandemic, but we are Trying to get that going here. So, what I wanted to mention uh today is this map or this app called Access Map. And if you go to accessmap. io, what we see there has really inspired us. So What you're looking at is the app showing the Seattle-Washington region.

Speaker 7: And while a lot of us might use Google Maps to get around, those with mobility challenges, maybe you're in a wheelchair or you walk with a cane to support you. If you've ever walked around Seattle, it's a very hilly city. And so what Access Map can do is show you elevation

Speaker 6: inclines, and you can tell it that you're in a wheelchair. For example, and instead of giving you the most direct route from point A to point B, it might give you a flatter route or might give you one with curb cuts. So you can kind of wheel around from you know getting from place to place. So Access Map is open source software and we could install it today. But the application is only as good as the data underneath it, right? So our end goal is to kind of seed access map somewhere else. So

Speaker 7: how we're doing that, we've chosen Raleigh right now. And we are in trying to enrich the data. Now where is that data? Right now we're using OpenStreetMap. And OpenStreetMap has a lot of user-generated content. To basically put points and lines and polygons on a map, and those indicate properties and streets and sidewalks and crossings and all that kind of stuff. So we enrich that by adding more data to those points and tags and metadata, etc. There's an app uh alongside OpenStreetMap called Tasking Manager. And this is kind of a quick screenshot of Tasking Manager and what it does is when you pick create a project and you pick your location. Here's downtown Raleigh, for example, it chops up uh the map into these polygons.

Speaker 6: Each polygon becomes a task, and we can assign these or you can assign it to yourself to map that polygon that specific area. So this is a no code, very accessible project. You just need internet connection and a Latin. you know, computer, and we are getting volunteers to contribute their time to slowly uh contribute to the map. Um so so far we're doing this is the most recent uh update on our stats, so we're hoping to get there. Hopefully want to get all this green. And um what I'm trying to get the word out uh about our project here

Speaker 7: is to uh people can help in different ways. So the smallest way to help out would be to help Spread the word. So code for Carolinas. org could could get us out there and just recruit more volunteers, which would be the medium ask. So any any amount of volunteering

Speaker 8: effort even

Speaker 7: just come to one of our uh online uh mapping nights and pick a polygon and and and fill it in with dots and lines we have some more uh experienced mappers to help each other out and learn for it and some people have really taken to it um and adding more. Clearly that's an old that we have it we read every two weeks. I grabbed that from an online, so ignore that date. But really the the big land that we're trying to get is while we are enriching the data, we really need to find a partner

Speaker 6: to host the access map and own that kind of long-term IT. So we have people interested in maybe helping them.

Speaker 7: do the install of the app and tie it in into OpenStreetMap, but trying to get the word out to find that partner to host it and really push it out to their community so that we can get a lot of users. So last slide, code for the Carolinas. org.

Speaker 8: We also have another project about zoning. If you're interested in affordable housing, that might be one we're doing too. We're on Slack and we mainly use meetup uh to organize these.

Speaker 3: And we meet up pretty often, I think every two weeks. So we're active right now. And thanks.

Speaker 4: Thank you very much So, we've got three conferences coming up. You'll hear DjangoCon US now, but if you thought, well, Kojo, this is fantastic, but I'd like more Django Con. Well, in about two weeks, DjangoCon Africa is is happening in Tanzania, as Daniela mentioned earlier. If you'd like to financially support DjangoCon Africa, you can take a picture of that QR code and that will take you to where you can provide financial support for Django Khan Africa. So today's Wednesday, I leave, I leave two weeks from Friday to go to uh to Zanzibar where I'll be speaking at Django Khan Africa But that's not the only conference that is coming up next. There is also, let's see, can I do a

Speaker 4: lot of gonna sleep on me All right. There is also a PyCon in in Italy, PyCon Italia. Let's see. Let me figure out the There we go. So I can tell you in Florence, the end of May, and so that's next year, so there's more time for that. And so if you have ever thought, you know, do I want to go to Italy? Have you ever wanted to go to Italy? Have you ever wanted to go to Europe? This is something to look forward to. But now, notice those dates. 22nd to the 25th of May 2024. What is also happening in Europe about that 25th is a Saturday, the Wednesday of the of two weeks after. is when Django Con

Speaker 4: Europe begins in Vigo, Spain. And so again, if you if you're like Wokojo, like this DjangoCon is nice, and You told us about DjangoCon Africa, but I'd like more DjangoCon Kojo. Well, there's DjangoCon Europe is happening uh here in early June. And as someone who's done a lot of traveling, That got me to thinking about how much conference can you do? So let me this is uh more information about uh DjangoCon Africa But I've done a lot of traveling and in that rule I've spent a lot of time using Google Maps to sort things out. And so you've got about a week and a half between uh PyCon Italia

Speaker 4: and DjangoCon Europe. And so it feels like you can do both of those. And so so here's here's some valuable questions to ask yourself. Have you wanted to go to Italy? Have you wanted to go to Europe? So I know some folks here are from Europe. And so if you are from Europe, so first of all, if you're from Europe and you live in Europe, going to Jangohan, Africa, fairly easy. uh time zone wise. But if you're from Europe, but you thought maybe I'd like to go to Italy, you can go to Italy. Or if you're from North America, you thought, I'd like to go to Europe, but I don't know where, well, like you don't really have to choose. I if you'll notice here You can take it it's it's about a one-day trip from Florence to uh to Vigo and I can't see all the details here just because of the distance, but I've I've I've looked at this. I was up literally late last night looking at this

Speaker 4: By going from Florence to Vigo, you can pass through, call for memory, from through Milan, through Lyon, France. through uh Barcelona, Spain, and Madrid, Spain on your way to Vigo. So you've got about a week and a half to do that. If you wanted to just sort of make a trip of it, That's one approach. So you might think, well, Kojo, that's that sounds good, but I'm not made of money. So here's some things to talk to think about when you're maybe talking to an employer. Do you have offices in Europe? Does your company have offices in Europe? Does your company have clients in Europe? Does your company want clients in Europe? Or are you looking to hire developers from different parts of Europe, maybe from Italy

Speaker 4: or France or Spain, or really from Vigo Spain? It's about two hours south by train to Porto, Portugal, which is where Py c where Django Town Europe was last year. So if you have any interest, if you or your company have any interest in Doing business in Europe, finding new European customers, new European clients, this combination of PyCon Italia and DjangoCon Europe is an excellent opportunity to just go spend week and a half, two weeks on the continent, traveling through, stopping in these different cities on the way. You don't have to make the full trip all at once. You can stop at different cities along the way. Again, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, all major European cities, Lyon, France Excellent opportunity to visit these different cities, visit different offices, meet different clients, meet potential new clients,

Speaker 4: find potential new people to hire. So as someone who likes to travel and It feels like there's a lot of benefit that comes from attending conferences. I felt like it would be remiss if I didn't point this out to you all. So That is it. And I've got seven seconds left. Thank you very much for your time.