Keynote with Chloe Condon

Speaker 1: Hooray! Okay, now we can get started. So this is a very, very serious keynote, as I've titled it. So hello everyone. Good morning. I'm so thrilled to be speaking today. At DjangoCon. And thanks for rolling out of bed early enough to catch my talk. I attend a lot of conferences and I miss the keynote a lot because I want to sleep in because I'm kind of on vacation. So you made it. Congratulations. I applaud you for being here bright and early. All right, let's uh go to the next slide. All right, so before we get started, a little bit about me. My name is Chloe Condon, and earlier this year, I was named one of the 200-plus thought leaders in crypto and blockchain. Now, if you read my speaker bio before this talk, this may be a little confusing to you.

Speaker 1: But I'm going to tell you a little story before we get started here. So I'm about to tell you a very inspiring story because this is a keynote and in a keynote you're supposed to tell some moving story about how you became who you are, how to be a good leader, maybe announce a new Product feature. So I'm gonna put on my keynote TED Talk voice and I'm gonna talk very slow. I'm just kidding. That would be a very long keynote. Um, but I'm gonna walk you through this inspiring story. And what I want you to walk away from with this are seven easy steps that I took in my career. So let's let's dive in, shall we? All right. So step one. Join a LinkedIn group.

Speaker 1: So in my experience, LinkedIn is mostly a tool used by recruiters, hiring managers when maybe we're getting ready for a phone screen, looking up a candidate, maybe an older white businessman ran randomly adding me for no apparent reason. Um but this began last year um when a woman reached out to me um to speak to a group of women in crypto and blockchain about being a woman in tech and what that experience. Experience was. So I joined the private LinkedIn group to get more info, and the timing didn't work out for the talk, so I didn't really think much of it again. So, which brings me to step two. Once I figure out how to get through my slides. Alright, here we go. I promise I've given talks before, you guys.

Speaker 1: Hold on. Step two is it's gonna be a really great step. Step two Forget about it for six plus months. Did you know that LinkedIn has groups? That's funny. I totally forgot that they did too. As someone who doesn't really frequent LinkedIn groups, I totally forgot to leave said women in crypto and blockchain group, as I do not work in that industry. So imagine my shock and confusion when I had 30 plus messages, connection requests, Twitter follows from DMs asking me, someone who knows nothing about crypto, for advice on their crypto startup. inquiring about consulting prices, wanting to connect over our shared love of Bitcoin.

Speaker 1: Very strange. So step three, don't learn anything about crypto. So let me remind you that I know nothing about crypto and blockchain. I work as a developer evangelist at century. io. We're an open source error logging and reporting tool. I don't own Bitcoin. Um the only crypting that I'm familiar with is the CryptKeeper. So you may be thinking, well now's a good time to learn, right? No. I have a lot of other stuff. Stuff going on in my life. Um, and frankly, I'm not interested. So, step four. Get copied and pasted into several articles and continue to learn nothing about crypto and blockchain. So puzzled by this influx of messages, I decided to Google my name and the words crypto and blockchain, and I got added to an article titled

Speaker 1: 200 plus thought leaders in crypto and blockchain, the ultimate crypto list for event planners, influencers, and the like. This is an article that I now lovingly call um 200 plus thought leaders in crypto and blockchain, the ultimate crypto, copied and pasted from a LinkedIn group I forgot existed. And thus began this lovely game of telephone, which was my crypto career So step five, insist that you know nothing about it. So soon my LinkedIn inbox looked a little bit like this. I got some lovely examples here for ya. So here's a good one. I see that you're in the blockchain space. It would be great to connect. Uh I was pleased to see your you liked our crypto and blockchain list.

Speaker 1: I just want to connect with you in case you wanted to add or change your wiki. I'm in a wiki About crypto and blockchain? Okay, cool. We are always looking for interesting speakers in China and Germany. Happy to be connected. And then here's another great one here. Um oh if anybody's interested in property coin, um yeah, so there's there's I'm really not one that should be giving advice here. So uh let's let's go to step six here. So step six Tweet about how ridiculous it is, how little you know about it. So trust me, I was not giving out any vibes that I uh knew anything about this topic. Um here's my favorite, whoever signed me up for a blockchain email list, I hate you. Um

Speaker 1: Adventures in Crypto Thought Leadership continue. This is still happening to me. Uh I don't understand why I'm not giving out any vibes. Um step seven, put a line in your LinkedIn about how you literally know nothing about it. So this is the kicker. Um this is the was at the top of my LinkedIn for a very long time. And I'd like to point out these two messages which I literally got last week. So this is still happening to me. Me. This is a true story. I wish that it wasn't. So, result. The opportunities will roll in by the hundreds. So this is this is all uh to say that I've added this. You probably noticed if you read my speaker bio, in February of 2018, she was named one of the 200-plus thought leaders in

Speaker 1: crypto and blockchain and still knows absolutely nothing about crypto and blockchain seriously, not a thing. She considers it her greatest accomplishment. I'm speaking at a couple conferences this week and I think a a new social media intern didn't pick up on the humor and said come join crypto and blockchain influencer and I was like no don't say that please thank you that is the end of my talk I'm just kidding that's Not the end of my talk. Um, but uh hi everyone. Um since this talk is all about bringing comedy and humor into tech, figured I'd start things out with one of my favorite stories of being a woman in tech. And yes, that is a true story that actually happened to me. You can read more about it on my Medium page with even more details about my journey, hashtag journey into ThoughtLeader.

Speaker 1: So, okay, really, who are you? So hello, my name is Chloe Condon. I am not a thought leader in crypto and blockchain, but here are a couple things that I am So I'm a developer evangelist at century. io. We're an open source error logging and reporting tool. Um I'm a writer. If you're looking at me and thinking, show Looks kind of familiar. I'm the girl awkwardly standing with the thumbs up in the um wine cave after a party for the what it's like to be a woman at a tech conference article, um which came out last year. Definitely check that out. Um men and women, figure out what that expenses. experience is like. I'm a HackBrite Academy graduate. If you're not afil familiar with Hackbrite, it's a um 12-week software engineering boot camp in San Francisco with a mission to change the ratio of women in tech

Speaker 1: and also Female program. We also learned Django at Hackbrite. And I believe there are a couple Hackbrite speakers here today, which is super exciting. So shout out to HackBrite. I'm also a frequent, uh oh, I'm a I'm a former actress. Um don't worry, there will be a lot more quirky photos like this as the The talk goes on. And I'm also a frequent Twitter user. This is one of my favorite tweets that I put out there. I take a lot of photos in the bathrooms at conferences. It's kind of my thing. Um so uh definitely follow me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is gonna be at the bottom for all of this. Um uh you can take photos, but flattering photos only, like people down here, like get a good angle down I'm kidding. It was a joke. It's a talk about comedy. So please laugh during this talk.

Speaker 1: If you don't laugh, they're videotaping it and um it'll look really bad for me. So please, please laugh. So there's my Twitter handle at the bottom. Alright, so hi. I'm Chloe and I'm a recovering actress. Oh good, you guys can read. Cool. Alright, so I have to come clean. I wasn't always a quirky blonde girl who wears bows in her hair and gives you technical tutorials, writes blogs, does the occasional tech conference keynote. In fact, I was a quirky girl who wore bows in her hair and sported many wigs and did countless commercial auditions and briefly worked as a children's birthday party entertainer. Which is a whole other keynote that I should do.

Speaker 1: So here's a couple photos from my my previous life of being an actress. Fiona and Shrek the musical. This is a really bad Frank Sinatra musical I did once. This is me as Penny in Hairspray. This is some men carrying me. I don't know what show that was. And this is from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which um I feel like I live out Every single day. But one thing has stayed constant in my life from those many years of being an entertainer, something that I bring into all my work, and that is wearing bows all the time. Actually, it's comedy. That's what the talk's about, but I do wear a lot of bows as as is illustrated in this photo. So a little bit of background on me.

Speaker 1: I'm a non-traditional background engineer. Both of my parents were were artists, my dad is a director playwright, my mother was a costume designer and illustrator. So growing up I was around computers and I was great at using them. My dad brought home a A Macintosh Plus to do WordPress processing on. It was super exciting. We could type up stories and print them on those noisy machines where you had to rip off the things on the side. If you don't know what that is, I I feel very, very old. But this eventually transitioned me into learning what all the files and folders and programs did. I learned a majority of my numbers and spelling from this game called the playroom. I still have a lot of um visual association in my head with that, although I didn't learn colors from it because it was black and white, because it was the nineties.

Speaker 1: But here's the thing, my parents weren't able to Able to teach me about computers beyond the basics. I didn't know what an engineer was. Both of my parents were artists. And when I asked my parents how computers were computers were made, I'm sure I got a a brief answer. And to be perfectly honest, um up until relatively recently, maybe a couple years ago, I thought that engineers wore lab coats and had hammers and were physically putting computers together. I didn't really have any exposure to this field. There weren't any engineers in my life. There certainly weren't any female engineers in my life. Um and a lot of the media that I consumed didn't have anything in that either. So the fact that I'm here today speaking to you at a technical conference is in itself a little bit of a miracle. Um also shout out to Mario Paint from that last slide.

Speaker 1: So I went into this profession uh theater thinking it was something that I could support myself with. With and I was exposed to the creative world very early. I saw Death of a Salesman when I was four years old, probably a little bit young to be seeing that. Um I went to a performing arts high school. Um I ended up getting my theater degree from San Bernardo. Francisco State University and reality set in when I did Xana do the musical, which is this lovely rainbow photo over here. Um I had a cardboard cut out of me in the lobby, my picture was on buses, people were tweeting me for photos all the time and my picture in the paper and I thought I've made it this is it and then they handed me five hundred dollars for three months of my work. Um the sad thing about theater is no one sits you down while you're getting your

Speaker 1: four-year degree and asked you, do you know how much money you're gonna make when you do this? Um but I did have a very long theater career uh after college So it wasn't until I heard a talk at Google about getting young women interested in programming in STEM that I really started to understand that this is something that I could do. I of course Googled Googled Girls Who Code. I was not a girl. I was a 25-year-old woman. And luckily, I had started dating my boyfriend, who is an Android developer, started taking um actually Kenneth's uh treehouse class on Python. And I'm here today. So if you're unfamiliar with what a bootcamp is, it's typically a 12-week program, sometimes longer. It's very intense. You learn recursion in a day. They don't call it a boot camp for nothing. Preparing for whiteboarding interviews for the first time is a lot like going into

Speaker 1: To combat, as we all know. So shocking realizations when transitioning from theater to tech. There's a lot of things that are drastically different when it comes to To the theater world versus tech. And as someone who performed in musicals from the tender age of four, it's very much the opposite of Silicon Valley. For one, um, the gender balance is completely opposite. I have some really, really great news for you dudes out there who want to start doing musicals. If you can kind of carry a tune. Um, come on down to your local community theater or Broadway um where there's about forty to fifty women auditioning for one role and the four men who end up auditioning and a hobo from the street who wanders in all get cast as all the male leads.

Speaker 1: the show. So um bundles of opportunity for you there if you're interested. And because of this, uh it's a lot less competitive. So uh I went from some place where 30 to 40 women were trying to get the same role to companies begging me to join their startup. Um LinkedIn went from a very boring, dormant place to an influx of messages, but maybe that had something to do with my creative crypto blockchain expertise, so I'm not really sure. Um also, uh people do not sing as much. Um it's probably the biggest difference. Folks in musical theater definitely burst into Song and dance numbers a lot if you've ever hung out with them before. Um also I get paid a living wage. What? Uh I get a job based on skill

Speaker 1: and not one of the following. My weight, my ethnicity, my ability to tap dance, not having a believable Italian slash Bronx accent. My parents' donation to a theater, having an affair with the director, ability to belt a high C, gender. So sadly, these are actual reasons why I was not uh given jobs as a musical theater actress. Um it's a it's a completely different world. Um I wish they were fake examples. but they are real reasons. But one of the things that was most striking was this. Meetups, events, content, et cetera. I've been fully immersed in the performing art

Speaker 1: since birth and you have to understand that until I became an engineer, pretty much every single part of my life had some sort of element of entertainment. in it. Even at family dinners, I would perform elaborate dinner theater for my parents up until age 12. It was really embarrassing. But even when it came to what I would consider boring or bad theater, there was at least some amount of fun, comedy, camp. involved. That's why we go to the theater, right? We go to be entertained. So when I first started giving uh talks at conferences about two years ago, I thought I was bombing. I would throw in a bunch of gifts and jokes and puns. I tell a lot of dad jokes. I apologize in advance. You've probably already heard a lot of them.

Speaker 1: But they would my shtick would always be kind of met with these blank expressions, people on their phones, the occasional sleeper. I totally get it. Time zones. Are a beast. But the one person who would keep me going would be the nodder. Has anybody given a tech talk before? Yeah. There's always that like one glorious human who's paying attention. They're like, yes, I agree. And you're like, thank you. Thank you, sir. Um so uh I I really think that, you know, people come and see my talks and they're the quirkiest talks they've ever heard. And I used to do musical theater. I'm about as quirky as they come, but shout out to the nodders. You do God's work, really keeping us alive up here. So thank you. So why do I have to give a disclaimer when I'm giving technical talk

Speaker 1: Every time I give a talk, I always apologize and I go, hey, FYI, I give a lot of dad jokes. Um why do I have to do this? What is it about uh what is it about tech conferences, uh meetups, panels, to like even online tutorials that have made us grow into custom In front of everyone in the room. So of course I understand that musical theater is a completely different entity. Um, and it's not called the entertainment industry for nothing. But even some of the worst shows I've seen, and I have seen you guys, I have seen some terrible shows in my twenty-nine years on this earth. I saw a one-man

Speaker 1: Christmas Carol one time. Um but even that had some sort of entertaining element in it and I had no wine before that show. So even if it was, you know, a grown man playing Scrooge to himself as Tiny Tim, it was bad, but like I'm talking about it now and we're all laughing. Um and I I understand that these are two different mediums, musical theater, tech, um, and it's uh it's something that As someone from the musical theater world, Tech Talks felt a lot like Saturday Night Live, a Saturday Night Live sketch that's Tim Calhoun. And I hope we have sound. Let's see. There we go.

Speaker 2: I am Tim Calhoun and I'm running for the office of President of America, United States. A lot of people are wondering who is Tim Calhoun? Well, I want to tell you now who is Tim Calhoun. I, Tim Calhoun, is leader Confident. Economy

Speaker 2: Dancer Strong, both up here and with muscles I'm pro ISIS. Whether large cubes or small flakes, I says keep my drinks cold, but it's good for America.

Speaker 1: Okay, so that's a little bit of an exaggeration. But it is drastically different from musicals. Um also I would totally vote for Tim Calhoun. All right. Oh no, we're not gonna play it again. We're gonna go to the next slide. Okay. So obviously exaggeration, um, but it was quite polarizing going from musical theater to tech talks and media. So as a non-traditional background engineer, I'm a huge advocate for folks who come to technology by way of literally any other industry. Here's a couple of my faves. This is my friend Robert. He can't he was a A horticulturist before he turned into an engineer. My friend Katherine, who's an opera singer, turned engineer. She works at Apple now. I highly recommend checking out her RubyConf talk that's called Mozart Would have been an amazing programmer talking all about how music is very similar to programming.

Speaker 1: This is my friend Elaine. She's a teacher turned to engineer. She's also job searching, so definitely hire her. her, she's amazing. Um and this is my co-worker's um mentee from HackBrite who was a professional Muay Thai fighter um before she turned engineer. So there's so many different amazing ways that you can come into this industry. But you get the point. All of these wonderfully diverse perspectives from tech bring their previous lives into their tech careers. And when I first began my journey into tech, not blockchain. Um and decided to attend HackWrite Academy. I felt a lot of conflicting feelings about having a BA in drama from San Francisco State University. I would have these fantasies about building a time machine and basically using all the money that I used to my tuition to buy a house in the Bay Area in 2007

Speaker 1: and then teaching myself how to code on Udacity while living off of free Pizza at local meetups, but alas I was 26 with a useless degree, or so I thought. So what do you do with the BA in drama? If you are an Avenue Q fan, you're singing the song in your head right now. So two years ago I felt very, very different about my four-year theater degree. Grade than I do now. Um, sure. I took a lot of very bizarre classes where we did an improvised musical about a skeleton woman. What? I was in a musical about playing chess in the Cold War. That's a real show that played on Broadway. Ah, question mark. Um, and who could forget when my dad came all the way from Sacramento to see me play Young

Speaker 1: Whore number one in the first stage musical that I did However, those four years taught me that's me on the right. Um those four years taught me a lot of things that I use on a daily basis as An engineer that many folks with traditional computer science degrees haven't been exposed to. So when I was an actress, I was typically cast as one of two types: the ingenue or the quirky sidekick. So here's a picture of being an ingenue. If you're unfamiliar with these terms, an ingenue would be sort of a Disney princess, love interest type, whereas a quirky sidekick would be something like donkey. From Shrek , which is ironic because I played Fiona, but she's sort of of an amalgamation of both of those people. So while the ingenue is typically the leading role in the romantic love interest, I always preferred playing the quirky

Speaker 1: sidekick. I love to make people laugh. I love the science of perfecting a joke, the whole rule of three. I love figuring out the Just the perfect phrasing, timing, facial expressions, body language that really go into making it land. And playing Penny and Hairspray was some of the most fun that I had on stage for two hours. I got to wear amazing wigs, be really weird, make people crack up. And to me, there's no better feeling than making people laugh. It's truly my drug of choice. And giving tech talks is about as close as I get to performing these days, other than the occasional karaoke session that they have at an after-party. So naturally, once I began to give technical talks, I wasn't sure how my senses of humor would land with a mostly white male 30-something crowd wearing Patagonia vests.

Speaker 1: I'll let you read this real quick. This is one of my faves. It says Devin Dinkelman grew up in SF, lives in West Village, started an app company called Chadley, was Evan Spiegel's fraternity brother, has 11 pairs of all birds, stoked because he just crushed 28 days of keto diet This is my boyfriend. That's not a picture of my boyfriend, but my boyfriend did all those things. So as I mentioned before, I started giv prefacing all my talks and giving people permission to laugh. And after seeing success with this approach, I began to change my approach to not only writing talks, but also creating content, building developer communities, establishing my personal brand. In short, I just really wanted to make people laugh. And also, this is the Instagram account that this came from. I'm gonna give you a second to follow it.

Speaker 1: It is really, really great content. Alright, now for something completely different.

Speaker 3: Well, the sun is huge and sun is bright. The color of the color is bright because yellow is the color of the sun. Well, the sun is huge and the sun is not so the color of the Choose from the colors of sound. Well the yellow is the colors of sun. It's not because orange is the colors of the sun.

Speaker 1: Alright, it's gonna stop, I promise. It's mind-numbing. So guess what? There's science behind this. So I used to do children's theater back in the day. It's me, the yellow yellow crayon. I'm very diverse. I I played yellow and blue crayon. Um and I I found that doing these shows, I would be exhausted. Afterwards, there was not enough Red Bull in the world to keep up the energy needed to keep children ages five to seven engaged for an hour. And if you've ever attended a children's theater show or even watched a television program, I'm sure we've all seen it least a clip of Sesame Street, you'll notice there's a lot of color, movement, songs, jokes. It's a total sensory experience. And this is on purpose. Why? Because children ages five to six years old typically can only

Speaker 1: Attend to one activity that is of interest to them for around 10 to 15 minutes. And they generally should be able to like filter out different distractions, but 10 to 15 minutes is the limit. I'm also willing to admit that adults probably even have a shorter attention span. We're all addicted to our phones, and about 10 minutes into an OKR meeting, we're all itching to check our phones. Am I right? So , next slide, will it work? There we go. And that is why memory hooks are so so so important. Making people laugh is one of the fastest ways to break down barriers and winning people's goodwill. Now, a memory hook doesn't have to be funny to be memorable. They can be emotional. You can think uh Don

Speaker 1: Draper in Mad Men, or you can think of any Apple keynote that you've heard where they talk very slowly and talk about how their product has changed the world. Um, but memory hooks have many forms. Um, and I encourage you to do your own research on this, but this talk is obviously about humor. Alright, so content. It doesn't have to be boring. So someone who does this really well is the company that I work at, century. io, and in particular my coworker Richard, who is in charge of all our content. And one of the reasons that I decided to join the Sentry team was actually this statement on our website, your shit is broken. It just is how a developer talks. Like when you're out on the conference floor, none of us are talking like the pamphlets or the, you know, technical things that we see that are very corporate on these websites.

Speaker 1: Also, I'm going to just minimize this real quick and show you our careers page, the magic. of technology. Okay, there we go. So this is our careers page at century. io and you see they've got kind of this typical stock footage thing in the And she closes the door and you're like, oh, what's going on? Oh, a little man on the table. What's going on here? So it's it's really fun. You scroll down here, we've got all these gifts. I think under our benefits, we say that we have unlimited LaCroix, duh, because that's that's what everybody wants here. So um and every employee who starts out at Century gets a welcome gift. Which I have some examples of. Here we go. So we make a welcome blog post and gif

Speaker 1: for every single person who joins our team. This is Erin. I sit next to her. She loves donuts. Here's another one that's one of my favorites. So as you know, we are a bug reporting tool. So here's Lauren. Gonna catch some bugs. A wild venomat appeared. Go sentry. I just have to shout out to Richard here because I saw him working at this on his desk for about two weeks. Lauren used releases. It's and it's in real time too. We've all played Pokemon. We know how long it takes to catch. An exception was got. Yes, yes. Um and then one of my favorites, this is uh

Speaker 1: an a shout out to 80s films. This is our PM Sarah trying on different outfits. So this is actually something that wanted me to work for this company. I was so used to seeing the careers page and having it be so boring. And these looked like people that I wanted to work with because I like having Having fun at work. And this is way more memorable. So this is a memory hook. And as tech companies, having a sense of humor and branding does it not only humanizes our product But um it gives a sense of it humanizes the working environment. By the way, Sentry is hiring. Um hit me up afterwards if you want a job. Um you do get a welcome gift if you come and work for us. Um all right, next slide. Oops, I started the video. There we go. So content.

Speaker 1: So in addition to our careers, page Sentry also has some quirky and fun content. I created a series called Exception Perceptions, which is a technical series where we answer engineering questions about error reporting and beyond. And we do some uh shows with other engineers at other companies. And these are five-minute videos. Notice that they're five minutes because we want to keep that short attention. span of our viewers where we dive into technical concepts but also have fun. For example, Richard and I created a two-part series that I'll show you a little clip from that was um episodes one and two of Star Wars, but good, not the bad Star Wars. Uh let's see if I can. This might not load, but you can look at it on your own if you'd like. Um we'll let that load for a second. Um

Speaker 1: The beauty of technology. Okay, there we go. Um you can check those out. They're they're um century. io slash tutorials. And you don't have to work at a quirky small startup to do this. Even larger companies like Microsoft have joined and doing the kind of join the comedy train, so to speak. Um so this is a clip from the open source show that they just started, me and Bridget Kremholz talking about

Speaker 3: your users have the ability to do that, which developer tools, so yeah, they probably do, they may not want to. Like they may not be super interested in debugging your tool for you because they are trying to use tools to get their work done.

Speaker 1: Exactly. And for example, I'm a very visual person, so I'll show you in this handy demo that I prepared. So as you can see, this is not a realistic application. It's built to throw errors, which we probably wouldn't build something. something like this in the real world.

Speaker 4: But I can kind of demonstrate what this would look like.

Speaker 1: So it's a simple voting application. I'm going to type a normal working app. I should also note that the reason that this is not on a green screen is because Bridget's hair is green, so um we couldn't film it on a green screen like the other episodes of this. So at Sentry, we also did this with our meetup. We wanted a monthly meetup that would engage with the community, create brand awareness, and be authentic to the Sentry brand. So we created something called Sentry Scouts, which is my brain child, which is a camp-themed meetup, and we also made a commercial for it, which I will play for you right now. It'll load. Perhaps I will refresh it. A hard refresh. Here we go. Alright, cool.

Speaker 4: And then, before the meetup even started, they ran out of pizza. And he started to do a live demo of his product. And the Wi-Fi wouldn't work. Sorry, didn't mean to scare you. We were just talking about old Meetups that we've been to the past. Pretty spooky, am I right? We've all been there before. Meetups with the same cold pizza, boring speakers, weird topics. But let's be real, we're really there for the good conversation and maybe a couple free beers, but I digress But what if there was a meetup that was fun? More talking, less listening. One with diverse speakers from all kinds of backgrounds to help kick off the conversation.

Speaker 4: That's looking great, y'all. And just for fun, what if we threw some camp food in the mix? Don't forget the boozy hot chocolate. Oh no, I couldn't. I'm working Oh, thank you. And just for fun, what if we threw some patches in the mix? That's right, patches. We'll have limited edition patches and stickers commemorating each meetup. And yes, if you collect them all, we do totally have a surprise for you at the end of the year. Look, we know you can go to a meetup any night of the week in SF, and we're here to make them a fun, open, engaging discussion with a campy theme. Get it? Nailed it. Nice. Our promise to you will

Speaker 4: never pitch you, feed you cold pizza, make you sell Girl Scout cookies, or make you bored. So what are you waiting for? Come and join Sentry Scouts Meetup today.

Speaker 1: All right, so that's our commercial. Um we actually find that a lot of people find us through our commercial or through word of mouth. Um Which is really cool. So it's not your typical monthly meetup. And yes, we do have patches and stickers for each event. So When when we were kind of drafting this out, we were thinking of the average meetup. You arrive, grab pizza, maybe a warm beer, chat with other attendees, sit down, hear someone, usually recruiter, talk about how they're hiring, blah, blah, blah. Um first speaker comes up, usually always mail, shamelessly plugs his company, tries to do a demo, the Wi-Fi doesn't work. Second speaker is very nervous, Wi-Fi is Still shitty, you start to look at your phone, you kind of tune out, start questioning why you're here on a Wednesday night. You slither out as soon as you can, the event ran 45

Speaker 1: minutes over. And then for Century Scouts, we wanted it to be different. Um we wanted you to arrive, take pictures with a giant squirrel in front of a tent. You also uh ask someone to take a pic of you in our giant camp chair. You chat with attendees, quickly grab some s'more fondue, boozy hot chocolate, gushers, grilled cheese. Chloe comes out, that's me. Um Intros of the PowerPoint karaoke speakers, you laugh a lot, the sugar is kicking in. The panelists come on stage, you learn a new or familiar topic from a truly diverse panel of speakers. Someone performs a song. Yeah, we we did that one time. That was fun. Um you grab your patch and sticker, you get kicked out of the venue because you've stayed too long uh talking to other folks, and then I have an asterisk. There's an introvert option which you go home, post about how great a time you had on Twitter and catch up on Westworld, because I've done that before

Speaker 1: too. But we really did see a big difference between making our meetups Fun, which honestly seemed like a no-brainer to me, a musical theater person. Now clearly you do not have to do patches and stickers for all your events. I lovingly say that our meetup is the most extra meetup that ever meetuped. But there's a lot of ways that you can do this. So we found that a lot of folks find out about us through the commercial, but it's mostly through word of mouth. People say, I went to a meetup that was fun. And people go, what? What there was food that was delicious? And also like PowerPoint karaoke. And it's it's been kind of a a mind-blowing phenomenon to me that people are like, how did you think of this? How did well, I was bored

Speaker 1: and I wanted to make them fun. Um the highest compliment that I've gotten in my career as an engineer was uh a person came up to me after a Century Scouts meetup and said, I've never laughed at a meetup before. for um which was crazy to me um and and that made that made me very happy mission accomplished um and yes we do really have patches for all the events definitely do come and check them out um and get one of our only you can prevent dumpster fire pins Here are a couple ways that I've seen other people do this successfully. So another example of this is Oh, uh do I put oh there's a question right over there. What I think someone has a question. What's going on?

Speaker 5: Sure do. Um Um Chloe, first of all, great talk. And may I say I love those pants.

Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, thank you. Oh yeah.

Speaker 5: Anyway. Uh what are some of the ways that we can make tech talks more engaging?

Speaker 1: Oh wow, thank you so much for the question that I planted in the audience So this is actually something that I saw um my good friend Eve uh Porcello do in a talk once at a React meetup. It was probably a room full of 30 people. We were all really tired after a meetup. Not only was the technical example that she gave interactive. We were all able to interact with it as she was doing it. But she planted questions in the audience and it was so so so funny. I have never seen a group of tired engineers wake up that quickly because we're all waiting for the next one to happen. Um so uh definitely there's there's some interesting ways that you can spice up your your technical talks if you're doing those. Um so maybe you hate public speaking Maybe you don't think you're funny. Maybe you don't think your team can create some choice gifts.

Speaker 1: This is not a call to action to get everyone to develop quirky content. It's more of a call to action to bring humor to everything that you do. Why do we love HBO's Silicon Valley so much? Because it's realistic. If it was a reality show, I would cry every time I watched it. We we love it because it's humorous. Um making people laugh is really one of the fastest ways to break down barriers between strangers, win over an individual, a group. So next time you're creating a technical sample, an application, organizing a meetup, maybe even having an OKR meeting that you know is gonna go really poorly. Try to find the humor and the joy in it. How can you make things better by lightening the mood?

Speaker 1: Oh captain, my captain. Channel your inner Jared who makes me laugh every single time. So that's all from me. Thank you for listening to me tell a lot of really bad dad jokes. I hope that you all have a wonderful conference and I will see you on the conference floor. I am the one with polka dot pants. Thanks, y'all.