Lesbians Who Tech 2019 recap

I’ve been to every Lesbians Who Tech summit that has taken place in SF (6 total) at the beautiful Castro Theater and this year was the BEST.  I love that this conference is unapologetically Political, that they are committed to modeling a world where 50% of the speakers are women of colour, that they highlight issues that are current and affect more than *just* tech, and that the level of technical acumen in the talks continues to rise year over year.

Also, the conference is just plain FUN.  There’s always dancing and video montages and high fives. It’s very collegiate in ways and that’s light and fresh and certainly more engaging than some of the technical conferences I’ve attended where it’s faces in laptops all day long. This year there was a Queer Jeopardy opportunity and I wasted no time in grabbing a spot as a contestant.

When they said they needed 3 players, I worked my way to the front of the stage, which meant going against a stream of 1000 lesbians trying to make a break for the bathrooms! They said to come back in 10 minutes, at 11:40 am, and then I was on stage with 2 other contestants managing to clean up during the first round that day. I was then told to return the next for a second round which ended up being against 2 new players where I continue my winning streak, becoming (as far as I know) the first Queer Jeopardy champ at Lesbians Who Tech.  I loved the “Name the drone footage” category – one of them was of a house and I guessed it was Edie Windsor’s but it was Mark Zuckerberg’s which I worried meant someone from LWT flew a drone over his house to capture but a simple Google search turned up the image used:

In the Tech Pavilion, GoDaddy had a photo booth where you could make your own sign to finish the sentence “Make Tech More”.  It’s a cute idea and I see that GoDaddy is *trying* but looking at the options they provided, I found myself quickly wishing for other words like “intergenerational”, “accessible”, “authentic”, “socialist”, “anti-capitalist”,  or perhaps “socially responsible”. I had to settle for “weird” from their pre-printed options. If someone else does this, I hope they might make a dry erase option for people to write in their own.  The best swag was this poofy dog – @buttonspom on Instagram – which got me wondering if Snapchat could make it easier for people to have pet accounts on our platform?? I’ve created an account for Shortstack (@corgishortstack) but I don’t end up posting much to it since switching accounts is not possible in the app (that I know of anyway).

As I mentioned earlier – this conference is unapologetically political and centers the voices of black and brown queer women which meant the excellent work Alicia Garza is doing with the Black Futures Lab got center-stage with a packed house near the end of the day on Friday.

Another talk I enjoyed was “How to Prevent the Robopocalypse” where Cynthia Yeung flipped the script of “robots will take over our jobs” and pointed out how robots &  humans will need to work together on certain areas long into the future, and more importantly how universal healthcare, revamped education, and basic income could pair with a welcoming of human/robot society being built. The robopocalyse is a lie, she said, the current systems are already broken and causing harm & risk to humanity.  The robots are not the enemy in this scenario, the policies of dropping people from social safety nets, quality education and care, are the real culprits we should be fighting.

My talk went well.  I was presenting at 10:30am on Saturday at Badlands with several other amazing speakers. The two folks who went before me both shared some serious knowledge and comfortable public speaking skills about Agile development and then geo motion capture. It was a packed house, impressive for an early, rainy morning.  I presented “Ship Fast & Leave No Engineer Behind” which is a slimmed down version of an internal roadshow I’ve been touring to small groups within Engineering to familiarize them with Release; what we do, how we can help them get features ready to launch, and what some best practices and key tools are for being able to make trains on time. I saw a lot of heads nodding in the crowd as I explained our process of moving quickly through development, to stabilization, and then to monitoring releases post-launch. My friend Marcy, who is not a tech worker, was the best barometer of my success – when I was done she said she fully understood what I do now 🙂

Basking in the glow of two days of being immersed with queers who are empowered and vastly knowledgeable about many many things like AI, geo motion capture, Pixar animation lighting, and so much more has left me a little sad to be back to reality, however on the bright side – my laptop is now delightfully bedazzled and provides a daily reminder of the queerest event in tech.  I’m super glad that Snap had a strong presence at the conference and that I met several coworkers that I hadn’t before. Looking forward to growing our internal initiatives over the course of the next year with all the awesome women @ Snap that I’ve met in the last month!