I was definitely posting through the whole thing. On LinkedIn, mostly.

Some people told me to shut up about politics or well-actually’d me about actual facts. Some people noticeably abstained. LinkedIn quickly made it so you could filter out political content, as though work itself isn’t political. A consistent crew liked my posts and my comments, and I vaguely worried about my ongoing employability.

It was bold and it was useless.

At the same time, Democrats who had months to form a plan were manifesting a hilariously useless opposition. The pathetic faux-SOTU ping-pong paddle thing was still in the future, but inevitable. Faithful party members wanted to work with the system rather than pointing, urgently, at its collapse.

In late February 2025, legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil had yet to be disappeared to a notorious Louisiana detention facility, as though the First Amendment didn’t exist.

I was starting to feel deeply insane that I was considering not going on a work trip to Europe, lest I not be allowed back into the country.

And then one day I was just: “Who am I waiting for?”

To the corner

I picked the intersection because I could walk there, and because I knew it was annoyingly backed up at certain times. No grand strategy, just easy access and the hard-earned school pickup knowledge that lots of cars pass through at certain times of the day.

It took a few days to muster the posterboard, acrylic markers (turns out that normal Sharpies are wildly insufficient), and someone better at making signs than me. That same person warned me to take so many precautions and lectured me on how and when to leave a protest expeditiously. They told me to park my car so I could leave quickly without walking home.

The first day I showed up with my “No Nazis, No Kings” sign, I cried. Cars honked. People waved, raised their fists, gave me a thumbs-up, and cheered with their whole body. People shouted “QUEEEEEN!!!”

After weeks of doomscrolling, rage-posting, and sleepless nights: this felt like something to do.

A few days later, I might have had some wine. I decided to post under my real name on Facebook and Reddit. If anyone wanted, they could find my house and phone number and stuff.

Skepticism followed: “What are you even protesting?” (I’ll let you hazard a guess … ) “That’s private property, you know.” (It’s not, in fact!) “One person with a sign, seriously?” (It’s very powerful, actually.) “Get a life!”

That same day I had some Christo-fascists harassing me on X and posting my picture. I called the police non-emergency line and explained the concept of swatting, because that seemed relevant. An officer called me back and took my report. I let him know my son was home with me. Just, you know, so they knew.

A few days later, the response to my posts was different.

“I saw you out there.”

“I honked at you yesterday.”

“How can I join?”

Soon, someone new joined me at the corner, and helped “hold” the corner while I traveled for the weekend. Another read my posts and showed up looking for something to do that felt valuable. She said I looked “normal,” which gave her the confidence to be out there alone, too. A neighbor stopped me on my way to the corner and asked how they could join me.

On the corner, truckers blast their air horns. Mail carriers wave. School buses and UPS trucks honk, work trucks give thumbs up, and Tesla drivers make noises and gestures in regret and apology.

No men have shown up to join me yet, but they’re welcome.

Some people don’t like what I’m doing.

Sometimes they shout at me, sometimes they give me the finger. It must bring them sick joy to entertain the possibility that they could make me feel bad.

Sometimes they try to explain, in the middle of a left-hand turn, that tariffs are fine actually, if you just buy American [without any foreign raw materials or components of course].

No one has crashed yet.

Some yell “No they don’t, stupid!” when my sign says tariffs raise prices, and just like, good luck to you and your sketchy car from the early 2000s.

My framework

I’m not a pro at this. I’ve done approximately zero of this in public before now. I used to write headlines for a newspaper and I feel like that’s helped me write good and factual signs, but that’s about the extent of my qualifications.

You can find much better resources about safety when protesting, safety when protesting on street corners, and safety from police officers and internet strangers — all with a Google search or two. Still, these are some of the organized thoughts I’ve had about what I’m doing and what I’d like to do more broadly.

• Use signs that state the truth. Tariffs increase your prices or Trump = Chaos + Cruelty + Corruption. Keep it kid-safe — they’re reading the signs and asking their parents about them. Nazis are bad! is OK but maybe not very actionable. Fuck Trump probably isn’t a winning message. Be accessible, not alienating.
• Welcome engagement, even from Trump-lovers. Express solidarity with anyone who responds positively, with a fist bump or a wave or a thumbs-up. For the people flipping you off, shout “Thank you for the feedback!” or “I’m glad we agree on the freedom of speech!” or just “Have a great day!” Sometimes I just shrug and smile. The point of this type of protest is not to incite arguments.
• Activate others. Invite the people who cheer you on to participate in the future, and tell them to bring their kids! Spread the message of “You can do this too!” Enable new joiners with existing signs.
• Have a light footprint, and don’t impact the flow of traffic. If you’re protesting at a corner where traffic backs up a lot already, don’t make it back up more when people slow down to read your sign. Otherwise, someone might report you for creating traffic issues. Be ready to leave quickly. Clean up after yourself.
• Leave if you’re asked. Nearby neighbors might invite you to go somewhere else, or police might suggest it would be best if you went away. Focus on the battle, not the war, and remember: this isn’t defeat. “Leaving” can look like a lot of things. If you’re at an intersection that has sidewalks in both directions for a long distance, go for a walk with the sign you’re transporting from one place to another.
• Stay anonymous. People will take your picture, and they will be so very excited to do it. You might want to be wearing sunglasses and/or a baseball cap — bonus points if it’s a reference to a local institution. Be a soccer mom, a mom going on a run, a dad out for a jog, maybe with one of those running strollers. You might want to cover up an awesome but distinctive tattoo. I try to dress in super-boring clothing and bring a shirt to throw over whatever I’m wearing.
• Stay healthy. Street corner protesting, especially alone, can mean a lot of time in the sun. Drink lots of water and liberally apply sunblock in the summer — ask me how I know! Prepare yourself mentally for how you’ll shrug of the assholes and derive energy from your supporters.
• Find delight. My goal, my first time, was to spend 15 minutes at the intersection. Well within those 15 minutes, I was crying actual tears about the reaction. You’d be amazed how much you can connect with someone in a three-second interaction at 30mph. Engaged people are the goal, and every one of them is a victory. Celebrate it.
• Learn how to interact safely with police. Don’t be incendiary, don’t be rude, don’t be helpful, just shut the fuck up.

Feeling safe

I live in North Carolina so I have thought through the possibility that some people in my, uh, target audience have guns and may not like what I’m saying. The other day there was a loud bang when a truck backfired and my chest hurt for just a little bit for no good reason. If someone shot me I don’t think that would end well for them, at least here, so that’s comforting I suppose.

The intersection is generally unsafe at high-traffic times: Porsches floor it through a red light while some poor tiny Honda tries to turn left. Despite four crosswalks, approximately zero pedestrians seem to use the intersection. God bless the cyclists.

Thankfully, a street-corner protester in a blue region can choose a relatively safe corner that also has some shade (the kind under where a tree has grown). I don’t have a well-developed hypothesis yet, but corners with “no right on red” seem to be particularly advantageous.

The more interesting safety question for me has been how to feel safe with the people I’m sharing space with on the corner. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I say and don’t say, what I ask and don’t ask, and how exactly to welcome probably wonderful people into my life without risk.

North Carolina is a purple state, and I’m in a blue county. If you’re in a redder location, this is probably scarier, but I’d like to encourage you to do it anyway. Messages like “Honk if you hate fascists” or “America fired its last king” are pretty hard to disagree with.

What changed & what’s next

I still feel pretty pessimistic about everything, and terrified for our First Amendment rights and the viability of the US Dollar as an ongoing concern while our government acts so unpredictably. I’m sleeping for shit.

I also feel a bit more hopeful. I know now that people feel how I felt — they’re just waiting for someone else to go first.

Someone on Reddit called my actions “preaching to the choir,” given the Democratic slant of the city. Someone else aptly pointed out that no one’s even showing up to choir practice right now.

I started alone, and now three people have joined at different times. Three more people decided to stop waiting and to stand on a corner and say “This is not OK.”

So, find your own street corner, metaphorically or otherwise, and join us? So many people are like I was, frustrated and clueless about what to do about it. Be the inspiration you’re looking for, and others will join.

Further reading

• 30 lonely but beautiful actions
• Project 2025 tracker

Some signs

My grandfather died in November.

One day after his 96th birthday.

That was the day I’d welcome a not-insignificant portion of his family to my parents’ very-not-large! house, where I managed to feed them a tortellini salad that they still talk about. Also some olives and carrots and dip and stuff.

Everyone appreciated the olives because he always liked them.

Two days before Thanksgiving. My brother and sister and I were all supposed to be elsewhere. My sister’s kid was effusive about taco Thanksgiving and this will be his expectation going forward.

Three days before I’d put together, with my sister, a collection of voicemails that captured the person he was and damn was that some emotional labor that I will never regret.

Four days before we would gather at the no-frills funeral home he specifically chose, and see not-him all made up with liptstick and shit, and tell our stories to each other like there wasn’t a dead body beside us. A random pastor encouraged us toward the Lord.

My mom assures me he was a person of faith, but church was not least for the break provided by Sunday School for the kids, especially when his first and beloved wife, Phyllis, died young. I don’t remember the details but it seems like her condition would be entirely uninteresting today.

She was his high school teacher but they didn’t get married til he came back from serving, unremarkably, in the Navy. Make of that what you will. I mostly wonder how long they might have stayed together.

Phyllis was 40 or so when she died and my mom was 10. It was customary, at the time, to keep kids away from the living-but-dying part.

My mom was there when he died, even though the folks at the nursing home where she worked for something like 25 years told her not to rush. She had been there for him for years, even when he wasn’t a mile down the road. In the last week or two she just held his hand. It was a comfort, the thing she couldn’t do with her mom.

Two days before Thanksgiving and one day after his birthday and four days before he was buried, my grandpa took a breath and shed a tear and that was it. The color goes away fast after that. I wasn’t there to see it but my mom was there, of course she was, and I showed up five minutes later, no idea what I was walking into, so glad to be there.

He was too old to have any friends left, and that’s kind of heartbreaking to be honest. Some family members of his exes attended (you end up with a surprising number of exes when you live to be a 96-year-old man and are also as charming as my grandpa), and that was sweet, but I hope when it’s my time there are some people left to say nice things who don’t have a, like, post-romantic obligation.

One of my aunts and I, let’s say we have wildly opposing political views, and yet her skill at storytelling at the service, rural upstate New York accent and all, might have a shot at being on The Moth. I sat in awe of a person who almost didn’t finish high school, whose politics I abhor, but who had such a fundamental grasp of storytelling as an art that I was a bit dumbstruck.

Another aunt, who sometimes needs some physical support, brought her neighbor to the service, and made a point of introducing me to her afterward, which was so nice. That aunt still owes me since I got stuck in her chicken coop when I was 10, insofar as I didn’t realize there was a latch I could open to easily escape. She doesn’t have Trump flags and that’s nice.

A half-aunt, who I have always appreciated, didn’t come, and I sent her a message saying that I understood and it was OK but it was also good to hear her voice when my mom called her to tell her that her dad had died.

I loved my grandpa always, for the mazes he would mow in his side yard for us and the sweets he always had on hand, and the Christmases in the basement when I was small, and the micro-cassette tapes we would trade when I went to college.

And then, after my first couple of years at college, I didn’t feel a deep connection to him if we’re being quite honest. I visited him when I was nearby, and made a point of him meeting my son, but other grandchildren were certainly closer to him. So this isn’t a sentimental post exactly, but:

With his passing there’s no more need for my parents to live where I grew up (and perhaps arguably an urgent need for them not to), and that’s the bigger deal I wasn’t ready for, a world where “where I grew up” is a place I can visit but not a house I still have access to.

I felt this so deeply, on the drive to the graveside service from the funeral home. He was buried in a cemetery in Interlaken, N.Y., next to Phyllis, overlooking Seneca Lake. It’s ridiculously beautiful even in sub-freezing November. And so too was the drive from the service in Waterloo, through gently rolling hills on 50mph roads overlooking magical lakes a thousand feet below.

From Waterloo to Interlaken I basked in this magic, and was also late to the graveside service for reasonable but regrettable reasons, so it was time to leave almost as soon as I got there. I politely skipped the reception at my Trump-loving, brilliant-storytelling aunt’s house (I sent her a nice text, though) and started the long ride home.

A lot of the advice I might share from my own early career, such as “make friends on IRC who will work at cool places in 15 years and refer you” or “participate actively in the comments section of your personal WordPress blog, where you write about jQuery” just doesn’t feel very applicable these days.

There’s one piece of advice I find myself giving over and over, influenced by my more recent years as an engineering manager. This comes up all the time when I’m talking to early-career women pursuing a career and professional growth in software engineering — that is, women who have ambitions to climb the engineering “ladder.”

A gross oversimplification of such a ladder might progress something like this:

1. You write code to complete tasks that are valuable to your team. You have relatively few opportunities to make big mistakes, but when you do take advantage of those opportunities, you learn from it. You’re still figuring out exactly when to ask for help.
2. You complete tasks in order to help your team complete projects. You’re good at unblocking yourself. You still make mistakes — you will always make mistakes — but some things that used to feel hard or scary are easier. You’re developing a solid understanding of the systems your team works with and depends upon.
3. You own and drive small to medium projects and contribute to defining and achieving your team’s goals. You’re good at unblocking others on your team, and others on the team look to you for guidance. You have a growing sense of the architectural world outside your team.
4. You own and drive large, complex projects. You guide your team in defining goals that align with the org’s mission and vision, and you contribute to defining your org’s goals. When you’re at your computer, you’re more apt to be reading or writing docs than you are to be writing code. You have a high-level understanding of multiple business-critical systems, and are well-versed in at least one critical system.
5. You’re working with other leaders to set a mission and vision for your org that aligns with business needs, and then collaborating with those leaders to guide your org accordingly. Coding is pretty rare, but your technical instincts, experience, and understanding are essential. You have at least a high-level understanding of all critical systems and how they interact, and deep knowledge of several critical systems. You bring experience from other relevant companies.

Three things I’ve learned about this type of ladder: first, that people, process, and political skills (basically the sort of stuff that Tanya Reilly calls glue work) go from useful to valuable to essential as you move up the ladder; second, that these skills do very little to help you climb the first couple of rungs on the ladder; and third, that there are greater than zero engineering managers who know the first two things but don’t know how to communicate them to their reports who are struggling to get promoted.

So, here’s the thing that I tell so many people who are trying to make those first couple of jumps (and maybe this will give managers some language they can use too):

When “the business” is considering whether to move you up the ladder — which will plausibly result in you making increasingly more money for the rest of your career — your manager has one fundamental question they need to answer:

Will I be able to review this person as “meeting expectations” at the next level during the next review season, in a way that is true to the letter and spirit of the ladder?

(Because of course any decision that wasn’t true to the letter and spirit might be characterized as favoritisim or bias.) A manager can’t “jk” about a promotion they end up regretting when they can’t defend it after the fact; often the only way to take it back is with the dreaded performance improvement plan.

Perhaps your manager has pitched the impact of your glue work to get you good performance ratings in the past, allowing them to avoid harder conversations about next-level expectations while keeping you happy. What you might not know is that the impact of that glue work is at best tangential to the question of whether you can meet the business’s expectations of an engineer at the next level.

“But the business should value a wide variety of skills; every engineer shouldn’t have to be the same!” Well, the business does value a wide variety of skills … in a wide variety of job titles, at a wide variety of prices. (Remember, “the business” is, at the end of the day, nameless faceless capitalism, as disclaimed above.) You are being evaluated against an engineering ladder in exchange for your skills being priced on the engineering scale. That ladder wants you to write a lot of code at the lowest rungs.

Charitably, the ladder doesn’t value non-coding skills at lower rungs because those skills take time away from gaining engineering skills and experience that will be necessary to get to the next level. But no one is strongly incentivized to tell you that — your team likely values the non-coding skills you bring, and your manager especially appreciates them, because you’re making their job a lot easier. It might be up to you to figure it out.

Uncharitably, “the business” is getting glue work at a steep discount, like grocery stores getting you to bag your own groceries because they gave you control of the scanner thingy and the ability to interact with one less human (unless you are buying alcohol, but then at least the interaction is brief and explicitly perfunctory). Your skills and your willingness to do the glue tasks instead of the work that will get you promoted … together they mean that “the business” didn’t have to hire someone extra for that particular skillset, and you stayed relatively inexpensive. In addition to being affordable, early-career engineers are relatively easy to get to a sufficiently productive steady state, and relatively easy to replace (in the U.S., at least) if they don’t have a clear trajectory.

Did “the business” set out to be so zero-sum? Probably not. And yet you’ll do best if you assume it is.

If you’re still in your first couple-few years and you aren’t hands-on-keyboard writing and reading and reviewing code and talking about code most of the time you’re working, if you haven’t yet established that trajectory I talked about a minute ago … you are a good and valuable human! Maybe we could be friends!

But the first conversation we’re going to have is how you’re only hurting yourself if you aren’t focused on the ladder if what you want is to climb the ladder*. And if you’re realizing that you enjoy your not-coding time at work more than your coding time, we should talk about that instead. There are a lot more jobs in this industry than I ever imagined when I was getting started, and only a few of them require teaching computers to do things if it turns out that’s not your thing. It’s a lot easier —and feels a lot better—to climb the ladder of success in a job you enjoy.

(A good work friend of mine who knows me quite well once had the guts to suggest that maybe I’d enjoy being a product manager. I was offended and he was right and I was offended more because he was right and I knew it. I wrote him a long note in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep because our conversation had upset me so much. I told him how it felt to have a senior, white male engineering leader suggest that maybe I was a better fit for a product role than a role as a fellow eng leader, and how it felt like it went against everything I had worked hard to achieve to even CONSIDER the idea.)

(And then a few weeks later I took the job and I was very good at it. It made me a lot better at a lot of things, and gave me a break from things I needed a break from. I took the job I have today — as an engineering manager, again — precisely because of the product aspects it includes.)

If the ladder is what you’re after after all, success is going to depend on being open to — and soliciting! and incorporating! — good-faith feedback, even (especially) when it’s hard to hear. Insist that your manager provide direct and honest feedback, and focus your attention on feedback that is specific to you. Ask direct questions, like: “If you were me and you wanted to get promoted, what would you be doing more of? What would you be doing less of?”

Peers and mentors can be great support when you’re trying to get leveled up, but remember that they may have a limited understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the ladder, which can skew their perspective on “what it takes.” Again, ask for feedback that’s specific to you. “More of/less of” questions can help focus the feedback, and questions like “What’s something I could have done better in the last month?” can give people the permission they need to say what you need to hear.

Finally, to managers: I know it’s not fun to have these conversations, especially when you’re having them with someone from an under-represented group of which you are not a part, especially when you really want to see that person succeed because otherwise you’re worried you might be part of the problem. I have avoided these conversations myself, and I have watched people avoid these conversations and not pushed them to do the right thing.

You (and I) do no one any favors by extending a protective wing that shields them only as long as you’re their manager. I have seen direct, difficult feedback on this topic change the course of people’s careers for the better — often ending with the person thriving as an engineer who finally understands how to grow and thrive.

Maybe it’s useful to shift your mindset from “I want to see them succeed” to “I want them to enjoy success.” The first takes an implicitly narrow view of success: unstated is the rest of the sentence “… at what they’re trying to do.” The second focuses on a success that’s defined primarily by their enjoyment of it. Their enjoyment might actually be in climbing an engineering ladder, even when they’re a bit miserable in the moment — and they need you to help remind them of that and help them stay focused on that goal. Or their enjoyment might be in seeing ideas turn into reality on a screen you can hold in your hand — and there are a whole, whole lot of ways to work on that. Be the one with the guts to help them find their way to enjoying success, whether “engineer” is in the title or not.

* Hope for the Flowers is a cherished book from my childhood that I now see is categorized in “Christian Books & Bibles > Christian Living” and I’m not sure what to do with this new information, but I still think it’s worth owning in its paperback form.

Originally published at rmurphey.com on December 23, 2021.

You landed in Tokyo for work in January 2020 and there was a text from your mom saying your brother was in the hospital with a surprisingly bad case of pneumonia. You’d seen him just a few weeks ago when the whole family all got together for Christmas, which was, by the end, exhausting if we’re being honest. You and your partner agreed on the drive home that this would be a biennial tradition.

Your last night in Tokyo, outside the Naka-meguro station, you said goodbye to a friend who had recently moved to Japan. You didn’t linger because you’d be back in just a couple of months.

Coworkers with family in China had cancelled trips home because of a new virus. There were people with masks on the flight home, but not too many more than normal, really, but you were glad to be heading back to the U.S., far away from there, with a stop in Seattle before you got home. You listened, on the way back, to a podcast about the start of World War I.

Saturday afternoon drinks and board games with friends and their kid at a packed pub, the same weekend you went to the grocery store and bought toilet paper, pasta, and an unreasonable quantity of canned tomatoes, many cans of which are still in the pantry.

Taking your kid to school, trying to explain that his life might change dramatically any day now, but struggling to explain how because you can’t quite comprehend it yourself. Coming home and reading about how people in China were getting creative to make meals of the food they had on hand when their lockdown began. You call the pharmacy to see about getting an extra supply of meds, and they can’t fathom why you are asking.

March 4, the day that work asked you — well, told you — not to come to the office for a little while. You felt a little glib because you were already working from home and how hard could it be, and you started your morning watching the VPN collapse.

You slice the tip off your finger that night with your new fancy knife while making dinner.

March, April. You come to terms with obviously impending death. Breakfast tacos at home. Wondering what it would be like to die before your parents and without getting to say goodbye to your kid. Awake at 2 a.m. for no reason except you wake up and then can’t stop thinking about death. Legos at standup. Calm, capable people at work freaking the fuck out because no one will tell them what’s going to happen.

Making bread.

At the Airbnb you stay at in May, your first venture into a world outside your house, your kid takes your parents on a FaceTime tour. He’s absolutely marveling at the different styles of trash cans because at least it’s something new compared to the monotony of the past couple of months.

Fishing at a nearby lake, no boats to rent or bathrooms to use because you might die. Wide berths around scattered strangers, but especially the ones forsaking masks outdoors.

Neighbors converse across the street. Your kid makes do with retirees as friends, making a daily habit of “dog party” in front of the house.

Summer afternoon on the screen porch, George Floyd is dead at the hands of government-sponsored paramilitary forces, and you explain to your kid that while, yes, the government does have a habit of using military-grade force against its own citizens in response to reasonable demands for justice and equality, we probably weren’t going to see planes bombing our neighborhood anytime soon, and that this among so many other things is what we call white privilege.

Convincing yourself that a 10-year friendship

(she hasn’t spoken to you since you attempted to come up with a shared solution for childcare in the fall of 2020 — back when you thought “if this isn’t over soon …” but also “at least we might have a new, competent president who will certainly do obvious things like send out free at-home tests and high-quality masks in his first month in office …” — she hasn’t spoken to you since that plan didn’t pan out and you probably could have handled it better than you did but everything was just a lot, then, and it was hard to fight for things anymore)

had maybe run its course and wasn’t in fact a gut-wrenching loss.

Weekend bike rides with your kid, especially that time you got him to ride the whole 22 miles of the American Tobacco Trail and he was so proud.

Campfires and marshmallows and bat-spotting in the back yard on a weeknight, just because. A whole Lego city on the dining room table, buses and urban services and apartments and even an airport and a space station. Suburbs extend into the living room.

TFG gets sick, and you don’t know yet that the stunning lack of consequences is just cruel foreshadowing. The scarcity of lessons you can teach your kid in that moment without lying is just as stunning. RBG dies and all you want to do is break things and scream. A year from now you’ll grasp at a blur of memories trying to remember the exact order of all the terrible things happening at once.

You live in a failed state and winter is coming.

The election, standing in the cold for hours in Fayetteville, N.C., with a volunteer for the Democratic party who just couldn’t bring herself to vote for the Democratic opponent of the state’s overtly racist Republican senator.

A new job, one laptop closes and another opens, no wistful moment walking out a door for the last time, and most everything else is the same.

Christmas, New Year’s at home, just the three of you.

The beach, just after New Year’s, your kid came with you for a couple of beautiful 70-degree January days. Anxiously watching him play with other kids, wondering what the price would be for 45 minutes of sheer bliss in the bright sun and stiff ocean breeze.

Three days later, alone, one then two then three separate TVs tuned to different cable news channels in a 1,000-square-foot beach condo, and deciding that drinking alone at two in the afternoon was in fact the most prudent thing to do while one watches an attempted coup.

Emerging, unprompted, from a blurry sleep deep in the night. Watching the election get certified after all. Learning that we’d have a Senate led by the Democratic Party. Hope.

You take the day off for the inauguration out of a profound sense of fear about what might happen. What happens is that you cry your eyes out when Amanda Gorman speaks, and then you slowly realize that a young Black woman is the only person on the stage capable of rising to the moment.

March, April again. New job, vaccines, basking in the fever that says this is almost over. Buying a last-minute first class ticket across the country and feeling near-reverent about the banality of air travel and a beer at the airport bar. Discovering over and over the joys of taking a camper to a state park 30 minutes down the road, just to get away.

Trying Prozac, just to see, and learning — somewhat to your surprise? — that you have not, in fact, been OK.

A summer road trip, just you and your kid, you stay at a campground for a couple of days and he plays with a dozen random kids on a jump pad that is basically a bounce house without walls, and he is full of joy. He’s old enough now to not need you around so much; he’s turned into a big kid in the space of a pandemic.

Hugging your parents again, visiting friends you haven’t seen in a decade, just because there was a time when it felt like maybe you couldn’t ever do those things again.

Your partner joins you halfway through the trip, in her car because air travel to small towns is still the worst, and she takes the kid in her car for one leg of the drive home. He throws up after 15 minutes on a winding road. She is annoyed, of course, but you laugh about it together because this is by far the worst thing that has happened in a solid three weeks.

December 2021. Your kid is fully vaccinated. To celebrate, the two of you go out for sushi at a perfectly adequate place. He thinks it’s the fanciest restaurant in the world.

Visiting an office, reverent in banality again. You write on a whiteboard and hand the marker to your coworker, who is standing in front of the same whiteboard, next to you, in an office, without a mask. Simple acts simultaneously foreign and familiar. You have never met them in person before today. Your one-year anniversary at the company was last week.

The new president has been in office for almost a year. His press secretary, at a briefing, scoffs at the very idea that the richest and most powerful country on earth would send free at-home tests to every person in that country. She is not fired, and this explains a lot.

Your friend who lives in Japan now is back in the U.S. for her first visit since the before-times, back when you had unmasked drinks in a random bar like it was nothing. She tells you she’ll be in Austin three days from now and 20 minutes later, as soon as you got home, you’ve booked a flight.

You rent a house together and for three days in a row you stay up until all hours of the night and some of the morning ones too, talking about climate change and geopolitics and Japan and holding on to friends from your 20s, and also just a little bit about the viability of climate rebellion. One night you spend a solid five minutes just reiterating to each other exactly how amazing Taylor Swift is.

None of it gets old.

The weather in Austin is unseasonably warm. Forced childbirth is the law here in the state where you sit on the porch at midnight in December, but masks and vaccines are entirely optional. The Senate is about to head home without doing anything about voting rights or social infrastructure. Covid is still raging, and you feel like you can already write the script for the months between now and next November. You don’t even feel weird anymore about using the word fascist to describe the soon-to-be-ruling-again party.

You still live in a failed country that mostly doesn’t realize it yet, and you’re pretty sure no one is coming to save you, but you’re reminded, now, on this porch, that you’ll slowly get to start living in this mess with friends again, and that will make it a little more OK.

Omicron.

Christmas, New Year’s.

At home, again.

Just the three of you.

I got into computers when I was unequivocally a girl. It was 1982. I was five years old.

Back then, my dad made eyeglasses. My mom stayed at home with me and my year-old sister — which she’d continue to do until I was a teenager, when my brother finally entered kindergarten in 1990 or so. Their mortgage in 1982 was $79 ($219 in 2021 dollars), which was a good thing because my dad made about $13,000 a year.

We lived in Weedsport, New York, a small town in the middle of nowhere and about an hour’s drive north of Cornell University (a place, I’d later learn, that lots of people have heard of, fairly few of whom can point to it on a map).

We walked to the post office to get our mail. The farmers who lived just outside town were the rich people. In the winters the fire department filled a small depression behind the elementary school with water for a tiny skating rink. There were dish-to-pass suppers in the gym at church.

In 1982, Timex came out with the Timex Sinclair TS-1000, selling half a million of them in just six months. The computer, several times thicker than the original iPad but with about the same footprint if you set it on a table, sold for $99.95. When everyone else in town was getting cable, my parents decided that three channels were good enough for them (we still had a black-and-white TV) and bought the computer instead.

I remember tiny snippets of that time — playing kickball in my best friend Beth’s yard, getting in trouble for tricking my mother into giving us milk that we used to make mud pies, throwing sand in the face of my friend Nathan because I didn’t yet appreciate that it really sucks to get sand thrown in your face — but I vividly remember sitting in the living room of our house on Horton Street with my father, playing with the computer.

A cassette player nearly the size of a loaf of bread was our disk drive, and we had to set the volume just right in order to read anything off a cassette tape. There was some semblance of a flight simulator program that I’d play, after listening to the tape player screech for minutes on end. Eventually we upgraded the computer with a fist-sized brick of RAM that we plugged into the back of the computer, bumping our total capacity to something on the order of 34 kilobytes.

I wrote programs in BASIC, though for the life of me I can’t remember what any of them did. The programs that were the most fun, though, were the ones whose assembly I painstakingly transcribed, hunting and pecking with my tiny fingers, from the back of magazines — pages and pages of letters and numbers I didn’t understand on any level, and yet they made magic happen if I got every single one right.

When I was about 7, my dad lost his job. We moved to a town a couple of hours away, where he’d found another shop where he could keep making eyeglasses. We rented a duplex and I tried to make friends with the neighbor girls via my enthusiasm about the bugs in the back yard.

My parents bought a Coleco Adam. The computer came with a certificate redeemable for $500 upon my graduation from high school, but Coleco folded long before they could cash it in. We moved to a house, then another house. I made my first real money by typing a strange lady’s strange manuscript about strange food into an Apple IIe connected to the TV in the living room. My uncle and I spent almost the entirety of his visit from Oklahoma writing a game of Yahtzee!

In middle school, I started a school newspaper, and I think we used some very early version of Aldus PageMaker to lay it out on computers in the school library. When high school rolled around, I hand-crafted letters and lines and arrows in a technical drawing class just so I could take CAD classes and make the computer draw letters and lines and arrows for me. I quickly proceeded to out-CAD just about every boy in the class, a fact in which the teacher, Mr. Williams, clearly found some delight.

In the mornings I rode my bike around our neighborhood to deliver the newspaper. Every week, I’d go door-to-door collecting subscription fees, tearing off tiny paper tabs from each customer’s page in a special notebook, indicating that they’d paid.

In my senior year of high school, I oversaw the yearbook’s transition from laying out pages on paper to laying out pages with computers, this time the vaguely portable (it had a handle on the back!) Mac Classic. We used PageMaker again; the screen was black and white and 9", diagonally. We put black boxes where the pictures should go. The yearbook adviser sent me to detention because I decided to stop standing for the pledge of allegiance.

It was around then that my friend Marcus gave me a modem and — to his eventual chagrin, when he got the bill — access to his Delphi account, giving me my first taste of the whole Internet thing in the form of telnet, gopher, and IRC. When I went to college in 1993, I brought a computer with perhaps a 10 megabyte hard drive, and no mouse. I think it was a Tandy. Once again I found myself poring over magazines, now to discover URLs that I could enter to discover a whole new world of information.

In 1995, I spent the summer making my college newspaper’s web site, previewing it in Lynx. There wasn’t much to learn when there was so little difference between the markup and what I saw on the screen. I would go to the computer lab to use NCSA’s Mosaic browser on the powerful RISC 6000 workstations, because they had a mouse. I wandered the web using a new site called Yahoo!, which seemed like it might one day render those printed directories of URLs obsolete.

My friend Dave, who lived down the street from me, installed Windows 95 that summer and invited me over to get a glimpse.

It was amazing. We were living in the future.

In the spring of 1996, I took an internship at a community newspaper in Washington, D.C., not realizing that you actually had to be rich to take a barely-paid internship in D.C. Within a few months, I didn’t really have a reliable place to spend the night. I spent a lot of time at 24-hour diners and riding the Metro to the end of the line and back. One day I was on the bus and I got confused about where my stop was and I asked a fellow passenger. We got to talking: she was from near where my family lived, and she was driving home the following weekend. She’d be happy to let me tag along.

I came home, a de facto college dropout. For a while I worked at Video King, a local video rental chain that competed with Blockbuster by offering some less-than-family-friendly fare on a shelf in the back. To my great relief, I soon landed a job as a copy editor and page designer at my hometown newspaper, owned by Gannett. I was pretty sure I’d do something related to journalism for the rest of my life.

I stayed in touch with Marcus. He had gone to California after also dropping out of college, and was making what seemed to be boatloads of money, working on … well, I didn’t really know what it was, but it had something to do with the internet. He tried to get me to come out and join him: I could sleep on his couch, and soon enough I’d be making as much money as he was, doing programming things.

I was unpersuadable about the moving part — I had been on exactly two trips that required air travel, and going to college four whole hours away from where I grew up had seemed adventurous—but Marcus stayed on my case about the programming, plying me with a copy of Learning Perl, Second Edition and late-night lessons in vim.

I didn’t see how this had any bearing on my job until one day, around 1999 or 2000, the newspaper decided it should start putting its stories on the internet.

I was on the team that sent film negatives down to the pressroom on a dumbwaiter by 11:10 every night so they could create the metal plates that would receive the ink and transfer it to newsprint on a printing press that dated to the 1940s. Now, we were also the team that would be responsible for publishing the stories to the web before we ended our night. The process was tedious and error-prone: we had to get the files from one system into another, rename them, and then move them into individual directories so they’d end up in the right position on the web site. Completing the task took tens of minutes at the end of a shift that started at 5:30pm and ended at 1:30am if we were lucky.

“Why don’t you write a program to do it?”

I started by writing the program out on paper. Marcus and I worked together over the course of the next couple of weeks, and probably wrote at most a few dozen very terrible lines of code, but when we were done, I had used code to solve an actual problem, and it was a powerful feeling.

The people I worked with didn’t exactly understand what I had done, except that now it took just a couple of clicks to accomplish the task that stood between them and the end of their long day. During lulls in my work, I’d open up the code and read it over and over and over.

I left the newspaper on July 4, 2001. I wore a shirt with a sparkly American flag on it to celebrate my independence: I didn’t have another job lined up. I bartended. I waited tables. I tried and failed to piece together freelance desktop publishing work, using my teal blue iMac with a hockey puck mouse.

I sold my car and rode my bicycle to North Carolina. I did some desktop publishing gigs and worked at an ad agency for a bit. The boss’s daughter’s boyfriend got to do any coding work that came our way. I listened to him and his friend puzzle over the task of paginating a list. I wrote a tool for myself, using the text editor in what must have been Dojo 0.1, to create formatted email newsletters for one of the agency’s clients. I made Wordpress websites for friends in the evenings.

It wouldn’t be until 2006 that I got a job writing code full time. By then, rounds of layoffs had eviscerated the newspaper. Many of the folks I’d spent my evenings with for five years would soon be out of a job, if they weren’t already.

I can barely remember a time when computers weren’t a part of my life, but I know with certainty that that time existed, and that when computers first entered my life, they were exceptional and special. These days, of course, they’re ubiquitous. There’s a staggering quantity of computing power in a bin in my closet. When I’m sufficiently tired, I swipe at the pages of a printed book, and wonder why they don’t turn.

There is nothing special about computers for my seven-year-old. “Computer” describes just a few of the many unexceptional computing devices that litter the house. He doesn’t painstakingly type assembly from the back of a magazine. He’s caught off guard every time he can’t access the internet on his iPad when we’re driving in the car. To the extent that he’s intermittently interested in coding, it’s because he knows that it is part of my job, like I might have been interested in how eyeglasses get made when I was 7.

In 2020, I brought home more in a month than I earned in my first year at the newspaper, adjusted for inflation. I didn’t work particularly harder in 2020 than I did in say, 1997, and in so many ways the work I did—making there be a local newspaper, full of local news, every day, no matter what—was so much more important than the work I did to, uh, increase the velocity and quality of frontend development at <insert company here>.

When I reflect on the path that’s gotten me to where I am today, it’s hard not to contemplate all the ends I might have found myself at instead. The life I get to live now is embarrassing in its riches, and this present was entirely un-obvious when I was spending the night in a D.C. diner, or pulling still-warm copies of tomorrow’s newspaper off the dumbwaiter, or tipping out the hostess at the end of a night waiting tables, or even saying yes to that first coding job where mostly they made Flash banner ads. My gut is punched, viscerally, by the remarkable impact of the choices that were made, the opportunities that were offered, the doors that were held open, the $99.95 that was spent now decades ago.

Girl & Computer was originally published in OneZero on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My job also requires a lot of writing. The written communication that my team and I generate is likewise an implicit request for the attention of future readers. Their attention, like my own, is a finite resource. Information overload is real.

If our communication isn’t crafted with purpose and intention, it places a burden on our audience: they’re left to decide whether the communication is worth their attention, whether it requires their feedback, what the key takeaways are, whether there are hidden action items or implications buried within, and so much more. They have to do work that we could have done for them, and that we’re best positioned to do well.

The culture of communicating via longform writing is strong at Stripe, and that’s led me to think a lot lately about what it means to be good at this. A lot of this is applicable beyond written communication, but written communication skills seem to be an area of … particular opportunity … for software engineers.

Important purposes, essential questions

My thinking starts with considering the reasons we need to communicate in an engineering organization. Among them:

• To influence decisions.
• To summarize decisions.
• To solicit input and drive alignment.
• To articulate tradeoffs.
• To share knowledge.
• To share accomplishments or setbacks.

How do we effectively achieve these important objectives via written communication? Each of them requires a distinct approach, but they all require asking a few key questions:

• Who is the audience for the communication? Are they busy? Are they familiar with the subject matter? Do they need to make or contribute to a decision about the topic? Does the topic impact one of their projects or goals?
• What is the purpose of the communication? If we can’t complete the sentence “It’s important that <audience> read this document so that we can <purpose>”, then the document may be for recording purposes (see below), or we may need to refine our own thinking before we share it. (When considering a document’s purpose, the list above is handy, but certainly not exhaustive.)
• What do you want readers to take away from this communication? The TL;DR formulation is popular for a reason. The exact framing may vary depending on the purpose of the communication, but an effective document should have a clear summary of some sort near the top.
• What can we leave out, or link to elsewhere? The goal of communicating is not to share every fact we know, and all context is not created equal. Focus on the content that is necessary for achieving the communication’s purpose. Use comments or other documents to provide additional, optional context.

Depending on your comfort with the topic you’re writing about, and your comfort with writing itself, it could be hard to tailor your writing based on the answers to these questions, and that’s OK. Sometimes it makes sense to do some stream-of-consciousness writing before you move on to crafting your communication. Put another way: don’t let yourself get blocked by the need to answer these questions up front, but do press yourself to answer them, and refine your work as a result, before you press send.

Writing for the record

Writing “for the record” is a distinct purpose with different considerations. A document created to record a moment in time — meeting notes, your personal reflections on a topic, or notes from a brainstorming session — can serve as an artifact of the moment. These documents don’t need to be particularly intentional or audience-driven, but that also means they are likely not a useful tool, on their own, for effective communication with others.

Another thing to keep in mind about moment-in-time documents is that their content can rapidly become outdated as teams, projects, and perspectives change. If you’re sharing these types of documents, make sure to prominently include the date when they were created or last known to be accurate.

Documents that intend to brainstorm about a topic are hugely valuable to the group directly involved in the brainstorming, but are very likely require synthesis before sharing with folks who weren’t directly involved. Share these in support of a communication that you write with purpose and intention, but probably not on their own.

Templates, patterns, and prior art

Effective communication doesn’t have to be (and perhaps shouldn’t be) a creative writing exercise: it’s OK for your approach to be formulaic, for your writing to be dry and direct, and to draw inspiration from (or shamelessly copy) the things you’ve seen that work well.

Templates with predefined section headings and prompts can serve as a starting point for common types of communication, such as project briefs and design documents. For other types of communication, you can learn and lean on simple patterns like the tried-and-true, reader-centric inverted pyramid.

When you’re working on a piece of writing, take the time to review and reflect on examples of the same type of communication written by others. Who were they writing for? How did they organize their thoughts? How much did they write? What questions were you left with when you were done reading? What could they have left out?

A high-leverage activity that gets easier with practice

Effective written communication is incredibly high-leverage: I’ve benefited countless times from reading a well-crafted document whose author couldn’t have known that I, in particular, would read it someday. I’ve conveyed complex topics to others with the push of a button, ensuring a follow-up synchronous conversation would be focused and informed. A document written with purpose and intention has a surprisingly long useful life, and that same document can scale in a way that in-person conversation cannot. When well-crafted documents are searchable and findable, their value increases even further.

None of this happens without effort, and that effort can feel like a lot if writing is outside of your comfort zone. If you aspire to be a leader who influences others and plays a pivotal role in big decisions, the effort is worth it — and it gets easier with practice. Embrace written communication opportunities when they present themselves, even if it’s a challenge, and create opportunities of your own. A regular practice of writing about the who and what and why of your work will, over time, pay big dividends in your ability to rapidly and effectively communicate with others.

Originally published at https://rmurphey.com on January 23, 2021.

The post wrapped up with this (emphasis mine):

Great platform teams can tell a story about what they have built, what they are building, and why these products make the overall engineering team more effective. […] Without a clear strategy for showing impact and value, you end up overlooked and understaffed, and no amount of cool new technology will solve that problem.

Effective storytelling turns out to be one of the most important competencies for a platform team to develop. But how do you put it into practice? The exact implementation is going to vary a ton based on the communication norms of your company, but at a high level, here’s what’s worked for me and my teams.

Know your audience

Effective storytelling starts with knowing your audience, and for an internal platform team, that audience can be broad. You might think about breaking it down like this:

• Current users. These are the people who use your product today. They need to know about upcoming changes, and they’re your best partners in identifying new opportunities for your product and sharing your stories with others.
• Future users. These are the people who have or will soon have the need your team is charged with meeting, but who haven’t started using your product. You want to make sure they know what you’re working on and how others are benefiting from your current offering.
• The leadership that current, future, and former users answer to. Even the most fanatical user base will only get you so far — if you want to avoid the “overlooked and understaffed” fate, it helps to have your users’ leadership singing your praises too. To make that happen, they need to understand how you’re making life better for their teams.
• Former users. These are the people who have used your product in the past, but they aren’t using it today. You probably don’t need to communicate with them en masse, but it’s good to be able to reach out to them as needed.
• Your organizational leadership. Don’t forget to manage up — your own leadership needs to understand the value you’re creating and the problems you’re solving.

Ascertaining and segmenting the members of your audience — and then keeping those membership lists up to date — can be a challenge, especially in a large and/or rapidly growing organization. As an internal platform team, you should find yourself highly motivated to support efforts to create and maintain machine-readable org charts. You should also invest up front in instrumentation that lets you analyze who is using your tools and how often.

Barring a detailed understanding of who you need to communicate with, there’s always the all-hands mailing list or Slack channel, but at a certain size, communicating this way is about as effective as shouting into the void — even if almost everyone on the list is actually a user. You might be able to achieve results if your message is urgent and broadly applicable, but it’s no way to convey a nuanced, non-urgent update.

Communicate value, not effort

About once a month for the last year, I sent out an newsletter to stakeholders and users of the platform my team owned. Every month, as I was preparing the newsletter, I would review the tickets that the team had worked on since the last newsletter went out. Every month, I would find myself a little bit surprised that the newsletter’s contents rarely ended up focusing on the work the team had completed.

Platforms, by their nature, tend to have a long tail of value delivery, and the value delivered can be annoyingly difficult to trace back to any single piece of work the team completed. A platform we started building in 2018 radically transformed the iteration speed for a business-critical team in 2020 — allowing that team to achieve some big experimentation wins faster as a result — but we did hardly any work in 2020 that was specifically in support of that team.

So while it’s important that your platform’s users know about new features, communicating about new features isn’t sufficient. In the worst case, it can stir up “what have you done for me lately?” feelings among users who don’t immediately benefit from the new features. Your storytelling strategy needs to put at least as much emphasis on the wins your users are achieving with the help of your platform. Those wins could be operational, like reductions in build times or outages; or business wins, like a set of winning experiments that a team was able to run and analyze faster thanks to your product.

When you’re communicating value, tell stories at the macro and the micro scale, and don’t be too reluctant to focus on outliers. “The business” cares that you reduced build times by 10%, or an average of 1 minute, but the AcmeWidget Team cares that, due to a peculiarity in their setup, your efforts actually cut their build times in half, by 15 minutes. Tell both stories. Get a quote from a dev on the AcmeWidget Team and feature it in your next newsletter.

Get creative in how you communicate

Slack and email are the obvious candidates for communicating your team’s value story, but they’re just the start. The right venues for communication will depend heavily on your company culture, but here are some things I’ve tried that might give you new ideas:

• Newsletters. Don’t just write an email: put in the effort to format your newsletter so it has a clear title, headings, and even images. Make sure it’s readable on mobile devices. Use a consistent subject line across “issues” of your newsletter. Anticipate forwarding: include a footer that tells readers where to subscribe to future issues. Use a mailing list so people can see past issues.
• Slack. Have a public Slack channel for customer support. Forward your newsletters there using Slack’s email feature. Use consistent emojis to call attention to important announcements.
• In-office advertising. Pre-pandemic, Indeed had large displays throughout the physical workspace, and we ran branded, multi-week campaigns to share platform success stories and invite future users to learn more about our platform.
• Internal video podcast. I only did this once, and the primary audience was the team itself, but it was a unique storytelling tool. I can see using this venue a couple-few times a year to interview users, demo new features and use cases, and share your team’s future plans.
• Internal presentations. This could be anything from a big tech talk to an ad hoc lunch and learn with a cobbled-together invite list. My experience is that there is enough hunger for understanding what platform teams are working on that I never needed much “permission” to set something up as long as attendance was optiona.
• Performance calibrations. This is a weird one, but I often found myself sharing my team’s value story during calibration conversations with other managers during the performance review cycle. Obviously this isn’t a primary purpose of calibrations, but it’s a good reminder to be prepared for unexpected opportunities.
• Stakeholder conversations. The same artifact that you create for an internal presentation can serve you well for structured conversations with user teams and stakeholders, but it also never hurts to just drop them an email congratulating them on a win you heard about — and to gently connect the dots back to your platform and

Know your lines

Telling your team’s value story requires having a consistent way of describing 1) why your team exists (your mission), and 2) what’s plausibly at the end of the long arc your team is traveling (your vision). Will Larson does a good job of defining the component parts of a vision and the steps you can take to create a vision document, but you’ll also want a short, pithy version that you can include in communications to your users. At Indeed, my team’s vision boiled down to this:

Product teams building user interface can focus on the unique business value they are trying to deliver; everything else just works.

Our mission was equally simple:

We provide crucial capabilities that allow product teams to build and iterate on user interface — successfully, autonomously, and without regret.

We weaved these words, or echoes of them, through every communication about the work we were doing and why it mattered. They featured in every presentation to the team, to leadership, and to the broader organization. While it’s unlikely that anyone outside of your team will be able to recite your mission and vision verbatim, the constant repetition of the words and themes should serve to establish an ambient understanding of the value you’re providing.

A relentless repetition of your mission and vision also helps your team stay connected with the why of the work they’re doing, which brings us to the next part …

Everyone has a part to play

Even if you’re so lucky as to have a person whose full-time job is internal marketing — and let’s be honest, what we’re talking about here is certainly a flavor of marketing, and certainly time-consuming — everyone on the team should be able to explain why the work the team is doing is valuable. Engineers, QA, product managers, project managers — everyone should be on the lookout for stories to tell about the value the team is creating. Everyone should be attuned to opportunities for the platform to create new value, in line with the team’s mission and vision.

Succeeding on a platform team will frequently require direct engagement with a larger portion of users than one might encounter on a traditional product team — especially at a company big enough to require a platform team in the first place. The best of these are centered in understanding the value that user is trying to achieve, and in turn help the user understand the part the platform is playing in delivering that value.

Direct user interactions — via support channels, office hours, fireside chats, user research, or any other situation where you’re talking directly to a user or a team — are golden opportunities. Well executed, they cultivate evangelists for your product, people who will help the broader organization understand your product’s value with little effort on your part. Poorly executed, these interactions can do damage to even the best value story.

Make sure your team members see the straight line that connects their users’ success with their own. Highlight user success in team channels, and encourage individual team members to follow up on the usage of the things they build.

Wow, that’s a lot.

Yes, and I also feel like this barely scratches the surface of the work of telling your team’s story. Unless you do find your team staffed with a person who’s directly responsible for this type of communication, it really does need to be a team effort, and your team’s value story needs to be a regular part of planning and retrospective conversations.

It could be tempting to point at your team’s product manager (if you have one) as the person who should carry most of this weight. Their role here isn’t small, but it’s also not sufficient — especially on a team where other engineers are the product’s customers. Engineers and engineering managers all need to be looking for ways to engage in telling their team’s value story. That doesn’t mean they each need to be a public face of the team, but it does mean they need to be thinking about the why, the measurement, and the communication needs for the initiatives the team is working on. (Relatedly: A platform team might not be a comfortable home for an engineer who just wants to be heads-down in the code.)

If all of this feels overwhelming and you’re looking for somewhere to start, it’s here: make your team’s value story a part of your team’s everyday conversations. Incorporate customer engagement into your planning and development cadence. Encourage your team to ask challenging questions — about the expected value of the work they’re doing, about which customers are expected to benefit, about how customers are thinking about the product. As your team starts to understand how its success is connected with the answers to those questions, the rest will start to follow.

Originally published at https://rmurphey.com on November 18, 2020.

I continue to be flabbergasted by these stories. I am happy to accept, in the spirit of “open source,” that community conferences do not pay speakers a fee for speaking. I am not willing to accept conferences that ask their speakers to pay to speak.

To speakers both aspiring and experienced: Your time, your absence from home and work and family, your knowledge, your skills, your preparation, your practice, your presentation: they are valuable, and they should be valued. A conference that asks you to provide that value in exchange for the privilege of being at the conference and then asks you to throw in hundreds more dollars for airfare and accommodations (and, in the worst cases, a ticket to the event itself) — that conference does not deserve you, and I will recommend every time that you do not speak there, whether this is your first speaking gig or your fiftieth. If you are seeking “exposure,” there are plenty of more equitable options; if you want to go to the conference, then just go to the conference — don’t spend time stressing about a talk you paid to give.

To speakers whose companies pay their travel and accommodation costs: Be grateful, and then realize that your company’s thumb is on the scales (which is exactly why smart companies pay in the first place). You don’t need to ask conferences to pay your costs on principle, but you must make sure conferences are using your company’s generosity to ensure speaker costs are paid by default for others.

To conferences that could realistically adjust their ticket price or budget to cover speaker costs by default, and yet choose otherwise: This is your choice, but let’s be honest about what you’re choosing. A speakers-pay model will decrease the pool of submissions, which will make it that much harder for you to have an event with a diverse lineup. Some prospective speakers will simply not submit if they believe they will have to spend scarce money, while others may only be persuaded to submit with the enticement of getting to go to a city or an event for free. You can perhaps somewhat mitigate this with a “financial aid” model, but realize that such a model asks already disadvantaged potential speakers to further declare their different-ness from the prototypical young, well-paid, child-free, white male programmer we’re so used to seeing on stage.

To conferences that believe they truly cannot possibly come up with a way to cover all costs for all speakers: The lower your ticket price, the more likely I am to buy this. It is imperative that you figure this out before opening a CFP, that you communicate it clearly when soliciting proposals, that you acknowledge publicly that speakers paid to be able to speak, and that you ensure a diverse lineup nonetheless. “I could only afford the rich white dudes who are paid by their companies to speak” is not an excuse for a lineup full of rich white dudes. If you can only cover costs for some speakers, don’t ask accepted speakers to come begging. Make all prospective speakers answer a simple question during the CFP process: “Would you be willing to cover any of your own travel and accommodation costs?”

To conferences that ask speakers to buy a ticket to the event: Your event literally couldn’t happen without speakers. There is no “right” to run a conference. Maybe you shouldn’t be running yours.

When I’m having a conversation with a prospective conference speaker, one topic that comes up again and again is how to write a talk description.

If you think about it, conference organizers don’t have a whole lot to go on when they’re choosing talks, unless they already know who you are. Even if your name is well-known, though, organizers may still not know who you are — lots of conferences are taking a blind approach to selecting speakers. That means that no matter who you are, your talk description might be the only thing organizers have on which to base their decision. When you give your talk, you’ll need to engage your audience; the abstract is your chance to engage the organizer.

After answering the question several times, I’ve realized that I have a pretty explainable — some might call it formulaic — approach to writing abstracts for a certain common type of talk. It works well for talks about how you solved a problem, talks about how you came to learn a thing you didn’t know, and even “10 things you didn’t know about X” talks. I thought I’d try to explain it here.

Paragraph 1: The context

The first paragraph is where you set the scene, and make it clear to your reader that they have been in the situation you’re going to talk about. This is where you establish a connection, baiting a hook that you’ll set later.

You’ve got the hang of this whole JavaScript thing. Your code works on ancient browsers, and positively sings on new ones. AMD, SPA, MVC — you can do that stuff in your sleep.

Paragraph 2: Well, actually …

The second paragraph is where you break the bad news, which savvy readers may already know: the thing you laid out in the first paragraph is more complicated than it seems, or has downsides that people don’t realize, or generally is a bad approach … but only with the benefit of hindsight, which you just happen to have.

But now your users are trying to type in your Very Important Form, and nothing is showing up; that widget that’s supposed to end up in a certain div is showing up somewhere completely different; and, rarely but not never, your app just doesn’t load at all. You thought you had the hang of this whole JavaScript thing, but now you’re in the world of third-party JavaScript, where all you control is a single script tag and where it’s all but impossible to dream up every hostile environment in which your code will be expected to work. “It works on my machine” has never rung quite so hollow.

Paragraph 3: The promise

You’ve successfully induced a bit of suspense in your reader — and a strong desire to know what they don’t know. The hook is set, so the last paragraph is the time to promise to relieve that anxiety — but only if your talk is chosen!

In this talk, we’ll take a look at some of the delightful bugs we’ve had to solve at Bazaarvoice while working on the third-party JavaScript app that collects and displays ratings and reviews for some of the world’s largest retailers. We’ll also look at some strategies for early detection — and at some scenarios where you are just plain SOL.

Next

It turns out that in the process of writing your abstract, you’ve also written the most basic outline for your talk: on stage, you’ll want to set the context, explain the complexity, then deliver on your promise, just like you did in the proposal itself.

Originally published at rmurphey.com on January 26, 2015.

Writing Conference Proposals was originally published in Ladies in Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

They’ve also given me the chance to see a whole lot of talks by other speakers. Allow me to let you in on a little secret: less-than-stellar public speakers give talks at conferences all the time. They go way over time, or way under. They mumble or whisper, or say “um” a lot. They read the text on their slides, sometimes word for word. They spend one third of their talk setting up their topic, or convince you they are worth listening to by taking five minutes to list their credentials.

And some of the best speakers, the ones who make it seem like getting up on stage in front of hundreds of people is no big deal? They’re often the ones who have been practicing and preparing relentlessly.

The fact is, if you’re thinking about speaking but worried that you might be a little rough around the edges, you’re already ahead of the game: the first step toward being a good speaker is recognizing that you can be a better speaker!

But how?

What follows are a few tidbits that I’ve come to take to heart before getting on a stage. Sometimes I’ve learned these lessons by watching others, and sometimes I’ve learned them the hard way.

Know your story

“So what are you talking about?” Someone once asked me this a couple of days ahead of a talk that I felt pretty prepared for; thirty seconds into fumbling through an answer, I wasn’t feeling so prepared. I’ve learned that my ability to give the “elevator pitch” for a talk is a great measure of my preparedness.

An elevator pitch that has me worried: “I’m talking about how to get better at JavaScript.”

An elevator pitch that makes me feel confident: “I’m talking about how valuable it is to read other people’s code and to spend time with people smarter than you when you’re trying to get better at JavaScript, but also how there’s no substitute for hard-earned experience.”

I also like to practice writing out the narrative of my talk in longhand. If I’m flying to a conference, I’ll spend the time on the plane when I’m not allowed to use a computer working on that instead. It’s a good mental exercise to test just how well I know my material, and it means that when (not if) there are technical glitches on stage, I have a better chance of knowing my lines.

No one cares who you are

At his 2012 BackboneConf talk, my colleague, Andrew Dupont — a contributor to Prototype.js, an author of a book on the library, and a well-known member of the JavaScript community — asked the audience, “Who am I?” He followed up quickly with one of my favorite slides of all time, which said simply, No one of consequence.

While some audiences may care more about your credentials than others — and you do well to know where your audience falls on the spectrum — my general thinking is this: you can spend five minutes citing your qualifications to be giving your talk, or you can spend those five minutes giving your talk. Tend toward the latter and let your talk speak for itself. No list of credentials will spare you from criticism if your talk is subpar; if your talk is amazing, no one will question whether you had a right to give it. At most, mention where you work and what you do; but then move on. Do make sure to include contact information in your slides, but save it for the end.

Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to your qualifications to give a talk: if you’re preparing for your talk about ‹some tool› and thinking that ‹the tool’s author› could do a better job, think again. Most tool authors are thrilled when other people start talking about their work; if anything, they’re likely to be a great resource to you. Your audience is also likely to be grateful to hear a new viewpoint from a new person.

Command attention

For better or for worse, your onstage persona can dramatically affect how people respond to your talk. If you’re soft-spoken — and, alas, this is more often the case among women than among men — practice speaking in a clear and authoritative voice. If there’s a skilled person managing the audio for the event, they might be kind enough to adjust the settings so you sound better, but that’s pretty rare.

Pay particular attention to whether you’re speaking into the microphone; if you’re wearing a lapel mic, for example, be careful that you don’t turn your head away it.

When you’re delivering your key points, deliver them clearly and with authority — I’ve seen a surprising number of speakers whose voices trail off right when they’re getting to the good part.

Make eye contact with audience members and, if you’re feeling brave, engage with them directly. For example, just saying, “Aha, I see you nodding!” to a single audience member can make the audience as a whole re-focus on your presentation.

Project confidence

I know you’re nervous — even experienced speakers will usually have some butterflies before they go on stage. But don’t start your talk by telling the audience how nervous you are; it makes them nervous on your behalf, even if you end up knocking it out of the park, and it makes your talk about you rather than about the content.

You might think that confessing your nervousness will put you at ease, but it can have exactly the opposite effect. You probably will have a nervous inner monologue that’s going on through your whole talk — I know I usually do — but study up on some coping strategies and do your best to press ahead with your content. More likely than not, people will come up to you afterwards and marvel at how comfortable you seemed.

Know your tools

There are lots of great tools for creating presentations. Personally, I still use Keynote, because it gives me a lot of control without a lot of fuss (and I’ve developed a “theme” that I can reuse with ease). Reveal.js is the current hotness in browser-based slideware, and includes speaker notes functionality, which I consider essential. No matter what tool you use, make sure you are comfortable with it long before you go on stage. Customize your “presenter display” so it shows you the current time, your time remaining, your next slide, and your notes (pro tip: on older versions of Keynote, you can make your notes big and your slides small).

If you’re going to use a remote, make sure you’ve practiced with it before. The Remote app for iDevices is actually pretty terrible, especially on a conference network, so think twice before you use it and be prepared to bail. Lots of computers support infrared remotes, but some newer Macs do not, so beware — you might need to invest in a Bluetooth remote instead.

Of course, you can go remote-less, but that will either tether you to your computer, or else have you running back to the podium every time you need to move to the next slide. Using a remote is a good way to have the freedom to move around, but don’t go overboard with your movement — it’s good to get out from behind the podium (if there is one), but you don’t want to be pacing all over the stage.

Try it and see

You must see yourself speak in order to get better at speaking. If you’re nervous about a talk, one of the most terrifying, and yet most valuable, things you can do is to force yourself to give the talk ahead of time. This can be especially difficult when you don’t want to pause the writing of the talk in order to practice the delivery of the talk, but no amount of moving slides around and adding funny cat pictures will tell you what a rehearsal will tell you. Start in the shower, or on the drive to work, and just feel what it feels like to say the words you’re planning to say. I have discovered many times that as soon as I hear myself say what I’m planning to say, what I was planning to say is all wrong.

If you’ve never spoken in front of an audience before and you’re planning to speak in front of a big one, find a smaller, friendlier audience to practice on; maybe a lunch and learn at work or a local meetup. Do your best to collect anonymous feedback from them, too — maybe by providing a link to an etherpad or asking audience members to fill out a Google form.

Make a video recording if at all possible. Even just rehearsing in front of a video camera at home can do wonders. Make sure you’re standing up if you’ll be standing up for your “real” presentation. Use a projector or a second monitor, if you have one, to get the sense of what that feels like.

After your practice run, watch the video. Yes, it’s brutal to listen to yourself talk and yes, you probably said “um” way too much. But you can also spot places where things went particularly well, or make note of things that you want to remember to do again when you’re on stage for real.

Respect the audience

Audiences will tend to be extremely polite and forgiving; don’t make them regret it! Use a timer and do not go over time. It is one of the most disrespectful things you can do to the audience, to the conference organizers, and to the next speaker.

Remember that your audience can probably read just fine — you don’t need to recite your bullet points to them; indeed, you might want to consider whether bulleted lists of things are appropriate at all.

If your presentation includes code and you intend your audience to be able to read it, do not include more than a few lines on a given slide. Make sure you are using high-contrast syntax highlighting.

If you’re planning to live code during your presentation, you are brave and potentially crazy. I’ve seen it go well, and I’ve seen it go so terribly that everyone in the audience was squirming in their seats. Technical difficulties during live coding are a surefire way to go over time. If you choose to give it a try, it is impossible to rehearse too much. Keep your demos small and finite, and have an escape plan for when (again, not if) things go wrong.

Above all else, remember that your audience could be doing anything else, but instead they are most likely sitting in an uncomfortable chair, awaiting or recovering from a mediocre lunch, wishing there was an outlet nearby so they could plug in their dying devices — and they may have paid a few hundred dollars and a couple of vacation days for the privilege. Your talk has the potential to be the best thing that happens to them all day. Do all you can to prepare yourself to live up to that.

Keep learning

There are some people who are natural public speakers, but most get better the old-fashioned way: through practice and preparation. Watching other speakers and paying attention to what you like and don’t like is one way to get better; watching your own talks and soliciting honest feedback is, of course, another. I’ve also learned an enormous amount from a few books that I think anyone interested in speaking should take the time to read:

Confessions of a Public Speaker, a book by a professional public speaker that shares some of his ups and downs, and how he prepares and delivers compelling presentations.

Presentation Zen, a book that greatly informed how I think about designing and preparing a talk.

Thank You for Arguing, a layman’s introduction to the art of rhetoric and persuasion.

Good luck, and happy speaking!

Originally published at ladiesintech.com on June 18, 2013.

Speaker Notes was originally published in Ladies in Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.