“Suze creates and delivers her own coding courses, teaching Python and JavaScript as well as how to create your own personal branding website. She has worked with academics at the University of Sussex to bring their research interviews from 30 years ago to life via a chatbot. The interviews are with women about their views on love, sex and relationships at the height of the AIDS pandemic. Suze is also a technical writer and conference speaker, having given talks in the UK and overseas. She’s an experienced and engaging event host who instinctively gets the best out of her guests and speakers, even when live and unedited.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, Suze took all her tech meetups online, delivering more than 120 hours of live online tech content across 50+ events. These included over 90 hours of facilitated tech co-working sessions which helped more than 60 people through lockdown. She designed and delivered more than 15 hours of public speaking coaching and mentoring workshops, then organised and hosted a live online showcase event for the women (all software engineers) who “graduated” from these workshops. Suze’s tech community event ideas and methodologies, borne of two decades of knowing her various audiences and documented in her blog, have been replicated by other groups including those based in Silicon Valley, California.”

Like with any experience in the fun world of adulting, more preparation means fewer surprises. Estate agents don’t have the best image and I will let you make up your own mind about that.

What I will say is that any time you sign a contract, you’re bound to it whether or not you understand what you’re entering into. It’s pretty much a given that the terms of any contract are more favourable to the issuing party. Therefore, it’s not in that party’s interests to educate you on what the contract means.

I get the impression that because people know about the general strategy for selling a house in that they need to get their house valued, advertise it and receive offers, they view the estate agency agreement as a simple piece of paper. This isn’t the case.

Aside from the contract, there’s also the matter of estate agent fees, pricing your house and considering any offers. The two main factors in most transactions are time and money. Estate agents want quick sales. If you do too, then great, your objectives are aligned. However, most people want the best sale price they can get. This is not top of the estate agent’s list of priorities.

With all this in mind, here are some of the things I learnt when selecting an estate agent to sell through.

If you find these tips useful, please consider buying me a coffee. Thank you!

Agent knowledge

Houses are marketed online these days, so from that point of view you can use anyone who puts all their properties on Rightmove and/or Zoopla. However, it’s a good idea to at least consult one that has recently sold similar houses in your area and can demonstrate this. If they are selling all the houses in your area, then they are essentially setting the market rates. Therefore, you’ll get a realistic idea of how much you could get for yours by speaking to them.

Other services/conflicts of interest

Agents will keep reiterating to you that they work for you, that they want to get you the best price etc. However, sometimes they also work for the buyer and this means that the effort they put in for you is diluted while they try to keep both customers happy.

Things to look out for are: does the estate agent have an in-house mortgage broker that the buyer is using? This can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, the agent has some intel on how much money the buyer has access to. On the other hand, it means you’re not necessarily their priority.

Also, check to see whether the estate agent has in-house conveyancers and, if so, whether your buyer is using them. Again, this creates a conflict of interest as the agent will bend over backwards to please the buyer even if it inconveniences you. It is the agent’s job to see that the transaction completes and they will promise anything to anyone to achieve that.

Valuation

Use the age-old method of getting three quotes and going somewhere in the middle. Some agents I have dealt with are almost notorious for setting all their asking prices extremely high. Get your valuations in and decide how much you can realistically get vs what you realistically want or need.

Take into account any (good or bad) differences between your place and the other places that have sold, how long everything stayed on the market and how long ago the agent’s sales were. Agents will show you details of all different properties at different stages of the process: on the market, offer accepted, contracts exchanged, sale completed. The only prices that matter are the ones that the buyers actually paid.

Bear in mind that, unless you set your asking price low for a quick sale, you are going to have to do the offer negotiation dance later. Therefore, usually, your valuation is one figure and your asking price is usually a figure maybe 10% higher than that to give you the wiggle room for the offer negotiation dance.

Fees

Bricks and mortar estate agents (ie those with a physical sales office on the high street) generally charge a percentage of the final sale price. In the past two years I have seen anything from 0.7% to 1.2% plus VAT for sole agency. Estate agents have to say whether or not their fee includes VAT. Most of them don’t specify, so make sure you ask, otherwise you may end up paying them 20% more than you anticipated.

You can negotiate the fee. I always negotiate the fee. I asked each agent what their fee was, then decided which agent I liked the most. I then asked that agent to match the lowest fee. This suited my particular circumstances.

The less you have to shell out, the more goes in your pocket, but bear in mind that if the agent is only getting a small percentage, then there is also little incentive for them to strive to get your potential seller to increase their offer.

If you think your house will require some effort to sell, or you anticipate a long chain or other reasons why the process may take a while, you may want to consider a higher commission to incentivise your agent.

Check your contract carefully to make sure you’re clear on what’s included in the fee. You should look for things like photographs, listing on an online property portal, accompanied viewings and floor plans. If these are not included, ask how much they will cost and factor this into your decision.

Sole agency/multiple agency

You can instruct one or more agencies to sell your property at the same time. I have noticed that sellers tend to go with multiple agencies if they want a quick sale, or they have been trying to sell their house for a long time and haven’t been able to agree a sale.

The fees for multiple agency are higher than for sole agency.

If you’re using more than one, you must make sure you instruct each agency on a multiple agency basis. If you miss this vital step and instruct one or both as sole agency, you could be liable to pay both agents regardless of which one introduced the buyer.

Contract/agency agreement wording

So you’ve chosen your agent and now you’re ready to sign their contract. Keep your eyes peeled for the following:

Contract period and pricing strategy: these go hand in hand

The default seems to be 12 weeks and this can be negotiated down. I never contract an agent for longer than four weeks because I like to keep my options open. If you sign up for 12 weeks and quickly realise you don’t like what they’re doing (or not doing), you’re stuck with them unless you can renegotiate a multi-agency agreement and bring another agent into the mix, but you’ll end up paying more as I mentioned before.

Also, don’t forget that after the sole agency period has finished, you are still contracted to that agent until you actually terminate the agreement. There will usually be a notice period. So say for example the selling period is 12 weeks and the notice period is 14 days, then in reality you are contracted for 14 weeks.

The other reason I never agree to a long contract period is because I want to control the pricing strategy. I don’t want to cede that control to the agent. A long contract period gives your agent a nice long period over which to reduce the asking price of your house. They need your agreement to do this. However…

Consider the following situation. An agent assures you they can get a very good price for your property and woos you with compliments about it, the area and proximity to schools, amenities etc. They suggest an asking price so high it gets you thinking not only could you move to the place of your dreams but could perhaps do some reno too…

• Week 1: House goes on the market. No viewings.
• Week 2: Still no viewings. Agent suggests dropping the price to generate interest.
• Week 3: You drop the price. Some viewings. Feedback is that it’s a lovely house but not big enough (read: not worth 90% of the asking price).
• Week 4: Same as last week. Agent suggests dropping the price.
• Week 5: The people who saw it on Rightmove in Week 3 but didn’t view it because it was out of their price range are now thinking hmmm, let’s see if they drop the price some more.
• Week 6: People who have just started househunting notice that your house has been on Rightmove for five weeks and that you’ve reduced the price. They are put off by preconceptions that there must be something wrong with it.

The longer your house is on the market, the less attractive it will be. The sweet spot is to put it on the market at an asking price high enough that it doesn’t look like too much of a bargain, but low enough that 90% of the asking price would be a realistic sale price.

So, the longer your contract period is, the longer you are locked in with the agent and the longer they have to persuade you to drop the price.

Once you have dropped the price, you can’t feasibly increase it again unless you take it off the market and readvertise it some months later when prices have increased across the board. Therefore, you need to price your place realistically to begin with to generate a good amount of interest in the first couple of weeks.

Sole selling rights (not to be confused with sole agency)

Sole selling rights means that if you exchange contracts with a buyer who was introduced while you were contracted to a sole agent, then you are committed to paying the commission to that agent.

This is not a problem if the agent found the buyer for you. However, it also applies if you found the buyer yourself or if someone else made the buyer aware of your property (eg your brother told his friend about it).

The wording in the contract might not say “sole selling rights”. It could say something about “a buyer introduced by another agent during our sole agency period”.

If you are not comfortable with this, tell the agent you want it removed from the contract. You will likely get some pushback but, in my experience, they back down.

Cooling-off period

If possible, sign the contract at your home. This gives you a 14-day cooling-off period. So if you decide you’ve made a mistake, you can cancel. This option is not available to you if you sign at the estate agent’s premises.

Commission due upon exchange of contracts

This is a common clause. Exchanging contracts with your buyer commits them to buying your house and they pay their deposit. If, for any reason, they have to pull out, they lose their deposit to you and the agent gets their commission from that deposit. Check your contract to see whether it says you have to pay their fee on exchange, or simply become liable for it upon exchange and hand over the money when you complete.

I have successfully negotiated this out of agency contracts and changed them to say that the agent earns their commission upon completion, not exchange. This is because my situation was uncomplicated, with no chain either end so very little chasing for the agent to progress the sale. The agency will have spent some money on placing the property on Rightmove and conducting the viewings, but this won’t have been in the thousands of pounds. I take the view that if I pay them their commission and the sale falls through, there is little incentive for them to try to sell it again if it took a while to get an offer in the first place.

“Ready, willing and able” buyer

If you see this in a contract, either run a mile or make sure it’s removed before you sign it. This clause binds you to paying the estate agent’s commission if they find you a ready, willing and able buyer. Unfortunately, even if that buyer is really keen and has no chain there’s nothing to say that their offer needs to be acceptable to you or that contracts need to be exchanged before you are liable for the agent’s fee. Although estate agents are legally allowed to include this phrase, the terms “ready”, “willing” and “able” are open to interpretation.

What’s worked for you?

If you found these tips useful, please consider buying me a coffee. Thank you!

Have you found any other interesting clauses in estate agent contracts? How did you handle them? Let me know in the comments!

Get Heard in 2020 had been on our to-do list for a while. Our aim was to help women and non-binary people to find their messages and bring them to their audiences. We had it all planned to deliver in March 2020. Sadly, COVID-19 took hold, our host closed their offices and we mothballed the idea, intending to revive it when we were able to meet again in person.

However, it soon became clear that COVID was here to stay for a while. The UK lockdown forced us to take our meetups online or not meet at all. At first, converting the workshop series to a digital offering looked too difficult. But then we found ourselves delivering at least one virtual event every week, so we put in more than 20 hours of extra planning to take Get Heard online.

Our inspiration for Get Heard came from Global Diversity CFP Day, who kindly permitted us to use their resources. We combined some of these with 1:1 and group mentoring to create a series of sessions to take members through the process of firstly figuring out what to talk about, then creating all the materials you need to apply to give that talk at a conference or meetup.

Workshop sessions and structure

Finding your topic

Everyone has something they could talk about. In the first workshop we provided a set of prompts to get people thinking about what they’ve been working on and learning.

We then paired everyone up so they could bounce ideas off each other.

Here are the topics that people came up with in this session:

Creating your title

People found this challenging, but again we worked through this together. The hive mind and objective viewpoints helped once more.

Writing your bio

We based this on the currently… before that… also… model. It might sound overly simple but it ensures you have a structure. We encouraged attendees to include information about their cool accomplishments, what lights them up and what’s important about them that isn’t on their CV. For this segment we showed the GDCFP Day video about bios.

Writing your abstract

Again, this was challenging. We broke it down by asking members to think about what the audience would take away from the talk. Would they be enlightened, inspired, persuaded, reminded, motivated…? What call(s) to action would the audience be given?

Practice sessions/office hours

We provided three separate sessions for people to drop in to get help or feedback on any of the above and/or practise giving their talk online with us.

The stats

It was interesting to see how many people committed to each stage of the process. Workshop One was open to anyone who wanted to attend. The subsequent sessions were only open to those who attended the first workshop.

We always expect a 50% dropout rate for meetups so we were not surprised that not everyone turned up. Members fed back that they were very happy with the quality of the workshop delivery and materials, but were not forthcoming about their reasons for dropping out. Therefore we can only assume it was because they could not prioritise this activity at that time.

Workshop One (topics, titles and bios): 34 signed up, 13 attended.

Workshop Two (abstracts, structure and slides): 7 signed up, 5 attended.

Workshops Three, Four and Five (feedback and practice sessions): the 4 people who went on to perform their talks attended these sessions.

The result

The four women who came all the way through the series started with nothing. They attended the first workshop without a topic for their talk.

Here’s the video of the showcase event we held four weeks after that first workshop session, where they delivered their finished talks.

A recession is when the economy of a country is temporarily performing badly. This means that the economy is experiencing negative economic growth, or contracting.

Imagine a balloon. You blow air into it, it expands like a growing economy. You let some air out, it gets smaller like a contracting economy.

In the UK, the decline in performance needs to last for two consecutive quarters (ie six months, in this case January to March (Q1) and April to June (Q2) of 2020) for it to be classed as a recession.

Therefore, with COVID-19 and Brexit forcing the temporary or permanent closure of thousands of businesses, it’s not surprising that we now have a UK recession.

How is “performance” measured?

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

A country’s economic performance is measured in terms of GDP: Gross Domestic Product, usually per quarter. Therefore, GDP growth = economic growth. There are three ways of calculating this for any given time period:

• total income earned by companies and individuals
• total expenditure (by households, businesses and the Government)
• total value of output ie the value added to the economy in terms of the market prices of all finished goods and services produced by the country

All these methods should, theoretically, give you the same result.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines GDP as “the standard measure of the value added created through the production of goods and services in a country during a certain period”.

Calculating changes in GDP

If GDP growth = economic growth, we need some way of looking at the change in GDP over time so we can determine whether the economy has grown or contracted.

However, we can’t do this just by doing a straight comparison of the real data. This is because £100 buys you a different amount of goods now than it did in the past. Your purchasing power is affected by inflation (or deflation), so this needs to be taken into account when comparing GDP for different time periods.

Once the GDP at current prices has been calculated and adjusted for inflation/deflation, it can more accurately be compared against previous GDP figures.

Comparing GDP internationally

To more fairly compare GDP between nations of different sizes, we express a country’s GDP divided by its resident citizens (ie not including those located overseas), to give a GDP per capita (ie per head).

The latest OECD figures show that Luxembourg has the highest GDP per capita in the world, followed by Singapore and Ireland.

We can then adjust these figures to take into account purchasing power. This is because, for example, €100 in Spain will buy you a different amount of the same items from €100 in Italy, even though the two countries use the same currency.

What affects economic performance?

Factors that affect GDP are:

Manufacturing production

If production drops, the amount of goods and services that can be sold drops accordingly, reducing revenue and tax income. Jobs may have to be cut, thereby increasing unemployment and reducing household spending and tax revenue (VAT (a tax you have to pay when you buy goods and services in the UK) and income tax).

Levels of investment

High levels of investment in, for example, equipment means that money is flowing through the economy in the form of sales transactions, employee wages and sales and income tax. It also means the companies who are making the equipment are manufacturing more.

The rate of unemployment

Low unemployment means more households with an income, which leads to more spending. In fact, if you’re using the total expenditure method of calculating GDP, household spending accounts for the majority. More spending means more sales tax flowing to the Government and more revenue for businesses, some of which they will reinvest.

How can we avoid recession?

We can’t, really. Economies naturally go through cycles of prosperity and downturn. Therefore, recession is a fact of life: what goes up must come down.

Various events can trigger damage to the economy, like the current coronavirus crisis or the credit crunch of 2008 which have both led to economic slumps all over the world.

Ironically, worrying about a downturn can invoke one. If people are anxious about losing their jobs, they may spend less and save more. This results in less money flowing to businesses and the Government via tax. If businesses lose income then they will have less money to spend on production, so they may have to cut jobs etc.

Is any segment of the economy recession-proof?

People change their spending habits at all stages of the economic cycle and, for obvious reasons, tighten their belts during a recession.

How well a particular industry does during a recession depends, to some extent, on what caused the recession. For example, when unemployment is high, people may still choose to go on holiday, but instead of travelling overseas they might take a cheaper holiday in the UK. However, the current economic problems have partly been caused by COVID which, for a long period, removed our ability to leave the house except to obtain essential items or for short periods of exercise. This has meant that even the UK holiday destinations have taken a massive hit.

People cut back their spending in various ways. They can stop buying things completely (eg decide not to upgrade electronics) or they can buy fewer things (eg clothes). They can also modify their spending habits. For example, people can’t live without food and there is only so far they can go with cutting their supermarket spending. However, if they are accustomed to eating out and they don’t want to cook all the time, they might stop eating in restaurants and switch to the cheaper option of buying takeaways instead.

This is why fast food outlets often experience an increase in business during a recession. The COVID situation also saw many people buying more takeaways in a bid to help ensure local, independent businesses survived the pandemic.

What does recession mean for you?

Possible job insecurity/difficulty finding work

A manufacturing downturn can lead to a reduction in demand for labour. More people will be chasing fewer jobs.

Not being able to save

Unemployment will likely result in your having to dip into your savings. The Government will also do everything in its power to get you out of the house and spending money - see the August 2020 “Eat Out To Help Out” scheme and the reopening of many industry sectors amid the global pandemic.

Bargains to be had

Are there any bargains to be had during a recession? Assuming you have access to purchasing power, the answer is possibly.

Cheap stocks

You may be able to buy cheap stocks (although you need to bear in mind that gains may be negative, tiny or very slow).

Cheap credit

You may be able to get hold of cheap credit if the Bank of England reduces interest rates.

Cheaper goods in the shops

The cost of goods may reduce if the Government reduces sales tax in a bid to stimulate spending. The UK Government reduced VAT in July 2020 and December 2008. However, companies do not have to pass this saving onto customers.

Should you be worried?

Any time there is bad news about the economy, it’s always worrying. The current UK recession is the fourth one during my lifetime.

I don’t remember the first one (Q1 1980 - Q1 1981 inclusive). However, I clearly remember the second one, which began in Q3 1990 and, again, lasted five quarters. As a young person, this worried me a lot. I remember us being on a tight budget even before late 1990. I now realise this was probably partly because of sky high interest rates (14.8% at the start of the recession) and super-high inflation (9.5% in 1990; in 1992, the UK Government began setting and working towards an inflation target of 1% to 4%).

The third started in spring 2008 and, again, lasted for five quarters. By then, I was working and saving to buy a house. This downturn was scary for different reasons: several banks and old, established retail chains were going out of business.

As I suggested earlier, the belt-tightening often made necessary by a recession can actually make it worse. It is natural to be worried. Not everyone can pivot into a new career if they lose their job. However, as I also mentioned earlier, economies go through peaks and troughs. Therefore, at some point things will get better. Nothing lasts forever…

I am excited and surprised to have been nominated for this award. This year’s theme is Changing The Narrative and I was selected for my work in the tech community, as well as tech education.

Teaching

This year, I have been teaching coding to Professors and PhDs at the University of Sussex. Through this workshop series, I have built a chatbot which allows you to talk to a dataset containing archived interviews with young women, taped 30 years ago at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Read more about this on my public speaking page and at the project’s blog.

Community Management

The judges also recognised my work in the tech community: I am Chapter Lead at Ladies of Code London (3700 members) and Director at Women Who Code London (6400 members).

I joined those organisations in 2013 and 2014 respectively. Traditionally, we’ve met in person but COVID-19 has changed the world and we have taken everything online.

Ladies of Code London

I am particularly proud of the fact that, at Ladies of Code London, since the UK entered lockdown in April 2020, we’ve delivered nearly 40 online events - many of which I have presented solo. We went digital, and fast. This meant rapid innovation and we launched four digital series which have attracted new members from around the world, increasing our membership by 10%:

• Get On With It: co-working productivity sessions for folks needing help with motivation. This series has been picked up by groups in the USA who are borrowing our ideas with proper attribution. I’ve blogged about our methodology.
• Get Into…: talks and interviews featuring people in all kinds of tech roles who demystify their discipline for us and describe how we can get there too. Find out how we did it and watch the videos.
• Get Coffee: a Lean Coffee series we facilitate using free tools on the web. Some are freeform and some have been follow-ons from Get Into interviews for a deeper dive. I’ve blogged about how we ran Lean Coffee sessions on zero budget.
• Get Heard: a set of workshops, inspired by Global Diversity CFP Day (GDCFP Day), to help people find a tech talk topic, then create and deliver that talk in front of a live audience. Read about my GDCFP Day learnings.

Women Who Code (WWCode) London

I’m now in my second year of leading WWCode London which is a completely different experience: it’s a global organisation with 80 chapters worldwide. We relaunched the London chapter last summer and, since then, have passed the 6000 member mark.

Last year, I was lucky enough to be selected to speak at their conference in Berlin.

Being on holiday doesn’t stop me from doing the community thing. In January when I was in California, I designed and delivered a workshop for WWCode San Diego. This was a hands-on session, teaching people how to build their own personal dev portfolio and blogging website: something lots of people think about in the new year.

WWCode members from around the world are attending Ladies of Code London events, too. WWCode San Diego is now using our Get On With It format and another chapter plans to follow suit. Ladies of Code London has gone international!

Get In Touch!

I’m always happy to chat about any of the above! Get in touch if you’d like me to organise something for you or you’d like to give a talk at one of my events.

See the Women In Software Power List 2020 winners here.

1) Create a new repo with the same name as your GitHub username.

Go to github.com/new and type your GitHub username into the Repository name field.

Make sure you leave it as a Public repo and initialise it with a README.

When you press the Create repository button, the README will be live immediately with some default content.

2) Customise and edit your README.

You can do this on the GitHub website or clone the repo to your computer and do it locally.

Add whatever text, pictures etc you like. GitHub gives you some suggestions to get started.

If you want to use an image that’s in one of your other public repos, link to it in the usual way:

Use the usual markdown formatting for your text.

That’s it!

Here’s my GitHub profile README!

Friends of mine told how they had attended other online meetups on Zoom, only to have the screen share hijacked by a troll broadcasting graphic hardcore porn. A week after we had our first online event, another group’s large meeting was Zoom-bombed, leaving attendees traumatised.

It’s important to note that Zoom is not the only platform that bad actors can target. We considered a range of different ways to take our meetups online. (That’s a whole other blog post.) Zoom is the go-to app for thousands of communities because it has many great features. Its rapid rise in popularity, combined with the fact countless users aren’t changing the default settings, has meant that it’s the go-to app for many trolls too.

Therefore, before we ran our first event, I did some research into how Zoom-bombing happens and what we can do to prevent it. We then put in place a number of measures which, so far, have meant that we have not had any trouble from bad actors.

For our meetups, we tried to strike a balance between security and convenience. Therefore, the below is by no means a method of making your event like Fort Knox, but will make you less of an easy target.

If these tips help you, please consider buying me a coffee. Thank you!

1) Don’t publish the link anywhere

Bad actors use bots to crawl the Internet for Zoom links so they can join calls. Don’t tweet your Zoom link out or publish it on a web page (eg your event page).

We e-mail our links to attendees 10 minutes before doors open. We never put them on Meetup.com, even though there is a facility which means that only people who have RSVPd “yes” can see them.

2) Allocate tasks

When we first signed up for Zoom, our subscription only allowed us one host and zero co-hosts. This has recently changed, so you can now give co-hosting permissions to other people on the call and anyone with these permissions has the full range of attendee management powers.

However, if you want to run a nice slick event, it’s good practice to identify and divide tasks beforehand anyway.

At LoC we ensure that there are two organisers on every call, both with hosting capabilities. One of the organisers is in charge of watching out for any trouble and dealing with it accordingly, eg removing people from the call.

The other organiser is the “face” of the event: they lead the session and they are the one who presents. They speak to welcome the attendees and any guests, they facilitate any Q&A and close out the meetup. They have hosting permissions so can step in and deal with trouble if things escalate, but they rely on their colleague to make sure everything is running smoothly in the background to ensure a seamless experience for the attendees.

3) Limit the capacity of your meeting

We decided that 40 was a reasonable number of people for the host to feasibly keep an eye on: you can see up to 49 people in Gallery View. If there are hundreds of people on the call and you have the chat function open, it will move faster than you can monitor it. Knowing that we get a 50% attendance rate, whether online or in-person, we cap signups at 80 for our webinars.

4) Log into zoom.us on your computer and tweak your default settings

Link to your Zoom settings page.

a) Enable the waiting room

This is the default setting now, but it wasn’t when we signed up for Zoom.

Enabling the waiting room means you can vet people before you let them into the live call.

If you are running a meeting for people you have personally invited and/or a vulnerable group (eg a paid class or a Scouts meeting), this is invaluable. It gives you the ability to admit only the people you sent the invitation to.

Note: You might not know the names of all your members.

On Meetup.com, a large chunk of the membership uses pseudonyms, initials, first names only etc. Therefore, seeing names in the waiting room may not help you if you are running a meeting where you don’t know all the attendees.

Also, not everyone uses their real name on Zoom. You can mitigate this by enabling the Registration feature so that people have to take an extra step before they can get access to the call.

b) Mute all participants on entry

This does what it says on the tin and removes the risk of people joining and disrupting the meeting with noise. As well as thwarting bad actors, this prevents any unintentional interference from people who haven’t muted themselves.

I am in another group where the demographic is not accustomed to video meeting etiquette and they therefore never mute their mics. Some of them sit there watching videos while they are on the call, which everyone else can hear.

c) Only allow the hosts to screen share

Bad actors have been known to hijack entire meetings by sharing their screen with everyone on the call.

d) Don’t allow participants to annotate screen shares

Bad actors often test the waters by trying to draw on the speaker’s screen share. They will depict things which get progressively more provocative, then switch to trying to share their own screen.

5) Don’t allow participants to unmute themselves

We use the main in-call setting and then switch the self-unmute facility on, per call, when we reach the section where we have a discussion, depending on the makeup of the group (ie only if all the members present are known to us).

If you are running a webinar, there is no need for anyone to be able to unmute themselves unless you want them to be able to vocalise any questions they have. We use the chat function for people to submit questions, which we put to the speaker on behalf of the attendees. Therefore, the attendees are always muted.

6) Lock the call

We usually do this five minutes after the meetup starts. This means that we can relax in the knowledge that the number of people we need to watch is not going to increase. Also, if anyone who legitimately received the link has shared it with the masses, it won’t affect us.

What’s worked for you?

If you find these tips useful, please consider buying me a coffee. Thank you!

Have you taken reactive or proactive measures? Or have you been the victim of Zoom-bombing and needed to use both? Let me know in the comments!

Get Into… is where we demystify roles in the tech industry. Our first event was Get Into… Gaming and AI, which was a traditional talk with slides and was very popular. We’re currently in lockdown and, while we used to plan one in-person meetup per month, we’ve been producing at least two every week since the beginning of April.

I’m not sure whether this is because:

• Time in lockdown is going 100 times slower than normal time so monthly just seems like too long, or
• We LoC organisers have to pay for our community’s Zoom subscription out of our own pockets, so we want to get the most value out of it, or
• Not having a physical venue, host, catering etc means the lead time for setting up an event is WAY shorter.

Either way, we’ve been keen to keep up the momentum and support our community with opportunities to get together and learn stuff.

LoC events cater for those who are already in tech and want to level up and/or switch tracks as well as those who are new to the industry. People are always keen to hear from those who have gone before them. So we had a think about some of the roles people are most curious about. I am a web developer, so I took an action to find someone who could talk about how they got into web development.

Before the event

Sourcing a speaker/format selection

Person and role

I knew exactly whom I wanted to interview. I had met Niamh McCooey at an event last year and she was at GDCFP Day too. Later in 2019, as experienced speakers, we gave talks at the same tech meetup.

Niamh’s story is a bit different because she taught herself. I wanted to highlight this as a viable route to paid coding work which may be an option for those who can’t access bootcamps or similar courses.

Format selection

I know talks take weeks to write. I wanted to reduce the labour on Niamh as well as minimise the lead time. I hit upon the idea of using a chat show-style interview format instead of asking Niamh to write a new talk.

Advantages to the speaker:

• There’s very little labour. Niamh fed back that it was great that she had to do zero prep and could just turn up.
• They don’t have to think about timekeeping - they can rely on me for that.
• The speaker doesn’t have to worry about whether what they’re going to say will cover all the desired topics, which might be the case if they had to write a talk.
• It’s more fun to sit and have a chat than it is to give a presentation.
• They get instant verbal feedback, which doesn’t happen when you give a talk - especially online - unless you ask the audience to jump in with questions while you’re speaking.
• The sessions are recorded and uploaded to YouTube, so they can point to these as examples of public speaking.

Advantages to me:

• I have more control over aligning the content with the desired event outcomes.
• We can have a longer session: a long talk is usually about 30 minutes plus Q&A whereas this would be nearly an hour of Q&A and discussion.
• I can manage the timekeeping on the night and ensure adherence to the schedule.
• It’s a bit different from the other tech meetup webinars, so potentially more engaging.

Disadvantages to me:

• All the labour is on me. When you use this format, you (should) have a set of pre-written questions. You also need to be a good multitasker. This involves listening to the answers while deciding what you want to ask next, identifying which threads you’ll pick up and develop, determining how you’ll weave the live Q&A in and establishing when’s a good time to stop. However, it’s worth it for the results.
• I already knew Niamh, so this wasn’t an issue, but if you are going to approach someone you don’t know too well/have never heard speak, you don’t know how forthcoming they will be/how much probing you will need to do to get the information you need.

Creating a YouTube channel

I wanted the interview series to have some longevity and be available for those who couldn’t watch it live, so I created LoC’s first YouTube channel.

Branding and promotion

The name of this series was Get Into… (we also have our project co-working series Get On With It and Get Coffee, our lean coffee series). I created an eyecatching Get Into… brand and promotional banner (the one at the top of this page) to use on meetup.com and across social networks (including YouTube). I designed it so it was easily adaptable for other events in the series while retaining the same look and feel.

Questions

On the day, I had a set of questions I had prepared beforehand, along with some which had been suggested by attendees. I decided to weave the latter into the interview, as opposed to ask them in a big unordered chunk at the end of the discussion.

Host questions

As mentioned earlier, the interview format works perfectly for getting guests onboard and in the hot seat quickly, because they immediately recognise that they have very little work to do beyond giving up a couple of hours of their time to talk to you.

I chose my questions carefully and put a lot of thought into how to structure the interview. I didn’t purely want to go through a chronological description of how Niamh changed careers. Therefore I arranged the questions into three themes:

• Discovering and learning
• Getting confident; getting paid to do coding
• Continuous learning and what’s next in the career journey

I also came up with the idea of doing two speed rounds. This was partly because I knew Niamh and knew she would be a good sport, but also to break the interview up. It’s hard for the audience to stay focused when they’ve been staring at a screen all day so I wanted to change up the pace and tone. Here are the clips:

Audience questions

We invited attendees to suggest questions either when signing up for the event, or in the Zoom chat function during the interview. Some of the questions were similar to each other or to questions already on my list, so I didn’t ask all of them verbatim.

During the event

We always make sure we have one person whose job it is to be the Zoom host, so they can manage any code of conduct violations etc. Therefore my only role at this event was to interview Niamh. Like I said earlier, this required a lot of focus and flexibility as audience questions were being sent to me which I had to assess quickly while still listening to what Niamh was saying and formulating my next response.

After the event

I’m not an expert in video editing but I wanted to make it look less plain than a basic Zoom recording. Therefore I post-produced the video, by:

• Chopping the excess recording from before and after the actual interview material.
• Adding the LoC Get Into…-branded banner to the video.
• Pulling the two speed rounds out to share as “taster videos” on social media.

I created a YouTube channel for LoC and uploaded the video.

I then promoted the video across social media.

Here is the full interview:

If you have a suggestion for a role we could feature on Get Into… or would like to speak at one of our events, please contact me!

Figuring this out was fun, especially as we organise Ladies Of Code London on a voluntary basis and thus have no budget. (We pay for our Zoom fees out of our own pockets, for example.) Understandably, all the online sticky-note collaboration tools require a £subscription, with some offering a free trial.

We thought Lean Coffee would be a great way to spark a variety of conversations amongst the far-flung members of our now-international (“London” only in name) community and had already decided we wanted to run these events on a semi-regular basis for people to get things off their chests.

Format

• Lean Coffee sessions are structured but agendaless.
• Participants choose and vote on topics themselves, so it’s entirely democratic and efficient.
• Usually, suggestions, voting and kanban is all done on Post-Its so we needed to find an online, shareable solution.

Organisers’ requirements

To run the lean coffee, you need to be able to:

• Have all participants type topics somewhere they can be seen and voted on by everyone in real time - in person, this would be handwritten Post-It notes on a wall.
• Place the topics in order of popularity - again, where they can be seen by all in real time. This is easy in person - just use Post-Its.
• Move the topics around the board when they change status and have the participants be able to see this in real time.
• Have a video conferencing system so people can discuss the topics.
• Time the rounds.

Tooling decisions

We looked at a number of tools. Some of them had a free trial but, unfortunately, all of them were going to end up costing money and we have zero budget.

We decided on the following:

• Suggesting topics: Slack. This meant names were automatically attached and everyone could see all the topics. Because of the admin burden, we stipulated that all attendees needed to contact us for Slack access by the day before the event. If they did not do so, we were happy for them to join in the conversation, they just wouldn’t be able to suggest or vote on topics.

• Voting for topics: Slack. This is done on an honesty system. We go through all the topics and put two different reaction emojis on each one. We then give participants two votes each and they upvote by clicking on the emojis that are already there.

• Shareable kanban board: Trello. We shared a view-only link on the basis that the voting could be done elsewhere and only the hosts needed to be able to update the board. This reduced the number of services that people needed an account for.

• Timing: kitchen timer. We would just hold this next to our mic. We could have used an online timer and shared our screen but, when you’re running an event, you have enough windows open as it is!

Other free tools?

Have you run an online Lean Coffee event on zero budget? Get in touch and let me know which tools you used!

Back in April, I agreed to help my friend and Ladies Of Code (LoC) London co-organiser, Sarah, set up her personal blog site. By that stage, only a couple of tech communities had taken their meetups online. We at LoC London were trying to figure out if and how to move to virtual events, both in terms of content and tooling. And then it hit me…

Why not spend a Saturday afternoon doing our coding projects and invite LoC members to join us remotely? I was convinced that procrastination and lack of motivation were rife, whether or not people admitted it. I was also of the firm belief that vocalising your goals meant you were more likely to try and achieve them.

And so, Get On With It! Bring Your Own Project was born. My inspiration for the name came from our other series: Get Heard for public speaking upskilling and Get Into… for tech roles under the spotlight.

We figured that if nobody else turned up, we’d lost nothing except £15 on a Zoom subscription as we were going to work on our own projects anyway.

Methodology

We run Ladies Of Code London on a completely voluntary basis and work hard to create and deliver innovative events for our members. If you would like to run your own GOWI-inspired event using our ideas or parts of our format, please ensure you include proper attribution in your promotional material, including a link to this blog post (https://suze.dev/blog/get-on-with-it/) to make it clear where the ideas originated.

In my mind, for Get On With It (GOWI) to be successful, there were a few essential ingredients:

1. Careful choice of language.

I have heard a lot of talk over the past few weeks about how:

• “When you go for a job in the future, employers are going to ask how you spent lockdown and you need to have a good answer that involves learning and personal development.”

• “You have more free time than ever before. You have no excuse not to learn that new skill/finish those projects/get fit…”

Not everyone has more time on their hands now. Many folks with caring responsibilities are getting zero respite. Some are having to manage this alongside full-time jobs. To endeavour not to alienate people, I worded the event description carefully.

We were also careful about the language we used during the events, which I will elaborate on later.

2. Progress, not perfection.

Success looks different for everyone. Therefore, it’s important that everyone knows that their personal goals and achievements are valid. I knew we were going to hear a lot of “it’s not much” so I came to the first session armed with the mantra “progress, not perfection”. I just want everyone to leave Get On With It a little further forward than they were when they came.

3. Optional (but highly encouraged) switching-on of cameras and mics.

To get the most out of coming together, we need to discuss things. I believed that most people who were shy or introverted may well feel brave enough to speak up after others had shared.

4. An opportunity to state your objective(s) for the session.

Once you’ve voiced your intentions to the universe, they’re out there and you can’t take them back! That’s not to say you’re committed and need to beat yourself up if you don’t achieve them. But there’s something about hearing them in your own voice which cements them.

I was careful not to use the word “accountability” because that implies an element of compulsion. We didn’t want people to feel like they were going to be held to what they said they wanted to do. Especially with coding, where you could easily spend half a day trying to fix one bug.

However, some members were pleased to have what they called “accountability” and that was fine with us. If it worked for them, we were happy but we weren’t going to dictate that.

5. Breaks.

Working continuously for too long can be counterproductive so we made sure to build breaks into the schedule.

6. Opportunities to check in and celebrate.

This goes hand-in-hand with stating your intentions. The aim of the session is to get things done, so we needed to be able to come together and cheerlead and pat each other on the back.

Our weekend sessions are four hours long. Minus the half-hour break, 70% of the time is allocated to work and 30% is for checking in: what I term “showing and telling or watching and listening”.

Our weekday sessions are three hours long, starting at 6pm after work. Not counting the 15-minute break, almost 60% of the time is allocated to work and the rest for checking in.

7. Ways to communicate during the session: synchronously and asychronously.

LoC London has a Slack workspace. It’s pretty quiet with small bursts of activity and I want to increase engagement on it. Also, the whole point of coming to Get On With It is knowing that others are out there working on their projects too. So, to kill two birds with one stone, I decided that we needed a dedicated Slack channel to support these events. Slack is where people can discuss things between the scheduled check-ins and between events. This builds motivation and excitement.

Sarah and I wanted to collaborate on web development during the first session, and I had a feeling others may want to give or receive help too. So as not to compromise the security of our Zoom room, I created 10 Google Hangouts and posted the links to them in the Slack channel, along with instructions on how to “book” them. I named each Hangout after a London Tube station so people could say “I’ll be in Pimlico” etc. A bit of normality in these strange times.

8. Publicising success and sharing resources.

We are also trying to increase engagement with our Twitter account, so I decided to make a thread for each event where we tweet information about what each person is working on. We don’t attach names without their permission. The threads describe the type of activity and link to relevant resources, for example an online course that someone is taking.

We take a group photo at the beginning of each session, which we start each new thread with.

We're back for another @ladiesofcodeLDN #LoCGetOnWithIt! Today's pose is the #Mobot 🤩 quite apt as it was meant to be the @LondonMarathon today.@SuzeShardlow on key press so no #mobot from her 😀@ladiesofcode #womeninstem #womenintech #womenwhocode #supportnetwork @Mo_Farah pic.twitter.com/2TSyhXVsOe

— Ladies Of Code London (@ladiesofcodeLDN) April 26, 2020

I have created a new Slack channel, #learning_resources, where I cross-post any links shared in #get_on_with_it so they don’t get lost and so other members can benefit from them. Some learning providers have been offering free or discounted courses recently.

Planning and logistics

We have always used Meetup.com for event listings and signups. The interface allows us to ask a question when people book their place. We use this to ask them to say what they’ll work on, to get them thinking about it.

Each session contains four checkpoints via Zoom video conferencing:

• At the very beginning: hello from the organisers, reminder of the code of conduct, explanation of how it all works, how the concept came about and optional personal statement from each participant of what we will be working on.

• Just before the break: to remind people to relax for a bit and also to find out who wants to show and tell after the break.

• Midway progress update: a quick, optional show and tell/watch and listen.

• Final check-in: a longer show and tell. More people usually take part in this one because some folks don’t like showing unfinished work at the midpoint.

As I mentioned earlier, between the checkpoints we use Slack for asynchronous comms during and between events and Hangouts to collaborate in real time.

Outcomes

We have seen a number of results, both expected and unexpected, from these sessions:

1. The first event was so successful that we’ve run them twice a week ever since.

We run the four-hour format every weekend and the three-hour version during the week after work. We have now completed nine sessions in total.

2. People from other countries found our event and attend regularly.

This event has attracted the attention of a wider audience than we anticipated, with people joining from around the world despite this being an early morning weekend start for some of them!

One of the women I taught at my San Diego workshop found out about GOWI from a LinkedIn post and has joined several of our sessions. She is now going to run an online GOWI event in San Diego, on a weekend morning so we in London can join in. A member in San Francisco plans to follow suit. Both are using my ideas with proper attribution (see the end of this post).

We also have participants from other parts of San Diego, France and around the UK! We would never have met some of these folks had we not taken our events online.

3. We’re cheering each other on outside the sessions too.

One member mentioned that she was preparing for a webinar talk she was giving, and a number of LoC members tuned in to see her speak.

4. We’ve seen hardware as well as software projects.

Projects that people have worked on include:

• Hooking up a Raspberry Pi to traffic lights/arcade buttons/buzzers
• Writing blog posts
• Improving a Python/GitHub profiles/Redis prize draw side project
• Training a machine learning system
• Learning about accessibility
• Taking beginners’ JavaScript courses
• Honing JavaScript and CSS skills through practice/personal projects, eg a battleships game, zombie game
• Updating a portfolio site to include tech projects
• Crocheting for the first time
• Learning about web scraping with Python
• Writing up READMEs
• Creating an app for a hackathon entry
• Preparing a meetup talk
• Setting up a new Raspberry Pi with Node-RED
• Rebricking Lego
• Refactoring a React Hooks book cataloguing project
• Masters degree studies
• Organising some meetup notes to share with colleagues
• Learning about serverless computing
• Creating a tutorial
• Contributing to open source projects by filing and fixing issues
• Learning Python
• Completing a nanodegree
• Taking a machine learning course
• Migrating websites to the JAMstack
• Building a random password generator
• Studying for Scrum exams
• Sketching out wireframes for an app
• Creating a new CV after a career pivot to web developer
• Building a new website using Wix
• Using Django to make a new personal portfolio site

5. Folks have completed tasks they had literally been putting off for years.

Some people just needed help taking the first step to achieving their goals. There were some who had been wanting to create a personal website for ages. Others wrote blog posts they had been planning for over a year.

Find out more about previous events.

We run Ladies Of Code London on a completely voluntary basis and work hard to create and deliver innovative events for our members. If you would like to run your own GOWI-inspired event using our ideas or parts of our format, please ensure you include proper attribution in your promotional material, including a link to this blog post (https://suze.dev/blog/get-on-with-it/) to make it clear where the ideas originated.

Video walkthrough of @Raspberry_Pi project I made with #python and arcade button from @adafruit as part of @ladiesofcodeLDN #getitdone session today. Thanks @SarahNUsher @Shilaghae @SuzeShardlow for organizing #iot https://t.co/m04bnqCPfG

— Simon Prickett 🇪🇺 (@simon_prickett) April 27, 2020

Such an absolutely lovely way to spend a Sunday afternoon - getting things *done* and with such a nice group!

Thank you for being so warm and welcoming, and see you next time @ladiesofcodeLDN @SuzeShardlow #WomenWhoCode https://t.co/UnkrpVQZVt

— Alex Morton (@alexlsaltt) April 26, 2020