The Second Hopperx1 Seattle Conference was an impressive two-day event with 92 speakers, including us! We attended talks and events surrounded by a diverse group of 1500 women for two days. Here are some of our big takeaways.
Diversity and Inclusion is a Choice
The conference opened with Brenda Darden Wilkerson reviewing the history of women in technology. She asked why Katherine Johnson, and Hedy Lamarraren’t mentioned more often when talking about who made modern technology possible. Recognizing women’s contributions to technology helps counter harmful narratives that technology isn’t the place for women. This also gives younger technologists access to a larger set of role models.
Sandy Carter continued the D&I focus with a keynote speech on how to build the most innovative products—diverse teams do a much better job! Representing more viewpoints in your development team introduces more perspectives and allows you to craft products for a broader demographic. Elizabeth Viera echoed this point in her speech the next day. She declared that diversity was one of her team’s greatest strengths when building products. Having different backgrounds made for some difficult conversations when people disagreed, but defending a position urged team members to question their assumptions. In the end, their decisions were more thought through. Continue reading “What the Top Minds in Tech Communicated at Hopperx1 Seattle”
PyConES is the main event for Python developers in Spain and a must-attend for the engineering team based in Madrid. We meet the Python community every year, so we have a chance to catch up with fellow developers from other parts of the country. We learn a lot from them as we share our most recent experiences, either through our sessions or while hanging out with a coffee in hand.
The Spanish Python community has an identity of its own: it’s very diverse, open and most of all, inclusive. These values are essential to us, that’s why it’s not only necessary to be present at this great event, but also to sponsor it!
The trip to Málaga
PyConES is celebrated at a different location every year so that everybody gets to attend at least once, to share the hard work among various members of the community, and –why not— to showcase beautiful Spanish cities.
This year we attended PyConES at Málaga. This city is 530 km south of Madrid, and because that’s too far for many people, Eventbrite facilitated a bus so everybody could get there. That allowed us to meet some attendees before the event.
The Python Conference
Eventbrite, similar to PyConES, has a firm commitment to diversity, so we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to join the Django Girls workshop. (Once at the conference, we were glad to see that 25% of the attendees and 33% of the speakers were female!) One of our Britelings, Federico Mon (@gnufede), was a mentor for the workshop and he enjoyed it. So much so that we’re going to repeat the experience in Madrid on November 17th.
Our engineering team presented two talks:
Andrew Godwin(@andrewgodwin), who works as SRE in San Francisco, and is also a Django core developer, talked about the approach to make Django asynchronous.
Federico Mon (@gnufede), an engineering manager in Madrid, told us why Ticketea used Wagtail, and how can it be employed not only in blogs or news sites.
While this was the first time for Eventbrite to attend the conference, the Spanish team in Madrid had participated many times in the past years. Our faces were very recognizable, so obvious questions arose: “Where is Ticketea?”, “What’s Eventbrite?”. We were committed to satisfying the curiosity of everyone visiting our booth —which was a lot, by the way. Eventually, people got to know the brand and gained interest in it not as a platform, but also as a nice place to work in the center of Madrid. We met lots of people who want to come and visit us at our office!
When people visited our booth we had the chance to chit-chat with many of them, give them some Eventbrite goodies (very cool ones if you allow me), and discover their interests. We met many young people, a more significant amount of female attendees than at any other conference we attended this year. Among them were some non-devs that wanted to start with programming, and many data scientists as well. We can assert that the Python community is – hands down – one of the healthiest ones out there.
Also, we are hiring!
First of all, we want to thank the organizers of Python Spain, speakers, sponsors, and attendees for making it a great conference every year.
We are looking for passionate React and Django developers and also Site Reliability Engineers. We are expecting to welcome many more roles in the coming future, so if you are interested in working with us, don’t miss out and check our open positions at eventbrite.com/careers.
For more about other conferences Eventbrite has been attending so far, check this out!
14 Britelings arrived by way of planes, trains, and automobiles to the city of Alicante. We joined close to 400 attendees at a two-day conference, React Alicante.
Keep reading to learn about the new stuff coming out in the React ecosystem and learn more about our favorite talks at the event.
The atmosphere
Set in the Melia hotel, overlooking the Mediterranean coast and its rocky shores, the conference venue location was enviable. Inside, a small group of sponsor tables lined the conference room lobby. Eventbrite’s table, stocked by our R+D Villena team, was the first one in the attendees’ line of sight as they made their way in to see the speakers. Our swag didn’t last long, but we made sure to keep the Eventbrite presence strong. We had 14 Britelings in the house and our very own Ben Ilegbodu speaking at the event.
The Lonely and Dark Road to Styling in React
Sara Vieira (@NikkitaFTW) walks us through the dark alleys of styling with CSS in ReactJS apps. Sara starts her talk by reassuring us that CSS is hard. We know all about that here at Eventbrite, where we use a design system to speed up our development process. This often keeps us from having to walk The Lonely and Dark Road to Styling in React. Still, Sara’s talk gives us a lot to think about when it comes to styling in ReactJS apps. She walks us through the pros and cons of everything from link tags to BEM, and her main focus, styled-components.
The Year of Web Components
Dominik Kundel(@DKundel) reminded us, once again, that web components are out there and this is their moment! What are web components and why should you care? Web components are a set of building blocks, defined as WC3 web standards, that allow the browser to natively interpret the reusable components we frontend developers love so much. We often think of frameworks like ReactJS or VueJS when componentizing our code, but what if we could write reusable components that were framework agnostic?
Next Generation Forms with React Final Form
Here at Eventbrite, we know the joys and pains of working with forms inside of ReactJS. When Erik Rasmussen(@erikras) hit the stage to offer one Form to rule them all, our ears perked up. The author behind Redux Form went back to the drawing board and iterated a new solution for forms. Unlike its predecessor, Redux Form, Final Form has no dependency on Redux and has a bundle size that’s about five times smaller. Final Form by itself is framework agnostic, but Rasmussen also provides a thin wrapper library for interfacing with ReactJS which works by taking advantage of React’s subscription utility.
Help! My React app is slowwwww!
Last but not least, our very own Principal Software Engineer, Ben Ilegbodu(@benmvp), hit the stage and got our blood pumping with a quick workout. Thought you’d have to skip your workout during the conference? Ben’s got you covered. It was just what the crowd needed before he brought us some insights he’s gathered while working on ReactJS right here at Eventbrite. As a premier ticketing platform, the last thing we want is for our website to feel slow for our users. Ben covers everything from breaking up component markup to combining Redux dispatch calls.
The best talk
Choosing from the long list of great talks is hard. If forced to pick one, I’d go with the talk that wasn’t on the official conference schedule: it was the conversations with my peers which brought up insights and questions inspired by the talks.
Where you there? Which talk was your favorite? What’s the most valuable part of attending a conference for you? Drop us some thoughts in the comments or ping me in Twitter @pixelbruja.
I just came back from the Grace Hopper Celebration, where I joined another 22,000 women in the world largest gathering of women technologist. This year’s conference was outstanding, and I’m excited to share the standout moments that stayed with me the most. Keep on reading to learn about the most inspiring, surprising, outstanding and best career advice I got from the 2018 event.
I couldn’t believe I was going!
The first time I heard about Grace Hopper – the world’s largest gathering of women technologists produced by AnitaB.org – was a year ago. My VP at the time recommended I attend. Unfortunately, it was way too late to register, but I tuned into the live stream of the keynotes and felt inspired just by watching remotely. I immediately set a reminder on my calendar to register for the 2018 celebration as soon as I could – I was determined to be apart of the largest women’s conference in the world. On the day registration opened, I blocked off my calendar to refresh the site until the magic registration button appeared. When I got my ticket, it was almost surreal!
At this year’s conference, over 22,000 women descended on downtown Houston, TX to take part in celebrating women in tech. There were several learning tracks this year, and the most popular were artificial intelligence (AI), mentorship, and career development. There are five different session types – panel, workshop, presentation, mentoring circles, and poster sessions.
Most Inspiring
Jessica Matthews, CEO of Uncharted Power, gave an inspirational keynote about how she started a company that develops kinetic energy storing products. She immediately connected with the audience when she admitted that she strives to be the perfect love child of Beyonce and Bill Nye the Science Guy. When she spoke about how she got to this point in her career, her message was simple: “Just because it’s not your plan doesn’t mean it’s not your destiny.”
At the age of 19, her career started when she developed the product idea for a college class project. Over her lifetime she visited her family several times a year in Nigeria and noticed a severe infrastructural problem in the community. Villages and even cities would frequently lose power for extended periods of time and their solution during these periods was the required use of kerosene lamps or diesel generators, which poses a significant health hazard from the fumes.
For the class project, she developed a short-term solution. Her idea was to use a soccer ball to store kinetic energy as you play. When she started distribution of her new product, she learned that girls in refugee camps were not allowed to play soccer or play outside past the age of 12. To solve that challenge, she applied the same technology in the soccer ball to a jump rope. To the crowd’s delight, she started to jump rope in heels on stage to demonstrate how her product generated light.
Jessica is building the cities of tomorrow and building them faster, more cost-effectively, and more durable. Without having her background or feminine perspective, none of this would be possible. In fact, her background has enabled her to have a unique perspective, to think about solving problems differently.
Shattering the Mid-Management Barrier: Moving to an Executive Role
Best Career Advice
The session, “From Shattering the Mid-Management Barrier: Moving to an Executive Role,” included a panel of accomplished women in executive-level roles who shared how they made it. My key takeaways were to ‘take a risk’ and get sponsorship. Each one had a unique story to tell, and all of them either moved into a role where they had limited experience or had someone advocating for them to open up key opportunities.
Many women turn down an opportunity to grow because it seems risky or they don’t feel they have all of the qualifications. These experts say, “Go for it.” Start by asking for something small that you would never do. For example, one woman described asking for a discount for a recent purchase and she got the discount! One woman applied for a job she never felt qualified for but was invited for a job interview. In your career, it is about taking the right calculated risk.
Most Surprising
Grace Hopper’s career expo was a sight to behold. It is considered the world’s largest career fair and did not disappoint. As you enter into the door, the displays resemble that of an amusement park with large signs, lights, and entertainment. Hundreds of recruiters were happily buzzing around their colorful and interactive booths with freebies ready to talk about their company. You could easily spend your entire week interviewing and take home an entire suitcase full of swag.
As you pass by each booth, you can talk to one of the available recruiters about potential openings as you would at a typical career fair. If there is mutual interest, an interview will be scheduled later the same day. If interviewing is your intention when attending Grace Hopper, you can upload your resume to the Grace Hopper resume database. Potential employers will call or send emails to set up interviews while you’re both onsite. Companies are so eager to find talent; two attendees received job offers on the spot.
Most Valuable Session
At the “How to Have a Successful Grace Hopper Celebration 2019 Talk Submission” session, I learned that only 24% of the average 2400 submissions would get accepted. This rate hit close to home as I submitted a presentation for this year that was not accepted, but after attending this session, I have a new strategy. Here’s a summary of what I learned:
Follow the Rules. There are strict guidelines for how you do your writeup from word count to page number
Pick the Right Track. The track is most important! You must choose a track that aligns to the content you want to present. Pro tip: Presentation or panel formats are ideal for first-timers.
Content that Aligns with Conference Themes. Career, mentorship, and AI stood out as essential themes for this year. Excited to see what will be hot for 2019.
A Clear Write Up of Your Proposal. You must provide a catchy title, abstract, and detailed information to get your talk accepted. Don’t leave out specific details in fear of revealing too much.
Target Areas for Low Submissions. The organizers need more submissions for senior and executive women sessions. There is also a need for more advanced technical topics. Submitting in these areas help increase your chance of getting accepted.
Most Outstanding Experience
The best experience was meeting people. I met women from all over the world – DC, the Bay Area, Boston, and even Ireland. I’ll stay in touch with all of them. If either of us is in the same city, we each have an open invitation to meet in person.
While the celebration is over, the inspirational message and excitement remain. I’ll take what I have learned and inspire others at my company and in my community. It is never too early to start planning for next year’s conference on October 2 – 4 in Orlando, Florida. Will I see you there?
At Eventbrite, we’re building an Elasticsearch-powered, content and behavior-based recommendation system to match users with events they are sure to enjoy. John Berryman, our Aerospace Engineer turned Senior Discovery Software Engineer, talked about our approach, successes, failures, and future work at the intersection of recommendation and search at Elastic{ON}16.
I recently flew to Nashville, TN to speak at Nodevember 2015 about ECMAScript 6, the new version of JavaScript making its way into the engines of our modern browsers and servers. Some of its features appear to be no more than a little syntax sugar — making development we already do in JavaScript a bit easier. Others add brand new functionality long missing in JavaScript, which allow us to spice up our code without having to include yet another library.
Unfortunately the talk at Nodevember was only 30 minutes long so I couldn’t talk about everything. And even for the features I did talk about, I was only able to give the highlights. So now I will begin a blog series entitled Learning ES6 to go into the nitty gritty details of the various ES6 features. I’m hoping to release a new topic every other week, so check back in regularly to learn all you’ve ever wanted to know about ECMAScript 6.
Jennifer Wong took the stage at JS Conf EU this year to talk about the etymology and history of developer-speak and language.
Recursion, instantiate, lexical scope – where do these words come from?! If you’ve ever been in conversation with other developers and thought, “I think I know what they’re talking about, but I’m not sure…”, you’re not alone. Let’s delve into the weird and wonderful parlance that computer scientists and developers have created for themselves. Whether the words are borrowed or just plain made up, I’ll uncover how they made their way into the vocabulary of the modern programmer.
In this session, you’ll learn everything from etymology to history to broader definitions, all of which can help you understand what the heck that person’s rambling about. So, the next time you’re in conversation, you’ll be the one discussing dependency injection versus inversion of control with ease.
Andrew Godwin, an avid pilot and Django core developer on what Python-based software teams can learn from aviation. Why should software always fail hard? What’s wrong with too many error logs? And why are ops people already like pilots?
Philip James and Asheesh Laroia discussed how the Python interpreter starts, from the perspective of the operating system (OS). Together, we will see the ins & outs of processes: fork(), exec(), stdin, and stdout.
It focused on OS concepts and requires no background knowledge, using analogies to Python data structures. (The talk does not discuss Python’s own initialization, such as site.py or global variables.)
We made it back from PyCon to the considerably warmer climate we’re accustomed to in San Francisco. Mica Swyers and Jay Chan from the Eventbrite Integrity team provides an introduction to rate tracking as well as an explanation of a particularly cool way to implement it. They go over what rate tracking is, why you would want to do it, and then how you can use build a Redis-backed “velocity engine” in Python to do just that.
The best experience was meeting people. I met women from all over the world – DC, the Bay Area, Boston, and even Ireland. I’ll stay in touch with all of them. If either of us is in the same city, we each have an open invitation to meet in person. 
