Most Active Speaker

Rizel Scarlett

Rizel Scarlett

Staff Developer Advocate at TBD

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Actions

Rizel Scarlett is a Staff Developer Advocate at TBD, Block's newest business unit. With a diverse background spanning GitHub, startups, and non-profit organizations, Rizel has cultivated a passion for utilizing emerging technologies to champion equity within the tech industry. She moonlights as an Advisor at G{Code} House, an organization aimed at teaching women of color and non-binary people of color to code. Rizel believes in leveraging vulnerability, honesty, and kindness as means to educate early-career developers.

Awards

  • Most Active Speaker 2023

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • open source
  • GitHub
  • GitHub Actions
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Github Copilot
  • GitHub Codespaces
  • Diversity & Inclusion
  • All things cloud and software engineering.

Why are people developing inside containers? How Codespaces takes containerization to the next level

In March 2013, Solomon Hykes and his cofounders revolutionized how we do software development with an open source platform called Docker. Thanks to Docker, engineers can create tools, like GitHub Codespaces, that enable us to code in a development container hosted in the cloud. In this talk, we'll explore the answers to a few questions:
- What are containers?
- Why are people developing inside containers?
- How do you use GitHub Codespaces?

Teaching to Empower: How to Support Early Career Developers

All engineers are teachers. Whether you are instructing at a coding boot camp, mentoring junior engineers at your job, or creating content in DevRel, being a good teacher means embracing vulnerability, kindness, and inclusivity. In this talk, Rizel will share lessons she picked up along the way as a student, an engineer, an instructor, and developer advocate.

Level Up with Copilot

While Copilot may seem like a fun but impractical tool, Rizel has uncovered the true value of this feature. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, join Rizel to learn about how you can use GitHub Copilot to level up your software engineering career.

How to stay in tech when you really want to quit

There are many resources to help you land your first tech job, from technical training to interview preparation. But once you're in, it's harder to find advice on navigating the industry and staying fulfilled, especially when you're an underrepresented minority. Over the past few years, Rizel felt a lack of belonging in this industry until she learned how to carve space for herself. Join Rizel as she shares tips and tricks for staying in tech and enjoying a fulfilling career!

Learning in Public: How beauty influencers taught me to learn in public

Before Rizel's introduction to software engineering, beauty influencers on YouTube were the first people she saw learning in public. Fast forward to present day: not only did they learn to do their makeup, but they're also leaders in the beauty industry. Rizel learned one important thing from beauty influencers that's helped accelerate her career: you don’t need to be an expert to share what you know. In fact, learning in public is a fantastic tool to build relationships, network, and a career. In this talk, we’ll discuss how and when to share your learning journey through open source, social media, and finding community through public speaking.

Hey, GitHub: I wrote this app with my voice

GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that extracts context from comments and code to suggest individual lines or whole functions instantly. It's helped to redefine productivity for millions of developers. Last year, Rizel shared tips and tricks on using Copilot to level up your career. Now, she's back with tips on how to use it to write code without touching your keyboard. In this talk, we'll learn about Hey, GitHub - an experimental voice-activated AI programmer that empowers developers who may have difficulty typing with their hands.

GitHub Pages Reimagined: Deploy Your First Website Without Leavin

From purchasing a domain name to managing CI/CD, publishing your first website can be a high barrier to entry. In this talk, Rizel discusses how she built a VS code extension for you to publish your first website directly from Visual Studio Code to GitHub Pages with just a few button clicks.

Git Driven Debugging

Developers often debate using print statements or the debugger to trace bugs within their code. But what if I were to tell you that you can use Git? In this lightning talk, we'll explore using Git to quickly identify and resolve bugs and regressions.

Cloudy with a chance of creativity


"I learned to code, so I could build video games," said almost every developer ever. The allure of unleashing our creative potential through code led us into the world of software development. Yet, as our careers progress, time for creative coding diminishes. Join Rizel to reclaim your creative journey, even with limited time. Harness the power of the cloud with GitHub Codespaces, tap into generative AI with GitHub Copilot, and explore p5.js, stable diffusion, and more. Together, let's reignite the magic of coding in our lives.

Cloudy with a chance of creativity


"I learned to code, so I could build video games," said almost every developer ever. The allure of unleashing our creative potential through code led us into the world of software development. Yet, as our careers progress, time for creative coding diminishes. Join Rizel to reclaim your creative journey, even with limited time. Harness the power of the cloud with GitHub Codespaces, tap into generative AI with GitHub Copilot, and explore p5.js, stable diffusion, and more. Together, let's reignite the magic of coding in our lives.

From Code to Cloud

As the need for well-designed cloud infrastructure increases, front end developers and early career developers may be feeling the pressure to learn CloudOps and DevOps practices. Commonly, software developers are on time crunch and don't always have extra time to study more.
The good news is if you may already have the necessary skills!
In this workshop, I'll discuss how I leveraged GitHub to make my code CloudOps ready without learning new tools or collecting new certifications.

Cue the command line: The evolution of the terminal

When computers first entered the market, we interacted with them via a console-like command line interface. As the years progressed, software and graphical user interfaces evolved, but the command line generally stayed the same. In most recent years, open source companies like Charm, Fig, and GitHub have been advancing the way we interact with the command line. In this session, we’ll explore the new generation of command lines and learn how they’re benefitting programmers at all stages of their careers.

Rizel Scarlett

Staff Developer Advocate at TBD

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Actions

Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.

Jump to top