Speaker

Aisha Blake

Aisha Blake

Senior Software Engineer at Gatsby

Aisha Blake is a Senior Software Engineer currently building < title of conf > (a musical tech conference). She also supports community by co-organizing self.conference and Detroit Speakers in Tech. A theatre kid turned tech community leader, she approaches speaking and teaching as a way to give others the tools to shine as brightly as they can. In her spare time, she sings karaoke and pets dogs. Aisha is a champion of feedback, a fierce accessibility advocate, and a steward of strong teams.

Give Feedback Fearlessly

Constructive feedback can be difficult to receive gracefully, but it can also be extremely hard to speak up when we notice a teammate struggling. We don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or make things awkward. Come discuss a few different types of feedback, learn techniques for sharing effective feedback with team members, talk through an example scenario, and practice using small group roleplay.

Give Feedback Fearlessly: Workshop

For many of us, it’s hard to speak up when we notice our teammates struggling. We don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or make things awkward. Sometimes it just feels like too much work to organize our thoughts into a coherent message that could help someone who’s falling behind move forward. Even knowing when it’s time to draw attention to a problem can be challenging.

We’ll start the session by covering our bases. When should we address uncomfortable situations at work? How can we keep personal feelings from derailing the conversation? And what happens afterward? Can we evaluate the effectiveness of our feedback? How can we move forward, growing as a team? We’ll answer these questions as we begin to build the skills necessary to provide teammates with specific, actionable feedback. Participants will receive a reference sheet to help them remember these techniques and work through difficult conversations in the real world.

Several sections of the workshop will involve hands-on role-playing exercises. Participants will be broken up into small groups and given several scenarios to work through. Each scenario will outline a challenging situation from multiple points of view to help participants further explore the techniques and principles covered in the lecture portion of the session.

This is an extended version of a talk I’ve given twice at the time of writing. I’ve received feedback from several participants that they’d like to spend a lot more time practicing and would like to see this as a workshop as long as a full day. This workshop is a deep dive into the topic, featuring more detailed and authentic scenarios, a walkthrough of a reference sheet participants can take home with them, examples for every technique discussed, and including a much larger discussion of how our biases affect our daily interactions. It’s approximately half lecture and half hands-on group work.

Web Accessibility: How to Be an A11y

Your content is clear, your images are responsive, your code is clean, and your layout flows beautifully on all the most popular devices. You think you're ready to launch, but you might have overlooked a crucial aspect of your web app's development. If it's not easy for a person to use your app regardless of the way in which they use the internet, there's still work to be done.

Developing for accessibility should be part of the standard workflow, but it's often given very little attention. This session will cover some of the low-hanging fruit that you can start picking today, discuss a number of disabilities (beyond visual impairment) that may be affecting your users, and take a deep dive into a few tools to help you build accessibility into your projects from the beginning.

THAT Conference

August 2018

PyOhio

July 2018 Columbus, Ohio, United States

Beer City Code

July 2018 Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States

KCDC 2018 Sessionize Event

July 2018

Techstars Startup Week

June 2018 Detroit, Michigan, United States

Music City Tech 2018 Sessionize Event

May 2018 Nashville, Tennessee, United States

RevolutionConf 2018 Sessionize Event

May 2018 Virginia Beach, Virginia, United States

WordCamp Detroit

April 2018 Detroit, Michigan, United States

Heartifacts

April 2018 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

PyTennessee 2018

February 2018 Nashville, Tennessee, United States

Aisha Blake

Senior Software Engineer at Gatsby