Portfolio Resources

These are sites I’ve come across that may help someone building a portfolio. (Writing it also helps me remember!)

Yet another portfolio post!

Rather than go on about my own issues, I wanted to share a few resources. Before I begin, I’m going to make a little rant in case you’re feeling overwhelmed, like I am.

One of the sites emphasizes the importance the design a portfolio has on your job prospects. I feel this importance is overblown because the the design or tool seems to have such a big impact on how the portfolio is perceived. I can’t emphasize enough how many people use paid templates, plus the cost of a web domain. And I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me that choosing the wrong CMS template is the difference between gainful employment vs not.

The fact that the portfolio makes a difference at all seems like the difference between showing up in a limo, BMW, Toyota, or SmartCar. I guess it really is like dating, which I admittedly know absolutely nothing about.

At the start of this review, my feeling is that people just want to be entertained. My thoughts changed somewhat, which you can read at the end.

/rant

 

Ok, now that I’m off my soapbox, here is my list. It’s organized like this:

  • Sites – Guides, essays, and portfolio collections
  • Tools – What people use to create their portfolio
  • People – A small handful of portfolios

1. Sites

A collection of essays, slides, and guides.

Article page: The Case Study FactoryThe Case Study Factory is about how similar so many UX portfolios seemingly look alike. The authors write:

“How the formulaic approach to UX case studies is numbing our critical thinking as designers, and how to bring a unique point of view to our work.”

Provides some pretty good tips at the end, however I recommend you read the whole article for context. Also because it’s a good article.

  1. Define your area of focus
  2. Align the story with the medium
  3. Set up the context of the project
  4. Focus on insights rather than process
  5. Design your case study reading experience
  6. Obsess over your case study visuals
  7. Make it personal

 

Article home page

Sometimes it’s just helpful to look at a big list. Here’s a list of 80 portfolios. I talked about 2 in the People section.

Guides and Slides
Article page, “Design a Winning Portfolio — Tips + Tricks from a Google Designer “

Design a Winning Portfolio — Tips + Tricks from a Google Designer  is a slide deck of tips and tricks. The slides are shared from Google slides (link).

This is a compilation of tips and tricks to improve a design portfolio. She states:

While each design discipline has slightly different project expectations (i.e. UX wants wireframes while Branding wants logo sketches), I’ve realized there is an overall universal set of tactics that, when applied, will automatically enhance and differentiate any design portfolio.

The Google slide deck is really big and there are videos, so keep that in mind. It loads a little slow.

 

nng.com’s recent article, “5 Steps to Creating a UX-Design Portfolio” is probably what kicked this whole thing off. Actually I talked about this in another post, so I won’t rehash. But I will point out that I’ve made a number of changes to my website and my portfolio at Cargo Collective, which at this moment is offline.

My Personal Bookmarks

I’ve had the following links bookmarked for a few years. These seem more geared to PDFs.

Portfolio Handbook [PDF] from the Class of 2012 Industrial Design, DAAP, University of Cincinnati.

This book was put together for the purpose of facilitating higher-quality portfolios. It will not cover project processes, but will act as a guide to documenting a project well for your portfolio. We hope the book will ease some of the anxiety around creating your first portfolio and then later exist as a helpful reference book to check a newer portfolio concept against

 

UX Portfolio Guidance, from Zebra People [PDF], London

We are fortunate enough to see some great portfolios, however there are still many UX practitioners who are selling themselves short. There are some absolutely brilliant and in-depth guides about UX portfolios out there. But our intention with this document is to provide a concise, visual hand book on what to include in your portfolio.

Your portfolio represents you. But you’re not always there to talk about your work. No one gets hired on their portfolio alone. The best outcome is a meeting. Tonight is about snap judgments.


2. Tools

What people use to create sites

From the list of 80 above, (plus a few others I found) I randomly clicked into about 3-4 portfolios per group and I took a look at the page source.

Many, many sites are built using Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, or some other type of CMS with either built-in or plugins for flashy animation, grids, and what-not.

Other sites were hand-coded, often with Bootstrap or Foundation. I took note of the many JavaScript libraries.

WordPress and Adobe Portfolio

Semplice home pageFor WordPress, I came across a template called Semplice. It is advertised as a WordPress template for designers. The latest version is Semplice4. Price is $100. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people have upgraded to the Studio version for $140. Semplice does not seem to have options for blogging; I didn’t see it.

 

Salient Live Demo

Another theme I came across is Salient, although the site I found it on had a “Under Construction” label. It’s $60 and available on ThemeForest. It has over 5,500 reviews, over 95,000 sales, and is currently rated as 5-star.

 

portfolio.adobe.com

If you use Behance, you may be interested in Adobe Portfolio. It’s $9.99/month, paid annually (about $120). You get access to Adobe Portfolio, Photoshop, and Lightroom, as well as access to Adobe Fonts. You can get a free trial, but you need to upgrade to connect a domain/subdomain.

Free DIY Options

Startbootstrap.com offers free Bootstrap templates, themes, and snippets that you can download and customize. Basically everything is free, with the obvious exceptions that you cannot use Startbootstrap templates to create a competitive website serving free Bootstrap templates.

I have used Startbootstrap multiple times and I find them pretty easy to use and combine. Some have CSS or JS animations built in; mostly CSS.

It does require solid HTML and CSS knowledge.

 

Github Pages uses your own github respository to host a website. It’s 100% free. However, it will say username.github.io/yourproject. And your code will be online for all to see. I’m also not sure if you can use Google Analytics.

Again, this is for people who have experience developing websites.

Obviously, having a free site generator is great. If you want to have your own domain, you can get a personal email address, like yourname@yourdomain.com. And you can connect it to github. But all that is well beyond the scope of this post.

 

BlankSlate by TidyThemes allows you to completely customize a WordPress installation, by providing a theme with absolutely zero styling. Sometimes you use a nice theme, but end up undoing stuff you don’t really like. Needless to say, this theme is for people with a good amount of experience. I say no more.

JavaScript Libraries

If you code your own site, these were some of the libraries and plug-ins some people used. I thought tilt.js was pretty cool.

There are so many JS libraries, this list will keep getting updated.

Lightboxes & Carousels

Instagram Embeds

  • lightwidget.com – Embeds Instagram photos into a webpage.
  • spectragram.js – http://spectragram.js.org/ – Instagram API plugin

CSS

Obviously Bootstrap, Foundation, grid/flex, and icon font libraries also showed up.

Jekyll/Jekyll Themes

  • poole – http://demo.getpoole.com/ – the Butler for Jekyll
  • hyde – http://hyde.getpoole.com/ –  a 2-column Jekyll theme

Layout

If you are a PDF portfolio person, you might be interested in using a grid.

The Grid System

Grid System

“The ultimate resource in grid systems.”

You can download InDesign templates, at 8.5 x 11 and 11 x 17. Good if you want to create a print portfolio, or if you want to redesign your resume.


3. People

A few portfolios in use

I randomly came across the following people, either in context of this post, or when reading an article, or serendipitously in some other way.

Caveat: In no way am I promoting any of the following people. I have never met them. I don’t know if they’re the kind of people who cut in line or litter. Maybe they don’t pick up after their dog….

The one thing that is true is that I took a look at their websites and I have an opinion. If you disagree, there’s a list of 80 portfolios above to check out.

Antonio Carusone, creator of Grid System. A very simple website. No images. He simply links to his other websites, most of them photography sites. The site is made with Cactus, which is another static-site generator not using Jekyll. (The last commit was 2 years ago, so it may not be maintained.)

I viewed a few other personal websites like this: simple, text-only, with no images. I think this is a good way to connect disparate interests. He seems to have a lot of experience, which is also good to know if you’re looking for ideas and you’re not early in your career.

 

Hiroaki Ito has this project on Behance. I’m including this person because I attended a virtual recruiter session with Google. The three recruiters reviewed two portfolios, and this project was one of them as an example from a visual designer. (The UX designer was Simon Pan, who uses WordPress. It appears to be his own theme although it could’ve started from BlankSlate.)

The project above is a combination of several very long images, stacked one on top of the other. This designer has a job at Google. He does not seem to have as much experience as the first guy.

 

Johna Paolino is someone I came across on Medium. She wrote an article on using CSS grid. Then I found her website, which is hosted on github. So that’s another – FREE – option. Looked like an interesting site and she seems to be employed at the NY Times.

That big font is BungeeShade.

 

Pendar Yousefi is the only person I came across in the list above that used Adobe Portfolio. It was pretty nice looking, so I’m including that here. He also appears to be employed at Google. He also seems to have many years of experience, which is another good data point.

To be clear, you cannot create an Adobe Portfolio account and link it to a personal domain without becoming paid subscriber. He does a good job of connecting his web properties. For him, he’s getting his money’s worth. But I just want to make sure it’s clear, according to the website, money appears to have been exchanged.

 

I came across Sharon Tsao‘s portfolio above, too. She does NOT appear to be employed. But I thought her simple site was an interesting example, and she seemed to explain her background particularly well.

She built this herself, or at least she did not use a template or CMS.


Foot imprints on sand near a beach
Photo by Matteo Kutufa on Unsplash

Thoughts & Reflections

I wrote this post over the course of 1-2 weeks. Right away, my initial thoughts for my own portfolio when the time of this post were to create a simple site that links out to other websites or to just expand my current WordPress installation (this blog). I also considered installing a separate WordPress instance altogether, which is still a strong possibility.

Yet after writing the majority of this post, I continued to investigate the list of 80 portfolios. I kept finding new CSS and JavaScript libraries. And, I wanted to dig a little deeper into some of these to find out more about how they were made and other details that the guides above don’t really get into.

Despite my rant at the top of this post, I have started to change my opinion a little on the importance of portfolios. I think there is something to be said for trying to display your work in as good a light as possible.

I’m still collecting more data about these 80 portfolios, so there will be another post. And I’ve found more items to add to the Tools section (Webflow, anyone?), so I’ll probably continue making updates to this post in addition to simply posting again.

[Featured image credit: Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash]

Notes from “Career Management for Introverts”

I recently attended a 90-minute talk on career management for introverts, held at the Science, Business, and Industry Library in NYC. Here are my notes.

Overview

A review of the speaker and the talk

The speaker was Win Sheffield who is a career coach. He speaks at the NYPL on job hunting and career management. He’s giving an upcoming talk on networking in October.

For this talk, an overview on the NYPL website says:

Do you feel you shouldn’t have to sell yourself? Are you uncomfortable around people who are talking about their accomplishments? Do you find yourself looking for ways to get out of conversations rather than into them? Perhaps instead you find yourself coming up with the answer while the person you are listening to goes on and on or maybe you like to take time to consider your answers. If you have had any of these experiences, you may be interested in this talk.

This talk is part of the NYPL Career Services series. You can read about the talk online: https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2019/09/11/career-management-introverts.

I also included a link to the Facebook Live video at the end. But, if you don’t want to watch a 90 minute video, you can read my notes below.


My Notes

Ok, let’s get into my notes.

First we discussed the difference between introversion and extroversion.

  • Remember that introverts are hired for skills related to being an introvert — such as reading, working independently, and deep thinking.
  • The US is NOT an introverted country, but the UK and Japan are.

Phone Conversations

Turns out, no one likes talking on the phone.

We discussed why phone calls are annoying:
  1. The expressions and body language of the person on the other line are hidden.
  2. It requires an immediate response; you cannot mull over your answer.
Some tips to help make phone calls easier:
  • Put up a mirror by the phone, to help you remember to smile.
  • Stand up while on the phone, to project more energy.

Small Talk

Despite the stigma, small talk is good for introverts.

Although we kind of hate it, small talk is a good way to make connections.

It can help if you think of ideas in advance. Good topics can include the weather, food, transportation.

We also discussed talking about decorations or photos someone has on their desk or office. That can help put the other person at ease.


Tips on Meeting People

Show empathy

I can help to put yourself in their shoes. For instance, if you see someone is wearing new shoes…. Imagine they still need to break in their shoes. Their feet are uncomfortable!

Send questions in advance

It can also help to send questions in advance, particularly if you’re job hunting. This is a low-pressure method to ask for support. For instance, you can say:

“I’m not seeking a job from you or anyone you know, but I’m looking to move into [name job area] and I’d like to get your opinion about [the information you’re looking for].”

When having conversations with extroverts:

Extroverts can have a tendency to dominate the conversation. Sending questions in advance can be helpful, to help keep them on track.

Remember to talk to people with whom you feel comfortable:

  • People who’s job it is to talk to you and provide help (help desk, customer support)
  • Friends
  • People in a non-authority role

The most important thing when meeting someone is talking about what you’ve already done.


Telling Stories

Tell people what you’ve already done by telling your story.

There’s a formula to telling a story about one of your accomplishments. It goes like this:

  • Setup: What is the context of the story.
  • Trigger: What changed to get the story going; aka “the challenge”.
  • Plan: What was your plan.
  • Unplanned outcome: How did things go off-track
  • Chaos: How did that lead to chaos/unplanned expectations.
  • Success: How did you resolve the chaos and get things back on track.

Where to use this method:

  • Cover letters & resumes
  • Elevator pitches
  • Anytime someone asks you about yourself

It helps to practice though. (Tips below!)

But, what if the story is negative?

Someone asked if you should tell stories even if they’re negative. The answer is Yes. The reason is that without conflict/chaos, the story doesn’t show growth.


Q & A / Pro-Tips!

A technique to improve your storytelling.

Someone who identified herself as a writer asked a question. She said she worked from home alone so much that she was often surprised by the sound of her voice.

A suggestion was to make a video of yourself talking, or telling a story. Then you can see how you come across to others. But you have to do this at least 6 times, and watch it, if you want the best outcome.

A tip for extroverts

Another person asked about being an extrovert. She said that during an interview she becomes very extroverted. She wasn’t sure how to handle that.

As the speaker mentioned, introversion and extroversion is a spectrum. Not everyone is always introverted or always extroverted.

His suggestion for extroverts is to always take a breath before giving an answer. That helps them slow down.


Final Tips

Planning Ahead

  • Conduct a job campaign, not a job search. A job search is you fitting yourself to the company. A job campaign means creating your own opportunity. Network, make small talk, etc.
  • Be aware and optimistic
  • Know your stories

Take thinking breaks

Smokers go outside to recharge with cigarettes. As an introvert, you should go outside to recharge and collect your thoughts.


Facebook Live

Here’s the Facebook Live stream. I may end up watching this again to refresh my memory. You get the handout / agenda here.

BTW, I was the one who said food is a good topic for small talk. 🙂

They recommend using headphones, if you have difficulty hearing.

Win Sheffield presents Career Management for Introverts. #SIBLEvents #WinSheffield #Introverts #JobHunt #JobHunting #CareerAdvice #CareerCounseling #Free #FreeLecture #LibraryProgram #NYPL

Posted by Career Services NYPL on Wednesday, September 11, 2019


I also published this on Medium: https://medium.com/@alliwalk/notes-from-career-management-for-introverts-from-the-new-york-public-library-c6c4f59f5b3

NNG: The Myth of the UX Unicorn

I hope this short, 2:36 video is just the start of a more public conversation about hiring practices within the UX community. I hope it helps to define UX titles and terms, and I hope it helps UX teams break past unspoken practices in team dynamics and hiring. A video like this is a long time coming and covers one aspect of a topic I have been thinking about for the past few years.

The UX Unicorn Myth (Jakob Nielsen)

Summary: UX constitutes many different specialties such as researcher, interaction designer, and Information architect. Forcing one person to do it all is a prescription for mediocrity.

Ladies of Creative Coding, CSS and Web Animations

I was inspired by this post after someone sent a funny video about how a dev team solved a problem and the only woman was the “mean” project manager. Like a few other women who got the link to the video, I thought it was a little stereotypical. That is because as I’ve learned more about CSS and creative uses of CSS and web animations, I’ve come to notice that a few experts and thought leaders in creative CSS and SVG animation are female. There are obviously more than I’m going to list here, but this post is based on my personal experiences with what they’ve put out.

In the order of whose work I last interacted with:

Sarah Drasner

I just finished Sarah’s course on Lynda, Advanced SVG Animations. It was originally produced by Frontend Masters, not Lynda. It’s more of an edited live course (with students in the room) than an online course, so the educational style is very different from Lynda. (I personally did not like this format for Lynda, but I think it would be much better as an in-person course.)

Her course went into using GreenSock Animation Plugin (GSAP) and a few of their plug-ins: Draggable, DrawSVG [Plugin], motion on a path as an animation technique, SplitText, and HSL color tweens. She also talked about how she plans her animations and showed examples of her work throughout the course.

 

Sarah also made an appearance on The Coding Train, on YouTube. Here she is giving a tutorial on web animations and Mo.js.

Sarah seems like an expert – a Frontend Master, if you will – on web animations, especially with SVG, GSAP, and any host of JavaScript or web plugins related to animation. In her Lynda/Frontend Master’s course, Sarah said she makes it a point to learn the animation capabilities for new JavaScript libraries and plugins. So for React, she’d learn the animation capabilities in React. For Angular, the animation capabilities in Angular. And so on, and so forth. That seems like a really smart way to keep up to date in an area of programming/web that you’re really interested in. (Mental note: I should do this too.)

 

Val Head

I came across Val’s course, also on Lynda, where she teaches a course on CSS Animations.

In looking up Val’s Lynda profile, I’ve also just discovered that she also teaches a course on responsive typography, called Responsive Typography Techniques! This course looks like it would go really well with the two web typography courses by Laura Franz, Typography for Web Designers and Choosing and Using Web Fonts, both of which I also highly, highly recommend.

Val was also a guest instructor on the Coding Train.

Val also teaches an in-person web animation course with…Sarah Drasner! Web Animation Workshops. These are one- and two-day courses, in multiple cities around North America and Europe (and possibly even further than that). Given that it’s now October, there aren’t many left this year. But, check out the website now so you can ask your boss for some funding for next year. They also have scholarships for underrepresented groups, if you happen to belong to one. You can sign up for announcements on new classes on the website.

Val also curates the UI Animation newsletter. The newsletter is how I found out about and joined, the Creative Coding Club. I feel terrible saying that I haven’t read many of Val’s UI Animation articles in a while. (Let’s be honest: I haven’t had much time to keep up with Creative Coding Club either. And let’s be even more honest and say I haven’t had time to keep up with much of my personal email, in general!) I might need to resubscribe with a different email address, because the links she shares are very inspirational and educational. And I want to keep up with what’s going on.

 

Leah Verou

I am not quite sure when or where I came across Leah Verou’s work, but it was obviously while I was trying to figure out CSS gradients because I’ve had her wonderful site, CSS Patterns Gallery, bookmarked for a year or two. You can look at my own project sites to see that I’ve used her CSS background patterns multiple times on my own projects. I probably also came across her Cubic Bezier site, as well, most likely during a CSS animation tutorial. You can find more of her projects on her website, http://lea.verou.me/projects/.

As I’m writing this, I cannot remember all the things that made me think of Leah, except for the bookmarks to her CSS gradients page. I think that at one point in the semi-recent past, it seemed that every time I looked for some building block for some cool CSS thing-a-ma-jig, turned out she’d already built it. I really hope she teaches a class somewhere, someday, because she really seems to know her stuff!

 

Rachel Nabors

To be fair, I have not signed up for any course with Rachel Nabors. Nor have I had much experience with her work. But, she does run a web animation Slack channel, called Animation at Work. Many of the discussions there seem a little over my head right now, but I want to keep involved and stay learning. She also offers a few online courses and has a book published by A Book Apart, called Animation at Work. She also runs a web animation newsletter, Web Animation Weekly. Check out the Archive if you’re interested in learning more. (As you’ve guessed, I am not really reading this newsletter either.)

Rachel is also an amazing Illustrator, and her animations look really good! You can find examples of her work, and get a sense of what I mean about her animation/cartooning skills, by checking out her website(s):

Many of her courses seem to cover a lot of topics as Val Head. But, if you’re interested in CSS animation, motion, and transitions, my experience has been that the best results come from learning from as many sources as possible. Sign up for both!

 

Shoutouts and More Ladies to Look Up:

Sarah Drasner mentioned Sara Soueidan (pronounced Sweden) a couple of times in her course. I looked her up and she seems like a pretty amazing front-end developer. She is on Twitter @SaraSoueidan. Sarah also mentioned Joni Trythall and Amelia Bellamy-Royds in her credits at the end of her course. I will have to look them up later…

Nat Cooper is the founder of the Creative Coding Club. Like Rachel Nabors, she has amazing graphics skills and comes up with some pretty sweet animations and keeps the group motivated every month. Find her on Twitter @natacoops and the Creative Coding Club (@artcodeclub).

Event: Advancing The Careers of Technical Women (ACT-W), Details

Speakers and Notes from “Advancing The Careers of Technical Women (ACT-W)” New York 2017 Conference

Following up from my previous post about the very inspiring ACT-W NY conference with a write-up of my notes.

Unfortunately, I could not attend all of the presentations, but they were all interesting an inspiring. Below are notes from just a few of the speakers I heard.


Presentation One: Advice about promoting yourself, by Natasha Awasthi

Her advice came in two parts, due to being a speaker in two presentations at the conference. I liked what she had to say in the first one, I went to the second.

  1. It’s not bragging to talk about your accomplishments. You’re earning trust:
    • I can completely relate with the idea of feeling like I’m bragging when talking about past accomplishments. So much so that I might avoid talking about what I’ve done in the past, even though it would be very relevant. Now that I can frame my past as a credential to build trust, I will be “bragging” about my past accomplishments as much as possible
  2. Don’t network. Build a community:
    • As an introverted person, the idea walking up to people and introducing myself for the sake of “business connections” or “networking” is almost like a 4-letter word. It sounds so fake and manufactured; like you’re “using” people. But when framed as “community building”, that is a concept I can get behind. It’s not so scary. I can definitely do that.
  3. Don’t get mad. Get what you want. (Create an action plan.)

 


Presentation 2: A story about diversity, by YZ Chin

Her advice was about diversity and the importance of being yourself. There were two main take-aways:

One: Diversity is important because if everyone is the same, it means they can all fail the same way. She went on to give an example about how, as a new member of the engineering team, she solved a critical error that all the other experienced team members failed to recognize. Her value to the team was her knowledge about their customers, not her skill as a software engineer.

Two: It’s important to be honest. In her example, she recognized that you’re not an impostor if you say you’re 2nd best. She again related a story where her manage told her that he didn’t hire her to be the best engineer. He hired her for her customer expertise.

 


Presentation 3: What she did well / What she wishes she done better, by Natasha Awasthi 

In Natasha’s second talk, she presented a list of career aphorisms based on what she had done well vs things she wishes she could have done better. I think the first list mostly speaks for itself. But I’ll explain the second a little more, because I think it’s interesting and helpful.

What she wishes she had done better
  1. Show don’t tell.
  2. Seek to clarify before you criticize.
  3. Find a kernel of truth.
  4. Ask for help.
  5. Have a board of people as advisors (not friends or family):
    • This is a group of professional contacts, that will give you difficult but critical feedback on your ideas, projects, career, etc. I thought this tied in really well with the point from her earlier presentation, about building community. People like this would be a great addition.
  6. Working together means going slower.
What she did well
  1. Act on little knowledge & lot of imagination.
  2. Ask for help, twice:
    • What she means is, instead of getting angry and assume people have simply ignored your request for help, just ask again.
  3. Declare your ignorance:
    • This is sort of like getting lost. Sometimes you just continue on the same path, thinking you’re going the right way and then realize you’re way off path. It would be better to just admit you’re lost and find out where you are and where you need to go, than to just start walking. Same here: rather than pretend you know the answer, admit you don’t and find someone who can help.
  4. Make it easy to have hard conversations:
    • I’m actually quite bad at this, probably because of my desire to separate my professional and personal life. In her example, if you never talk to a colleague about anything, good or bad, that one time you’ve got to have a conversation it’s clearly probably about something terrible. So, take the time to get to know your colleague on a more personal basis and build up a congenial rapport.
  5. Focus on what you want.
  6. Follow your obsessions:
    • She mentioned that she was a writer, who wrote articles for Fast Company. She said she also taught classes at General Assembly.

 


Presentation 3: How to Tell Your Story / Personal Brand, by General Assembly

This talk was given by two people from General Assembly. I think their job was to help students find jobs, or help them find support. (Another example of working in tech, but not being technical.)

At first, I was really annoyed when this talk started. I thought it would be about building a personal brand, which is an area where I felt I could use help. Instead the dual presenters gave somewhat detailed stories about their backgrounds, which I was kind of annoyed by. However, they helped make it useful by talking about how to use your story to convey to employers how you can help them.

The Q&A and Summary section really clarified a few points from them, about what employers are looking for when it comes to the non-technical qualities of an employment candidate:

  1. Employers want to know you have leadership qualities, which they described as seeking personal growth. I personally am not sure what leadership means to me, but I do know that I am growth-minded in that I am always looking to learn and expand my skillset. I want to know what I don’t know.
  2. Employers want to know that you take criticism well. I suppose I always knew this, but it’s good to hear it spelled out like this. For me, trying to apply the improv “Yes, and…” technique might be a good way to accept criticism when I don’t want to accept it. “Yes, I see your critique…and X-Y-Z.”
  3. Coming up with a story can be hard. So they suggested asking friends or acquaintances, maybe that board of advisors, to send 3 characteristics that they would use to describe you. And using that list to help guide your story.

In addition, in combination with YZ Chin’s story above, I came away with the idea that I should think of my story into tech as unique to me – and I shouldn’t feel ashamed or embarrassed to talk about how I didn’t go to design school or study engineering. I’m not being an impostor by admitting that my path into the tech industry was a straight line. Some employers might find that meandering experience valuable.

 


Final Talk of the Day

My last talk of the day, I actually cannot remember what it was called. But it was about finding peace at work and learning to cope with difficult situations.

In this story, the presenter talked about how she created her own job, at her current company, after running into resistance and unhappiness in her previous role.

A quote:

If you think it, you will say it. If you say it, you will do it.

They attributed that to Confucius but many people have said something similar.

A few more:
  • Move towards vs move away
  • Bearing down. (Sometimes you just have to work through difficult times, rather than run away.)
  • Crowd source advice from toughest critics. (Sound familiar? This theme is common, I guess.)

Event: Advancing The Careers of Technical Women (ACT-W), Highlights

Wisdom from “Advancing The Careers of Technical Women (ACT-W)” New York 2017 Conference

Or How a Woman’s Tech Conference Saved My Butt

Kind of on a whim, I decided to attend the Advancing The Careers of Technical Women (ACT-W), 1-day conference. The purpose was to provide career advice for women in all parts of the tech world, not just for developers. Overall, it was incredibly inspiring and energizing, which I really needed. Job hunts can be very depressing.

In an upcoming post, I will share detailed notes from each speaker. But for now, I will share some highlights and how I’ve applied the advice I learned from attending.

Highlights of Wisdom, Summarized

  • build a community; don’t network
  • create an objective panel of reviewers
  • tell your unique story
  • diversity of opinions and experience is important
  • earn trust
  • ask for help
  • be honest

Taking Action

Examples of how I applied the advice I learned by taking action:

1 – BUILDING A COMMUNITY

I immediately started applying the concept of community building. I got some business cards and names, from a few attendees, and I connected with them on LinkedIn and sent emails. I’ve even been reaching out to complete strangers on LinkedIn!

Coincidentally, this was kind of happening in real life, too, which made everything a little overwhelming but also provided another opportunity to try out these new ideas.

2 – ASKING FOR HELP

I decided to ask for help from people I haven’t tried before. For instance, I reached out to employers that rejected me for a job, to ask for help. Either to ask what they look for or to ask for career advice.

3 – BUILDING TRUST

I’ve been working on redoing my website (again) and this time, I included more information highlighting my expertise. Not to brag, but to build trust.

4 – TELLING MY STORY

As a part of redoing my website, I’ve included an About page. I’ve used part of that page to go into more detail into my background and how I got to where I am.

My new “About Me” page has a “My Story” section.

 


My next post will include detailed notes from the speakers.