Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?

I used to dread this question. It always made me feel as if I should know the answer to this – rather than just making it up as I go along as I normally do. And I felt bad that this wasn’t something that I inherently knew.

Yet often when managers talk about setting goals, this is one of the first things they ask. There’s this expectation that someone has taken the time already to stop and think about this. That someone knows what their big goals should be.

And a lot of the learning material out there about goals tend to be more about what comes after someone has come up with a goal. Things like SMART or GROW, it’s all about helping people reach their goals, but it all assumes that people already know what they want to do.

But what if someone doesn’t know what their goals should be, how do you help them to figure that out?

So the thing that I’ve started doing with the people I manage is explicit goal setting workshops – to get people to think big and get them to reflect on this stuff.

Before going into the nitty gritty details of coming up with more granular achievable goals, we want them to brainstorm all the different things they could do.

This workshop is about generating as many ideas as possible. Usually you can already get a sense of which things are important to someone, but the focus is on going wide rather than deep. Later on you can help with choosing and fine-tuning the actual goals.

The format of these workshops is very dependent on the person. This can be either a one off thing or if there’s a lot to go through, we’ll split it out over several catchups.

I normally leave it up to each person how much prep time they want: some are happy to just get the questions thrown at them in the workshop, others prefer getting them beforehand and having more time and space to reflect and think about this stuff. It’s easier to give at least some questions or ideas beforehand, so people can get in the right mindset for this.

The most important things are providing the appropriate amount of time and space for that person to reflect.

There are typically 4 different areas of types of questions I ask during a goal setting workshop: values, future, current skills & current role

Reason it’s laid out like this is so that we have two axises. So on the left we have the questions that are more inward facing – looking at the intrinsic, and on the right we have the more external factors, like environment, other people, the wider world. Then at the top we have the ideal world that we’d like to have and at the bottom we have our current state.

Different people will need different prompts to get them thinking, and I’ve found splitting it out like this makes it easier to see which things people are more drawn to and also are more motivated by.

I’ll go through the 4 areas in this order, cause if you’re doing it as workshop, it makes the most sense following this pattern – starting with the internal ideal, then going big picture and then ending on the current state.

Especially cause the answers to things early one, could influence questions in the later phases.

For instance, if someone says “I really value doing things efficiently” during the values phase, it’s worth asking later whether they think they get to do things efficiently in their current role. So a lot of this is fluid and will influence each other.

The first section is values – this is about getting people to look inwards.

And to get them to stop and think about what their ideal self is and what they believe about themselves.

So this is all about asking questions to get them to reflect and think about who they are and how they do things.

Ask things like: what are the building blocks that make up you? What is your purpose? Your motivation? Where do you get your energy from?

These are just example questions – this is no means an exhaustive list, but I wanted to highlight the types of questions you should be thinking of.

An extra thing you can do here is get people to fill in personality tests or quizzes beforehand, so you got something to discuss. Even if they don’t agree with the results, that’s a useful discussion to have.

The second area is about the future –

so here you want to look at the larger world and the person’s ideal place in it.

What impact do they want on the world – what are their life goals?

Ask questions to get people thinking what their ideal life and career would be. This is one of the hardest things to do, but given enough time and space to think, most people will be able to come up with stuff here. I’ve noticed the first question of “Imagine you’re retiring and looking back at your life” generally is easier for some people to answer, then where do you want to be in 5 years. Mainly cause you’re not asking for concreteness yet – people don’t have to have a plan yet on how to reach it.

The other stuff to ask is more about the day to day. What does work-life balance look like? What does your ideal day look like?

While we are talking about this in a work context, don’t limit people to think only about work stuff – it’s been mentioned a couple of times already, but things like exercise and meditation can help people a lot. If that’s something your people want to work on, you should be helping them figure out how.

Finally, for some people it might need to be anti-goals – so what are the things they don’t want to happen. Like “I never want to be bored” or “I never want to work overtime”.

The 3rd area is looking at their current role.

This brings it back to the day to day and is a good time to reflect on the short term. How have their past few weeks or months been?

So get people to reflect on what they currently do and how they fit in to the company. Ask questions like: what are the challenges of their current role? What would they miss if they left this role? It’s all about getting an understanding of what they think are areas of things they could work on, improve or do more of.

An extra thing here is to use a job description or career development framework to help with this. If your company doesn’t have these, it doesn’t have to be from their current role or company! If it works as a prompt for them, use it!

Final area is current skills.

So this is getting people to reflect inwards again and get them thinking about what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Ask things to figure out what they think their current skills are and what they should get better at.

Now at this point, you’ll have answers from other areas as well – and it’s a good time to use them to ask more specific questions.

Also, if they have a specific role in mind that they want to end up, it’s worth using that to compare to and do a skills gap analysis.

So those are 4 areas of questions to ask.

It can easily be that one person is drawn to only 1 area, or only to very specific questions in an area. While someone else is drawn to 2 different areas.

The point of these questions is not to have answers in every single section, but rather to have them as prompts, as conversation starters. And once you have the answers to these, it should be easier to make the jump from these to actual goals.

In the end all of this is mainly to get people to really reflect and think about what they want to do. To lead them down that rabbit hole and get them thinking about all of this stuff. I think goals are some of the most important things that managers should be helping with.

Cause if they don’t, we risk creating the human equivalent to technical debt. Waking up one day and realising that you don’t like the person you’ve become or wishing you had focused on different skills, different passions, different goals.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?

I don’t think you really ever need to know the answer to that question. But whatever you do you should always be thinking about what’s next for you?

You need to understand who you are as a person and what you want from life. And as leaders, you should be helping your team to figure this out.

So I’ll leave you with this:

“Which way you want to go depends on where you want to get to…”

Tomorrow, or later this week, whenever you get back to the office. Don’t just get straight back to work.

Make some time to stop and think about all the things that you’ve heard about and learnt about these past 2 days. Think about what’s next for you, and for your team and how to get there.

Enjoyed this post and want more? You might like: Employee Evangelism: Make Your Team Badass, Blogging tips: How to start writing , How I got into conference speaking and Imposter Syndrome: How we act and work together.

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So when I got asked to review the BenQ W2000 projector, I knew this was finally a chance to try out and see one of these devices up close.

Initial thoughts: it’s a little bit bigger than I expected, but I’m really liking the picture quality of it! And the setup seems pretty easy so far. Turn on, plug in and that’s it. Compared to other projectors I’ve used in the past, the warm-up time of the W2000 was also quite quick: seconds rather than minutes.

I’ll be writing up a full review in a few weeks time – I’d love to hear what other questions people have? What do you want to know about this projector?

The post First Look: BenQ W2000 Home Projector appeared first on Miss Geeky.

The production is created by the immersive theatre company ImmerCity. They specialize in telling immersive stories, inspired by their unique venues and set in the time period of the venue. I’ve been meaning to make it along to one of their events for a while, cause I had heard great things about their previous shows.

I’m so glad I did! The show is brilliant – I really loved the immersive side of it and everything worked really well together. Being able to walk around the old pumping station really adds to the atmosphere of the entire experience. To set the scene, here’s the description from the website:

“It was 1871, and every level of the pumping station was bustling with activity in preparation for the grand opening of the 100” Cornish Engine, when two unexpected guests from the workhouse arrived demanding to see the small boy who had been apprenticed to the Chief Engineer.

Now, more than a century later, a child’s crying has been heard from beneath the Cornish Engine and it is starting to unnerve the tourists. The Museum has invited the master of the supernatural, Jack Daw, to awaken the past and uncover the truth.”

In a group of 6, you need to solve the mystery of what happened to the boy. We were with the 4 of us, so we got paired with a group of 2 (who were awesome cause they had done more immersive theatre themselves in the past). If you can, try to get a group of 6 together, cause I think it can be more fun if you have a group you know.

In the first half of the play each of your team members gets assigned a different character in the story – using lanterns you follow your character around the old pumping station, watching as part of the story unfolds for you.

After the first half you get back together with the other members of the team, and you get some time to compare notes and tell each other what happened to your character. You then get to interrogate each character for 5 minutes, all whilst trying to figure out Whodunnit. In the end our group figured out the majority of the mystery, and were pretty pleased with ourselves that we did.

I loved this format! I’ve been to some immersive theatre shows in the past where I was slightly uncomfortable with the interactions – I don’t do well with improvising what to say myself and often aren’t sure what the actors are expecting of me. In The Silhouette in The Smoke it felt quite contained and you could prepare in your group what you were going to ask each character. Plus it was fun trying to figure out how to approach each character and what you needed to find out to solve the mystery.

They’re doing 2 more dates in March (on the 28th & 29th) and I can highly recommend you go! I’d love to see what ImmerCity’s next production is. Plus this has inspired me to actually check out the museum properly at some point!

Where: The London Museum of Water & Steam
When: March 28th & 29th
Tickets: £28 per person

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I realized last year that I don’t really enjoy just having 1 party where I have to interact with a ton of people who I all barely get to talk to. So instead I’m celebrating my birthday for a month long, doing a ton of different stuff: dinners, cocktails, escape rooms, theatre and movies. It takes a lot of planning, but it means I get to a lot of things that I wanted to and I get to hang out and catchup with smaller groups of friends.

Besides that though, today is also my 11 year blog anniversary! Technically it’s not MissGeeky.com’s birthday, but it’s the day I started blogging (and all the posts from that original blogged were moved to MissGeeky when I started that). So it really is #missgeekysbirthdaymonth for me!

To celebrate this birthday month, I’ll be doing a massive giveaway of 11 of my favourite things!

Update: This giveaway is now closed!

That’s it! In total I’ll be giving away 11 different things – and select the 11 winners at random.

The giveaway ends on Friday March 2nd 17:00, and I’ll randomly draw the winners of each of the prizes then. Sadly I do need to keep this to UK only, cause of the shipping costs. Keep in mind though some of these prizes do only make sense if you’re based in London, so you do need to be able to travel here on your own costs if you win any of those.

Here are all the things I’ll be giving away:

A Court of Thorns and Roses from Sarah J Maas: the first part of my favourite series from last year. It starts off as a faerie retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but as the series continues it evolves into so much more. I think the first one is the weakest chapter of all three, but you need to start there!

Indexing from Seanan McGuire: What if fairy tales narratives are dangerous and can impose themselves on the world? This book is about the ATI Management Bureau, an organization that protects the world from fairy tales taking over.

Quiet from Susan Cain: I’ve always considered myself a massive introvert and have blogged in the past about what it means to be a social introvert. I wish I had read Susan Cain’s Quiet much earlier, cause she really explains the differences between introverts and extroverts, and shows the way our society is built around extroversion.

The Night Circus from Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus describes a place that feels plucked from my dreams, the circus I never knew I wanted to visit. There’s just something about the circus itself that feels part escape room and part immersive theatre, and I ended up wishing it was a real place that I could actually go to. I absolutely loved this book.

The Power from Naomi Alderman: Fascinating look at what would happen to our world if women suddenly developed the power to electrocute people. How would society change?

Ready Player One from Ernest Cline: I sped through this book when I picked it up. I’m planning on rereading it before the movie comes out next month!

Monstress: Volume 1 from Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda: this comic is so good! It’s set in an alternate matriarchal 1900’s Asia and the artwork and story are both amazing.

Apatosaurus Necklace from Little Moose: Isn’t that necklace adorable? I’ve got several from Little Moose and I love how quirky their designs are.

Star Trek Lip Gloss from MAC (Khaaannnn! and Warp Speed Ahead): These are limited edition lip glosses which have been discontinued! They’re both super glittery and pretty.

Prince Charles Cinema Annual Membership: I love the Prince Charles Cinema. This gives you discounted tickets to their regular screenings, £1 tickets for weekly member screenings and discounts at local stores and restaurants (including Forbidden Planet and Shoryu).

2 tickets to Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic at the V&A: I haven’t been myself yet, but I’ve always been impressed by the exhibitions at the V&A. This one will tell the story behind the creative partnership of A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard!

And that’s it! 11 things for an awesome 11 years. Thanks to all my regular readers for sticking with me for 11 years!

Update:

Thanks to the brilliant team at Modern Fables, I’ve added a 12th prize to the giveaway: a voucher for a free game of The Escapist for 2-6 people! I did this escape room a few days ago and it was a lot of fun – it’s slightly spooky with a good narrative and puzzles!

The post Miss Geeky’s Birthday Giveaway appeared first on Miss Geeky.

Go back to read The Art of Slide Design intro, Maximise Signal, Minimise Noise, Make Important Information Stand Out and Show AND Tell.

The final principle is Be Consistent. When we hear consistent, I think some people interpret that as let’s make everything look the same. “I’ll use the same background and the same font for every single slide.” That’s not what I mean here.

In design, consistency is defined like this: the usability of a system is improved when similar parts are expressed in similar ways. So when we’re talking about consistency in slide design, it’s about making sure that those slides that are similar look and feel the same way. I think slides are similar if they have a similar purpose.

Bit of a mouthful, but: use consistent designs for slides with the same purpose

So this is all about identifying your slide patterns: what are the types of slides within your presentation that you keep using over and over again? Once you know what types of slides you have, you can make sure they follow the same patterns.

I’ll use the images in these blog posts as an example, cause by now you’ve been exposed to some of these patterns.

To start this presentation had the heading slides: bright and yellow to stand out.

We then had our design theory slides: dark blue background with a serif font in white and highlight words in yellow.

The example sides: a white background with a centred image and a light blue heading.

And then all the other slides: which followed the basic design of white and yellow text on a light blue background.

With some variations.

Having these building blocks means that your audience has reference points. They become easier to process, even though it might happen subconsciously.

The handy thing of breaking it down like this means that for future presentations you have much more tangible building blocks to use. And as you do more and more presentations you end up building up your own library of patterns that you can reuse, and it becomes easier and quicker to put slides together.

So identify your slide patterns: what are the types of slides that are in your presentations?

Those are 4 principles of slide design.

To recap: Maximise Signal, Minimise Noise, Make Important Information Stand Out, Show AND Tell and Be Consistent.

I hope that by applying these you’ll make it easier for your audience to consume the information that you’re presenting and create more effective and beautiful presentations.

If you had told me 10 years ago that nowadays I would regularly be giving presentations and enjoying it, I wouldn’t have believed you.

At the time I assumed that to give a good presentation I would need to focus a lot on me. Making sure that what I say is good and correct. Making sure that I don’t make a fool of myself. Making sure that I don’t eh and uhm.

In reality though, the “me” part of it isn’t that important.

Good presentations are all about the audience – it’s your job as a presenter to make sure that you teach, inspire and motivate your audience.

I’ll be sharing more tips and tricks on creating slides and public speaking in the upcoming weeks. Want to hear when the next post goes live? Follow me on Twitter: @mseckington or sign up to my newsletter.

Enjoyed this post and want more? You might like: Employee Evangelism: Make Your Team Badass, Blogging tips: How to start writing , How I got into conference speaking and Imposter Syndrome: How we act and work together.

The post The Art of Slide Design: Be Consistent appeared first on Miss Geeky.

Go back to read The Art of Slide Design intro, Maximise Signal, Minimise Noise and Make Important Information Stand Out.

Note: I kept putting off writing this part of the series, cause I got stuck trying to figure out how gifs work for the section about animation. Instead of putting off for even longer, I’ve decided to at least publish the post, but without the animated gifs – I’ll try to add those in at a later date!

Our third principle is: show AND tell.

This principle comes from the picture superiority effect, which states that information recall is better when combining text and images.

So rather than relying on purely text alone, we should be using visuals to support what we are saying. People remember things better if they’re absorbing that info both in text and in a visual way.

I want to talk about 4 ways of adding visuals to your presentations.

First: photos. Photos are the easiest way of adding visuals to your slides – making them more lively and memorable. The thing with photos and actually also with gifs is that they do need to be relevant to what you are saying.

So keep Principle 1 in mind: maximise signal, minimise noise. The moment that photos aren’t relevant or if the connection is too tenuous, the photo only becomes noise.

The main place I still go for my photos is Flickr, specifically their creative commons search.

It means that you can easily search for images with specific licences – making it easier to know whether or not you can use them.

The other place I go is Pexels. They have a huge collection of free to use stock images. While they can be quite pretty, again the main thing to keep in mind here is make sure they’re relevant. If they’re not, it’s better to use an abstract background or just a solid colour. Don’t use photos for the sake of using photos.

I mentioned these design bundles earlier already, but again these are great resources for finding images as well.

The easiest way to use photos is to use them to completely fill up the slide – and then pair it in some way with text over it.

Just to compare: you can see if you use the smaller image, it just doesn’t have as much as an emotional impact.

The image actually makes it more distracting.

By using the image as the background, you’re driving the point home much much more. And if you use the right image, the audience will have a much more visceral reaction.

Play around and experiment with different photos and different fonts

Cause changing either can make a slide feel quite different.

Keep in mind not every photo will work as a background – even though this is an adorable photo of a kitten, you can’t really read the text easily.

If you really want to use that photo, look at using masks to turn the photo into a specific shape or size.

It makes the image just standout slightly more and less like you’ve just plunked the photo into your presentation.

Next: icons.

The easiest resource for icons is The Noun Project. This website features a ton of royalty free icons of all different topics, and you’re bound to find icons in there that you can use for your slides.

Again I’m mentioning design bundles, just cause that’s where most of my icons from this presentation are from.

Icons work as nice little highlights to cement the text you’re already showing. It’s a lot less distracting than photos, but it’s enough of a memory cue that it will help people recall information.

The third way of adding visuals is using shapes.

With shapes, I mean use the shapes that are built in your editor – you can make lines, triangles, circles, squares. You can achieve quite a lot when you start combining them to create interesting visuals for your slides.

At this point I should mention that if you use Keynote, it’s worth installing Keynude. Most of the other themes that are built into Keynote have a lot of default settings that are pretty rubbish – stuff like drop shadows around shapes, gradient fills, I always end up losing some time removing those. Keynude pretty much solves this: it’s a simple stripped-back template with grey shapes, flat charts and just a single empty layout slide. If you’re going to be using shapes a lot, Keynude will save you a lot of time.

One example is to create simple pie charts or other types of graphs – it makes the stat just jump out a bit more.

Looking behind the scenes this is built up from 2 elements parts: a circle with a square on top of it, that has the same colour as the background.

Once you get the hang of shapes you can start constructing more interesting slides – building diagrams that are much clearer than relying on text alone.

For instance, this is much more visceral and memorable…

… than just having a plain list.

Finally if you combine shapes with fonts and photos, you can really start making your slides look more unique and give them some personality.

Final way to add visuals: animations.

Before showing some examples, I need to remind you not to misuse them. Most presentation editors support a lot of different animations, and quite frankly most of them are super distracting.

If you use animations, try to make sure the animation you’re using makes sense for the purpose of the slide. If it is distracting, make sure the benefits of using it outweigh the downsides.

I mainly like to use animations if there already is a lot of elements vying for attention on a slide. In this case we already have colour being used, and it isn’t practical to use a different font or a different size to highlight the different elements. So a simple pop animation to grab the attention can work quite well here.

Another way is using animation to reveal elements one by one: it makes it stand out just that bit more, so that people remember it.

One of the most powerful animations within Keynote is Magic Move.

You basically grab an element – this can be a shape, a font, a photo. Than copy it to the next slide, but changed. So in a different position, or a different size. Keynote will then automatically figure out what your animation should be. You can use Magic Move to very quickly move things around and give some movement to them.

Use animations in places where by using them you’re making it easier for the audience to grasp some idea or concept. For instance in time lines. You’re using the movement to create this illusion of a time line, making it easier for your audience to understand.

So those are 4 ways you can add visuals to your slides. Using both text and images means that your audience will be able to grasp your ideas and concepts much quicker and remember them more.

Three down, one to go. Head on over to read about the fourth principle: Be consistent!

I’ll be sharing more tips and tricks on creating slides in the upcoming weeks. Want to hear when the next post goes live? Follow me on Twitter: mseckington or sign up to my newsletter.

Enjoyed this post and want more? You might like: Employee Evangelism: Make Your Team Badass, Blogging tips: How to start writing , How I got into conference speaking and Imposter Syndrome: How we act and work together.

The post The Art of Slide Design: Show AND Tell appeared first on Miss Geeky.

Go back to read The Art of Slide Design intro and Maximise Signal, Minimise Noise.

Our second principle is: make important information stand out.

So again let’s go back to some theory (from Universal Principles of Design). The von Restorff effect is a phenomenon where you’re more likely to remember things that are noticeably different than things that are common. This is about making things look more unique or distinctive, so that it stands out more and that people will remember them.

This is basically what the definition of contrast is: the state of being strikingly different from something else in juxtaposition or close association. So what we want is to use contrast in our slides to make things memorable.

A good example of using contrast comes from this book, Slide:ology, from Nancy Duarte – which is all about how to make good presentations.

In it she explains contrast through this visualization, highlighting how we can use contrast in our slides in a couple of different ways – using colour, shape, size, shade and proximity. In each of these examples, you’re automatically drawn to the element that stands out.

I’ll only cover three of these here, cause I think shade is a variation of colour and proximity isn’t as easy to apply as the others.

I’ll give examples for each of these 3 areas, starting with colour.

First step is choose a colour palette with contrasting colours.

In the case of colour, contrasting doesn’t necessarily have to mean exact opposite – it’s more about having colours that work well together and are different enough from each other that you can see that they are noticeably different. I won’t go into too much detail here about colour theory, cause there are plenty of web sites and books out there that cover this.

One of those websites I really like though is colorsupplyyy.com. It allows you to quickly try out various colour combinations and shows different variations of it.

Plus it also shows you how the colours look together in icons and patterns. So you can get a sense of what type of contrast you might be able to get in your slides.

One way of using colour contrast is to use it within a slide to highlight the most important phrase or data.

Going a bit meta, you’ll have noticed that most of my own slides in this presentation have been following exactly this pattern.

Another way of using colour is to highlighting different elements on your slide. As I mentioned before the colours don’t need to be too opposite each other – you can use the same colour, in this case: green, and achieve contrast from the different variations of green.

Besides using contrast within slides, you can also look at contrast between slides. If you use Keynote, this is the Light Table view – where you can see an overview of all of your slides. I use this overview a lot, cause you can quickly see how all your slides feel as a whole.

This is an overview of one of my presentations from last year about lessons that we could learn from Marvel superheroes.

I each time used a red slide at the start of a section to highlight that we were switching to a different superhero.

Because all the other slides are white, the red title slide stands out much more and makes people pay attention.

Second way to use contrast is shape. Now traditionally when you think of shapes, you think of shapes like in that example: circles, squares, triangles, etc. And while they can be used within your slides for contrast, those aren’t actually the shapes that we most rely on in our presentations

What we rely on a lot are fonts. So one way of achieving contrast is through using different types of fonts within your presentation.

I tend to use custom fonts cause the fonts that are built in to our systems are mostly designed for reading paragraphs of text, so they don’t quite work when on a slide, and also people are more familiar with them already and it won’t stand out as much as it could.

Which fonts you end up choosing is quite a personal choice, and it will depend on your presentation style what type of feeling you want your slides to exhibit.

If you don’t want to spend anything, the first place to look for free fonts is Google Fonts.

The main focus of the collection is in providing the fonts as web fonts, but you can download them too and use them in most slide editors.

If you’re willing to pay for fonts, I’d suggest taking a look at the bundles on these websites (Design Cuts, Pixel Buddha, DreamBundles, The Hungry JPEG). Rather than buying a single font, you basically buy a bundle of different fonts and they often include quite a large and interesting selection.

Once you have multiple fonts, you can start playing around with them to create contrast. I’ll show a couple of examples, but again this is by no means the only ways you can create contrast.

In this first example we are using different fonts within the same phrase or sentence – the contrast is used to highlight specific words.

The second way is using different fonts for different elements on the slide.

It’s about making it easy for the audience to understand the different purposes of those elements.

Cause if it was all in the same text, it just makes it way too confusing to read and comprehend.

The same is true for when you’re displaying code – if you’ve got multiple elements on your slide with different purposes, use contrast to show that they are different.

Third way to use contrast: size.

The simplest way of using size for contrast is just grabbing a single element and making it bigger – using it to make a statement about something.

Or you can play around and make each part of the sentence a different slide. Again you’ll have noticed I tend to use this a lot within my own slides.

What becomes interesting though is when you start pairing different fonts with different sizes – it means that you can really play around with making a slide look quite graphic.

These type of slides will stand out more and make it more compelling to people. In these cases the contrast is both within the slide and outside of the slide, making the slide more memorable.

So those are 3 ways that you can use contrast to highlight key information and make it more memorable for your audience.

Through colour, shape and size.

Two down, two to go. Continue on to read about our third principle: Show AND Tell!

Want to hear when the next post goes live? Follow me on Twitter: mseckington.

Enjoyed this post and want more? You might like: Employee Evangelism: Make Your Team Badass, Blogging tips: How to start writing , How I got into conference speaking and Imposter Syndrome: How we act and work together.

The post The Art of Slide Design: Make Important Information Stand Out appeared first on Miss Geeky.

Go back to read The Art of Slide Design intro.

Our first principle is maximise signal, minimise noise.

This principle comes from the theory of signal to noise ratio (from Universal Principles of Design). This is the concept that in every type of communication we have there is a certain amount of relevant information to us, the signal, and there’s a certain amount of irrelevant information to us, the noise.

With good designs we want to maximise the signal and minimise the noise, ending up with mainly relevant information rather than irrelevant information.

So how do we maximise signal and minimise noise in our slide designs? How do we make sure that the information on our slides is mainly relevant rather than irrelevant?

I think there are a few things that we can do to achieve this.

The first is focus on one purpose per slide. This is about maximising the signal.

The moment a slide has multiple purposes it dilutes the relevant information you’re trying to get across. Rather than having a single slide covering multiple ideas or concepts, split them out over several slides. This is about making sure that your slide is as relevant as possible to what you are saying at that point of time.

One thing I see happen a lot is using bullet points on one slide to cover multiple ideas. For instance take this slide about cat facts. If you’re going to be talking for a few minutes about the history of house cats and then a few minutes about why cats sleep 75% of their lives and then a few minutes about each of the other points, you’re basically diluting the signal of each point you’re trying to make.

Cause while you are talking about the history of cats – your audience is reading and thinking about all the other things that are on your slide already and they won’t be listening to you.

It’s much better to spit out those ideas over multiple slides. Allow your audience to focus on the one thing you’re trying to get across, the most relevant information for the audience at that time.

Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t be using bullet points at all, but use them to support the specific purpose of your slide. For instance, in this case the bullet points are used to list a set of names that belong together – all the information together is what makes it relevant.

Another exception is when you’re using it to recap or give an overview of all the things you’ve said earlier. This slide has the same content as we saw before, but in this scenario, you’ve covered each of points separately already. The purpose is to show stuff you’ve covered before in one single slide – the audience doesn’t have to focus as much on the individual points cause none of it is new information – they’ve each been dealt with separately already.

So context matters a lot.

The second thing we want to do is make sure our slides aren’t distracting. In this case we’re trying to minimise noise – ensuring we don’t have any irrelevant information.

One way of being distracting is having way too much text on your slide. The moment you have a slide like this, people stop listening to you. Cause they’re either distracted by trying to read all the stuff that’s on there, or they get distracted trying to read and listen at the same time.

Rather than allowing your audience to focus on what you’re saying, by having that much text, you’re basically kicking off all these different questions and thoughts.

Think about what information really matters and distill it down to just the very essential.

A variation of this is having too much code on a slide.

Most of the time you really don’t need all of it. Instead focus on the part that actually matters to the audience at that time – don’t force them to try to read all of that, cause you’re only creating a situation for people to zone out and not listen to you.

Another way slides can be distracting is when there’s just too much going on in them.

This is an extreme example, but I often feel that people want to use all the space they can on a slide, making things super busy and much harder to process.

Keep your slides simple and clean, so that they’re not visually distracting.

This shows exactly the same images as before, but because they’re not overlapping and because there’s no text laid over it, it’s easier for the audience to process.

To recap: you can maximise signal by focusing on one purpose per slide and you can minimise noise by reducing distractions on your slide.

Continue on to read about our second principle: Make Important Information Stand Out!

Want to hear when the next post goes live? Follow me on Twitter: mseckington.

Enjoyed this post and want more? You might like: Employee Evangelism: Make Your Team Badass, Blogging tips: How to start writing , How I got into conference speaking and Imposter Syndrome: How we act and work together.

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I’ll be publishing the posts over the next couple of days, starting today with the intro (this post) and the first principle Maximise Signal, Minimise Noise.

I’m also planning on doing some followup posts to go into more detail about some of the topics (like choosing custom fonts and creating animations). For now though, this is staying pretty true to the original talk. Check out the full slides on SpeakerDeck.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, for most of my life I hated giving presentations – as a kid, as a teen, as a university student. I was so scared and nervous in front of people that I tried to avoid giving them as much as I could. Whenever I did have to do one, I’d be a bunch of nerves for the entire week before, and often because of my nerves the presentation wouldn’t turn out that great. I didn’t believe it was something I’d ever be able to do well and I really didn’t believe it was something I’d ever enjoy.

Nowadays I actually like giving presentations. For the past 3 years, I’ve been giving talks at meetups and conferences, and part of my role at FutureLearn is to encourage my team to both blog and speak more (read more about that in my post about employee evangelism).

For me, the secret, the magical solution, came from preparation.

I find that whenever I try to learn something new, it becomes easier for me if I understand all the different aspects, all the different building blocks of what it is that I’m to learn. With presentations it was about understanding my emotions and how my face and body and voice were reacting when I got nervous. It was about understanding how to tell compelling stories and how to keep the audience engaged. It was about discovering how often I need to practice until I feel completely comfortable with what I’m going to say. And it’s about understanding how to use the tools I have in the most effective way.

Alongside our voice and our words, our slides are the most important instrument in our presenter’s toolbox. And we should learn to use them as effectively as we can.

Nowadays after most of my talks, I’ll often get compliments that people really liked my slides, sometimes with the sly additional question whether I got someone else to create them (nope, just me). Just like mastering other skills, once you know some of the tricks, it does get easier the more you do it.

So that’s what this series of blog posts are about: how to create effective slides.

But what does that mean? What makes your slides effective?

Let’s take a step back and look at why we are presenting in the first place: what’s the goal of a presentation? At first glance you might think each presentation is different: some will be about teaching a new skill or knowledge, some will be to convince people to use a specific product, some will be to inspire and motivate people to change or do something.

There are endless goals of what a presentation is for and no two presentations will be the same.

Yet at the heart of it, they all have one thing in common: no matter what your motivation behind the presentation is, your #1 goal as a presenter is to allow your audience to absorb your information. Whether you’re trying to teach, convince, motivate, frighten, sell, inspire – it’s your responsibility to make that easier for your audience.

This all ties in with the concept of cognitive load: the amount of mental activity – perception, memory, problem solving – required to accomplish a goal.

This definition comes from the book: Universal Principles of Design and I’ll be referring to it a couple of times throughout these blog posts. It’s a great resource book covering 125 design principles and ties it back to psychology and physiology research.

In that book we also find this quote about cognitive load: design should minimise cognitive load to the greatest degree possible.

So when we talk about effective slides, we mean slides that help reduce that cognitive load.

Slides that help rather than prevent people from consuming your information.

So how do you create effective slides? How do you create slides that are compelling and help your audience?

The answer lies in shifting that question to: how do you design effective slides? We can get a better understanding of slide design, by looking at design theory.

In the next few posts, I want to share 4 principles of slide design, so that you can create more compelling slides and help your audience absorb the information you’re presenting.

One thing to bear in mind here is that I don’t believe there is “one true way” of creating slides. This isn’t about getting you all to create the same type of slides that I do – rather it’s helping you get a basic understanding of design theory and applying it to your own style.

If you’re starting out, don’t feel like you have to attempt changing all of your slides in one go: choose one principle to apply to your next presentation and build from there. Hopefully you’ll be able to hit the ground running with some of the tips in these post and make your slides a little bit more unique and effective.

Let’s start with the first principle: Maximise Signal, Minimise Noise.

Enjoyed this post and want more? Follow me on Twitter: mseckington. You might also like: Employee Evangelism: Make Your Team Badass, Blogging tips: How to start writing , How I got into conference speaking and Imposter Syndrome: How we act and work together.

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Last month I got invited to speak at Codemania in Auckland and at YOW! West in Perth, and I had an awesome time at both conferences. I also managed to combine those talks with a 3 week trip traveling and sightseeing through New Zealand and Australia – this was the first time since I was 8 that I was back in Australia!

The talk I gave there was about how you should reflect and refactor your own skills, values and behaviours, to help you understand what you want to be and what you want to do with your life. Here’s the video of my (closing!) keynote at YOW!:

I’d love to hear stories from people who have tried some of the reflection and refactoring techniques I’ve talked about. Let me know what worked for you!

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I’ve had this blog for 10 years, and while I still love writing for it, I’m finding it trickier and trickier to find the time to sit down and write.

It’s not for lack of ideas. I think now more than ever I’m coming up with different ideas and opinions and stories that I’d love to share with people. If you follow me on Twitter or have bumped into me at an event in real life, you might know that I recently moved to a sort-of new role. To give a bit of background, I’ve been at FutureLearn now for 4 years, and for the past 2 I’ve been attempting to balance three different roles: being a developer within one of our 6 product teams, being a line manager for 5 other developers and being the evangelism lead for our product team. Emphasis on “attempting”. As our team has grown, it has become harder to do each of these things well and I’ve struggled a lot with prioritising and balancing everything.

A month ago our team introduced a new structure and new roles for several of us. Previously we had 5 line managers (including me), who alongside managing people were within one of the product teams and worked on building our platform. Now we’ve changed to having 6 Technical Leads within each of the product teams to provide and help with technical direction and decision making, and 3 Technical Managers outside of the product teams to focus purely on managing, teaching and growing our developers.

I’ve switched to this latter role of Technical Manager and what it means in practice: I’m not developing anymore. I’m explicitly using the term ‘developing’ here rather than ‘writing code’, cause for the majority of last year I already wasn’t that hands-on with code anymore, but still was part of all other aspects of building a product (stuff like planning and pairing on what, why and how we’re building things, researching and analysing different implementation options, etc). Being a developer is more than just writing code (but that’s maybe a discussion for another time).

I really think this change of roles and structure for our team means that we can be more efficient and focused on what we each are passionate about. It means that I and the other Technical Managers now have time to work on things like figuring out how we do career progression or how to make our hiring process more diverse. It means that we have more time to get better at management: people are hard, and managing people is a hard thing, but it is something that we can get better at.

One thing to note: this shift doesn’t mean that I’m completely stopping with the evangelism aspect. I believe that every (senior) developer should be sharing and teaching what they know with other developers. For some developers that might mean giving a talk, for some it will be mentoring and pairing, for some it will be giving workshops, for some it will be writing blog posts. Our role as managers is helping each developer to figure out how they want to share what they know and helping them learn the skills they need for it.

Going back to the original point I was trying to make: finding the time to write. I want to keep sharing my experiences and ideas and opinions, through both talks and blog posts. But I’ve noticed that in the past year, as I’ve started managing more people, where most of my day is focused on having conversations and interacting with people, by the end of the day I’m drained. I love managing people, but as an introvert I have to admit that it does take a lot out of me. Outside of work, I need to do things that recharge my batteries. For me, that’s disappearing into a book, a video game or a TV show – doing things that disconnect me from my laptop and phone and from people.

I get time during work hours to prepare my talks, but my blog posts have always been something I’ve done in my spare time. And right now? Writing posts isn’t something that recharges my batteries. My mind needs to be fully engaged and firing on all cylinders to want to write. And that’s the main reason why it’s been 5 months since I’ve written something here.

So here I am again writing something. I’d like to promise that I’ll write something else soon again, but honestly? I don’t quite know whether I can keep that promise. Hearing though that people like and find my posts useful? It does make me want to write more and it’s motivation for me to re-examine and figure out how to fit it back into my life.

Fingers crossed it won’t be another 5 months till I write here again.

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The soundtrack is now available on Spotify and it’s as wonderful as I remembered. Almost every single track on this leaves me grinning like an idiot:

La La Land feels like your old school Hollywood musical with magical set pieces, tap dancing routines and super catchy music, but with a story and sensibilities for our generation. I can’t wait to rewatch it when it’s comes out in January!

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I’m a little underwhelmed by the trailer though. I don’t think it really captures the interesting parts of the story:

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Here’s the description from Amazon:

From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality. . . Chiang’s rigorously imagined fantasia invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

You can get Stories of Your Life and Others on Amazon for £6.99.

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I’ve been slowly making my way through all the Studio Ghibli movies, and it’s so cool to see some of the characters transposed over real life footage!

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Besides that, there’s a new gameplay trailer for Mass Effect: Andromeda. I can’t wait for this – there’s just so much about the Mass Effect world and games that I love, and this looks like so much fun!

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You can get this Louche dress from Joy for £55:

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In light of that, I’m reviving another ‘old’ post series of mine ‘Listening To‘: I started it with the intention to share what music I’m enjoying, but am expanding that to include podcasts, audio books and concerts!

For today’s post I wanted to highlight a podcast I started listening to recently: Imaginary Worlds. It describes itself as:

“Imaginary Worlds is a bi-weekly podcast about science fiction and other fantasy genres — how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. These are the backstories to our stories.”

It’s my new favourite podcast and in the past 2 weeks I’ve listened to the majority of their archive (it goes back about 2 years)! Imaginary Worlds gives us a glimpse behind the curtain of some of my favourite geeky books and shows: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, there are a ton of different geeky topics that get covered, often with perspectives that I hadn’t considered before. Pretty much anyone that enjoys geeky stories should try out this podcast!

Current favourites episodes: Fantasy Maps about the work and detail that goes into creating them, 1977, a look into the state of the world and pop culture when Star Wars came out, and Beware of Cyber City about a three-dimensional model of a town that the military uses for cyber war games.

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Moana

It’s a new Disney movie! If you’re a long time reader, you’ll know how much I love my Disney animation movies and I can’t wait to see this one. Moana tells the story of the titular character Moana, the daughter of the chief of a Polynesian tribe, who is chosen by the ocean to lift a curse. The film features music by Lin-Manuel Miranda from Hamilton fame – my Discover Weekly accidentally spoilt some of the music already and it’s so good! I might have been listening to How Far I’ll Go on repeat for the last couple of days…

Release date: Friday 2 December

Sully

I remember hearing about the plane landing in the Hudson back in 2009, but I had no idea about the story of the aftermath of it all. Sully features Tom Hanks as Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the captain who landed the plane and shows the subsequent publicity and investigation of the landing.

Release date: Friday 2 December

Star Wars: Rogue One

Do I really need to explain why I’m excited for this? Tickets are already available to book – I’ll be enjoying this in 70mm IMAX!

Release date: Friday 16 December

Passengers

I saw an early trailer for this and since then I’ve been trying to avoid as much as I can about this movie – I have the feeling it’s one that you might easily get spoiled for! Passengers features Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as two passengers on a spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet that are awakened from their cryogenic sleep 90 years early. It’s being promoted as a romantic sci-fi, so I’m curious to see how this turns out.

Release date: Wednesday 21 December

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The necklace is made of laser cut perspex/acrylic and comes with a 22″ silver plated chain. You can get it for £24.95 at Little Moose.

The store where I got this only had that one necklace, but turns out Little Moose has so many other cute designs and I kind of want them all! Here are my favourites:

Jurassica – £24.95

Space Unicorn – £24.95

Panda Family – £44.95

Cheshire Cat – £34.95

Alpaca – £34.95

To check out more designs from Little Moose, head to their website.

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Which books have you recently read that you love?

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus describes a place that feels plucked from my dreams, the circus I never knew I wanted to visit. Dressed in monochromatic hues, the Circque de Reves is depicted as a vast collection of tents, each with a different experience and the attraction, and it’s the setting for a magical contest between our main characters Celia and Marco.

There’s just something about the circus itself that feels part escape room and part immersive theatre, and I ended up wishing it was a real place that I could actually go to. I absolutely loved this book, mainly cause of the long descriptions of parts of the circus – the overall story and characters feel a little weak, but for me this book was more about creating this idea of an interesting world that I could explore.

Favourite quote: “You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”

Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire

I’m a huge Seanan McGuire fan – she’s written so many different story worlds and I just love the unique stories she comes up with. And Every Heart A Doorway is no exception. The simplest way to describe it that this is McGuire’s take on parallel universe stories: Alice In Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, what happens to the children after they come back from their adventures in these other worlds? In Every Heart A Doorway, we’re introduced to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school for children/teens who need to re-adapt to our world.

There were just so many things I loved about this book. Firstly, the diversity of the characters: rather than having the predictable (and boring) cast of straight white characters, in here we have a range of diverse characters. Besides that each character has such a different and unique backstory – I loved discovering the different worlds they each had visited and where they felt they belonged. A lot of this book was about finding that special place where you feel accepted and appreciated for who you really are, and the loss that follows of not having that place anymore. It also made me wonder what my other world would look like – what’s the world that I would escape to if I could?

Favourite quote: “For us, places we went were home. We didn’t care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn’t have to pretend to be something we weren’t. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.”

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

I don’t really know how to describe Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. It’s ambitious and epic and it works. I loved Jemisin’s first series (the Inheritance trilogy) and it’s awesome to see another complex and interesting world from her.

In The Fifth Season we’re introduced to the Stillness, a continent on a planet where every couple of centuries there is some form of cataclysmic event known as the Fifth Season. No one can predict when or what The Fifth Season will be, and the society of the Stillness has evolved to ensure the survival of as many people as possible.

There’s so much that happens in this book and my meagre description above really doesn’t do it justice. Jemisin manages to create real and messy characters – you don’t always agree with their decisions, but she makes you can understand them, feel for them and want to shout at them. Wrapped around that is an epic story and Jemisin leaves just enough clues for you to think along and puzzle out parts of the story for yourself. All in all, I can’t wait to read the next part of this series!

Favourite quote: This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we way “the world has ended”, it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine.

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Now what better way to show off your Westworld love with this cute pendant of the “maze”? It’s only £8.22 from etsy store WearableCollectibles.

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One of the most common things that I hear from people though is that they’d love to do more of this, but that they don’t have anything worth talking about.

And that’s absolutely not true.

Everyone has something that’s worth sharing with others. Every person knows something that others don’t. It’s very easy to undervalue the things that we know, and that we assume are common knowledge. You might not be the “number one expert” in something, but honestly you don’t have to be to be the one talking about it. In some areas actually being a non-expert might give you a different and perhaps a more relatable perspective, allowing other non-experts to easier understand the topic.

But how do you discover what you should be talking about?

I thought I’d share some tips and tricks of how I approach coming up with my talk (and blog post) ideas and turn it into an exercise of sorts that anyone can start with.

A framework for thinking about talk ideas

Now the way my brain works is that I like having structures and frameworks in place for me to interpret and think about information better. So before we jump into ways of brainstorming ideas, I want you to consider this:

I think with every talk you do, you need to consider and balance these three elements: the Location, the Format and the Topic. Here’s what I mean with each of them:

Location: where are you doing this talk? Is it at a specific conference or meetup? Is it internally at work? Who is your audience? What is their background? What do they know already?

Format: how long is the talk? Is it a lightning talk or a longer talk? Are you live coding or demoing something?

Topic: what is the talk about? What message do you want people to take away from it?

Each of these elements need to be in equilibrium with other, making sure that all three matchup. For instance, a lightning talk about dinosaurs might not be appropriate for a specific technical conference, or an in-depth talk about encoding might not work as a lightning talk.

When it comes to brainstorming talk ideas, I find that using the above structure allows you to approach the problem of finding a topic in two different ways: start on either the Location side or the Topic side and make your way across. Neither direction is right or wrong, but it allows you to focus your brainstorming. If you have a specific location in mind, it can help you come up with what type of topic is appropriate for it. Likewise if you don’t have a location in mind, you can be more unconstrained in coming up with ideas, and figure out later where you’ll do the talk.

Getting into the right mindset

Next we want to generate as many ideas as possible. The key thing about this though is going into this with the right mindset. A couple of things to keep in mind here:

1. There are no stupid ideas.

Write down every single idea that you can think of, no matter how stupid or boring or uninteresting you think it is for other people. As I said above, we often forget the things that we know and we’ll disregard ideas that we think no one else will care about. When I did this exercise with people at work, people were often surprised that others wanted to hear about some of the “silly” ideas they came up with.

2. Keep track of your ideas.

Use this as the time to start a list of all the ideas you have. Even if some of them don’t feel quite right right now, add them to a list or a doc: somewhere that you can keep track of them. This isn’t about creating a huge list, picking one and throwing the rest away. It’s about creating a repository of all the ideas you have that you one day might want to talk about and revisit. I’ve done talks based on talk ideas that I initially came up with 2 years ago – some talks need time to simmer and evolve.

3. Develop the “that-would-make-a-good-talk” voice in your mind.

Most of the exercise questions below are about developing what I call the “that would make a good talk” voice in your head. Rather than having these specific brainstorming sessions, I tend to always have these type of questions in the back of my mind whenever I’m working on a project or having conversations with people. My natural instinct now is to always consider whether there’s a story hidden within anything that I’m doing (and pointing it out for others when I see they’re doing something). I’m hoping that some of these things will become more natural for you by doing these exercises.

4. Don’t get stuck on the title.

The following exercises are about coming up with ideas for your talks, not the title. I’ve noticed people trying to come up with variations of what to call their talk, which at this point doesn’t really matter yet. You can figure out later what title works and is catchy. Right now it’s about the content – focus on that!

5. Get help from others.

If you know you struggle with coming up with ideas, try to get a group of friends or colleagues together and help each other with these exercises. Discussing and explaining some of these questions with others and having other people to bounce ideas off can help a lot: you might discover ideas that you wouldn’t have alone.

Exercises for talk idea brainstorming

So time to write down some ideas! If you’ve got some things in mind already, that’s awesome, write them down. If you’re unsure where to start, I’ve created a list of questions that you can use as inspiration, grouped by Topic, Format and Location. Start with the questions of the area that you want to focus on first:

Topic:

• Write down all the topics you’re interested in and you know about. It doesn’t matter how obscure – add it to the list!
• Think back to what you’ve done the past month. What problems did you come across that were challenging to deal with? What things did you work on that you’re proud of? What did you spend a lot of time on that maybe could have gone quicker if you knew something you do now?
• Can you remember any long emails, slack messages, git commits, pull requests, internal docs or long conversations recently, where you’ve explained something to someone? Would someone else benefit from learning that?
• What’s one thing you wish everyone knew or was taught? Why?
• Think about recent conversations and discussions with friends or colleagues. What topic could you easily talk hours and hours with them about? What excites you? What infuriates you?
• What’s something that you wish you could know more about? Are there any questions you have that you wish you knew the answer to? Coming up with a talk will give you a push to dive into that topic.
• Think about your favourite books, music, movies, museums, restaurants, sports teams, famous (or nonfamous) people, cars, anecdotes, countries, food, animals, games.
• Take a look at talks or speakers that inspire you. What do they have in common? What would your take on it be?
• Think back when you started your career – are there any topics that you think could have helped you if you had heard about it earlier?
• What processes/work/things do you do that make your life easier? If other people did it too, would it make their lives easier?

Format:

• Write down what types of talks you’re interested in. Examples: lightning talk, internal work presentation, small meetup, conference talk.
• Do you want to do demos? Or live coding? Or making the talk interactive in some way? Think about the type of talk that you would enjoy participating in. Think about the type of talk that you would enjoy giving.

Location:

• Write down specific conferences or meetups that you’d like to talk at. Does the event have a theme? What type of audience attends? What’s their background?
• Look at the event’s past talks or their call for papers. Are there specific topics or problems that they are interested in?
• Look at the event’s past speakers and their talks – do you agree or disagree with any their opinions? What area would you like to see more of? What questions do you have that you‘d like answered?
• If you were at that event, what talk would you want to see? What talk would be on your must-watch-don’t-miss list?

What next?

Hopefully the above exercises will have given you some inspiration and you will have ended up with a nice list of talk ideas that you’re interested in. The exercise questions obviously aren’t exhaustive and I’m curious to hear what other questions get your mind thinking about potential ideas. I’d also love to hear if these exercises help you, so feel free to email, comment or tweet me about this!

Once you have this ideas list, the next steps are deciding which idea to develop further, figuring out what events are out there and how to create talk proposals for them. In the upcoming weeks I’ll be writing blog posts for each of these topics, so stay tuned!

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About a year back I became a line manager, and as with every new discipline that I want to get good at, I threw myself into researching and reading as much as I could about the topic. Alongside that though, I also started trying to vocalize my thoughts on what I’ve been trying to do internally with our evangelism at FutureLearn. Both areas I’ve realized are grounded in similar questions: why do people do what they do? How do you encourage them to do specific things? What motivates them?

So this post is a roundup of all the “leadership-py” books I’ve read the past year (and have mentioned previously in my talks). Even if you’re not a line manager or a leader (yet), I think all these books give good insights into how people and teams work.

Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee

If you’ve just started managing or are interested in it and aren’t sure where to start with reading material, take a look at this book. Primal Leadership is all about how emotional intelligence is key to what makes an effective leader and gives a lot of practical examples of how to grow and apply your skills in it. The book highlights different leadership styles and the ways emotions are affected in each of them.

Favourite quote: “Imagine the styles, then, as the array of clubs in a golf pro’s bag. Over the course of a match, the pro picks and chooses from his bag based on the demands of the shot. Sometimes he has to ponder his selection, but usually it is automatic. The pro “senses” the challenge ahead, swiftly pulls out the right tool, and elegantly puts it to work. That’s how high-impact leaders operate too.”

Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull

Technically I read this book last year, but there’s so much in this book that I’ve found useful this year. Ed Catmull is one of founders of Pixar and his book Creativity Inc is all about how the history of Pixar and how they created their culture there.

I started reading this cause I’m a huge Disney and Pixar fan, and it’s a fascinating insight into how their movies are created. Beyond that though, the book really focuses on what drives and enables creativity within teams, and I think it can be applied to any team. Catmull manages to elegantly capture the reasons why failure, candour and randomness are all things that every team should embrace and expect to happen. There are a lot of good ideas and good practices in this book and after reading it I came away feeling inspired and motivated.

Favourite quote: “Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.”

Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra

In Badass, Kathy Sierra explains how the best way to get your product being used by people, is understanding that it’s not necessarily about making your product more awesome, but that it’s about making your users more awesome. If they feel they are being badass when using your product, they’ll be more passionate and motivated to share what they can do with your product.

While the book is written from a product perspective, I realised that a lot of it can be applied to how we encourage our teams. It gives a lot of insight in how to keep someone motivated learning something new. I’ve specifically adapted it for encouraging evangelism in teams, but I think it can be applied to other areas as well.

Favourite quote: “On their deathbed, nobody will say: If only I’d engaged more with brands.”

Drive by Daniel H. Pink

Continuing with the theme of “what motivates people”, the next book on this list is Drive from Daniel H. Pink. In it he examines the intrinsic rewards that people seek, rather than extrinsic awards like money or owning stuff. It’s backed up with a lot of research examples and case studies, and it got me thinking about why people I know do the things they do.

Favourite quote: “People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behaviour, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.”

Quiet by Susan Cain

I’ve always considered myself a massive introvert and have blogged in the past about what it means to be a social introvert. I wish I had read Susan Cain’s Quiet much earlier, cause she really explains the differences between introverts and extroverts, and shows the way our society is built around extroversion.

Regardless of whether you’re a introvert or an extrovert yourself, reading this book will give you a better understanding of how our brains process the information in the world around us and how that can affect each person in different ways.

Favourite quote: “Everyone shines, given the right lighting.”

Mindset by Carol Dweck

Another book I wish I had read earlier is this one from Carol Dweck called Mindset. In it she examines the idea of different mindsets and I think my life might have gone differently if I had read it sooner. Dweck describes the idea of the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset.

The fixed mindset is the belief that your abilities are set in stone – you believe that you can learn new things, but that you can’t really change how smart or social or sporty you are. The growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that your basic abilities are things that you can change – people might differ in initial interests, temperaments and aptitudes, but everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

I noticed about myself that I’ve already switched from a fixed to a growth mindset in the past couple of years, and reading the book I recognized a lot that felt familiar to me.

Favourite quote: “This is something I know for a fact: You have to work hardest for the things you love most.”

Turn The Ship Around! by L. David Marquet

I picked up this book after seeing Marquet talk about this topic in this video. I’ve only just started the book, but I’m including it anyway cause so far it’s been an interesting read. Marquet tells his story of when he became captain of the USS Santa Fe, and started treating his crew as leaders, rather than followers. The result is an environment where everyone is encourage to take ownership and make decisions.

Favourite quote: “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.”

Which leadership books have you read recently? Given the ones above, which books do you think I should read next?

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Of course within a couple of days a mashup appeared of the two videos:

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Imagine: you’re shopping for groceries and need to buy strawberries. You have two options. The first one comes in this completely closed off box – you can’t look into it, there’s no pictures on the packaging – you have no idea how the strawberries actually look like. The second option: a transparent plastic box with some handy labels on it: you know immediately what the nutritional value is, where the strawberries are grown and you even get some a nice recipe for strawberry pie to try. And you can exactly see what strawberries you get.

Which box do you choose?

Now of course choosing what company to work at isn’t on the same level as choosing which strawberries to buy. But in the same way, we should be thinking about how we expose and promote our teams as places where people want to work. Not doing anything and remaining a black box that no one can look into doesn’t help at all. So how can we be those strawberries that everyone wants to choose?

For the past 2 years, I’ve taken a lead within FutureLearn to do exactly this type of stuff – I’ve been responsible for trying to raise awareness about our company within the tech and design community.

How to define what I do?

In the past I’ve always struggled trying to explain what it exactly is that I do and finding the right phrase or word or title that encompasses it. Developer evangelism. Developer outreach. Developer relations. Developer advocacy. All these terms are used within our industry to describe these roles that are much more outward facing, but none of them felt quite right to describe what we were trying to do here.

The way I see it this area typically is about creating a relationship between your company and potential customers – you have a product, be it a platform, apis, tooling – it’s something that you want developers to use. There’s a good overview from Phil Leggetter about the different goals and approaches within developer relations, but in the end all of them are about shaping that space, so you can have conversations with those outside of your company about your product.

And that doesn’t quite work here for 2 reasons: 1) it’s not the product we’re trying to evangelize, it’s our team, and 2) we’re actually not just targeting developers, we’re targeting the wider product team, so also designers, UX researchers, product managers. It’s about more than just developers.

So the phrase I’ve started using recently to capture this is employee evangelism. In the same way that developer evangelism is about creating that conversation between your company and the outside world, employee evangelism is about creating that conversation between your employees and the potential employees outside the company. It is about raising awareness about the team – and comes from the team directly.

Rather than having a single person be the employee evangelist, you want the entire team to contribute to this evangelism, making sure that this loop is constantly happening:

Now we have other people on the team who take care of the hiring process, and I like to think that everyone on our team does awesome stuff, so my focus tends to be on getting people to share that awesomeness with the community. I’ve always seen this as a team role: I’m not the only person in the company going out and talking at all the events, I’m not the only person writing all the blog posts. This has been very much about supporting our entire team to do all this, helping them learn the skills they need for this and helping create the type of environment where everyone feels encouraged to contribute.

How to encourage your team?

So having defined this idea of employee evangelism, what can you do to encourage and support your team to practice this?

A couple months back I read Badass: Making Users Awesome from Kathy Sierra and in it she explains how the best way to get your product being used by people, is understanding that it’s not necessarily about your product, it’s about making your users awesome. If they feel they are being badass, when using your product, they’ll be more passionate and motivated to share what they can do with your product.

Kathy goes on to create a framework of sorts to help your users become badass. And I realised that most of what she describes in there can be adapted to how we can encourage our teams. How we can make our teams badass.

Using her book as a base I’ve adapted it specifically for getting your team to share more, but I think it can applied to a lot of other ways of making our teams better. I want to focus on 4 areas, and I think all of these combined can help you encourage your team:

Give them a compelling context

This is about creating that right type of environment where people feel like they can share. Start with the company culture first. Now let’s go back to our strawberry example.

Remember the packaging of the transparent box?  The retailer could have put anything they wanted on it – nutritional benefits, the claim that they’re the best strawberries in the world, adorable recipes. In the end though the main thing that matters: whether or not they are good and tasty strawberries. Whether or not they’re the type of strawberries a person would buy again. Whether or not they’re the type of strawberries a person would tell their friends to go buy.

So: be great. The first thing about getting your team, writing or talking about your company is having something that’s worth sharing, something that’s worth getting excited about. If you want potential employees to see what a great company it is to work at, then it does need to be a great company or at least have elements of greatness within it. If there isn’t a single thing that you can think of that is great, that is worth sharing with others, then most probably your focus should be on fixing that first.

The second thing is to be authentic. The stories that your team will tell need to come from them – you can’t give them a script or a brief and tell them to go and evangelise. It needs to have that human voice.

“On their deathbed, nobody will say: If only I’d engaged more with brands.” – Kathy Sierra

Remember this is about employees starting conversations with potential employees. It’s not The Brand having those conversations, it’s actual humans.

Third, be open. Be willing to share information and stories and data about your company. Not every company will be able to share everything – but get a good understanding of what things your team can talk about and share, and make sure they’re aware that they can.

Give them a compelling reason

The second area we need to look at is giving each person a compelling reason. With this I mean look at the personal motivations for each team member. What will drive each of them to share what they do with others? I’ll give a couple examples of what I think are the most common motivations.

Helping others – these are the people that share what they know, cause it will directly help someone else. They might not necessarily want to stand in the spotlight, but they know that if they do, they can make someone’s life easier.

Building confidence in communication – in most of our day-to-day work we rely on communication to others . Doing a blog post or giving a talk or workshop are extreme examples on that spectrum, but becoming a better speaker or writer will help people in their job, and for some this is the main reason why they will want to get better at it.

Building personal reputation – these are the people that want to stand in the spotlight and have the focus on them. A variant of this are the people that want to be experts in a specific thing – they want to show that they have mastered a specific topic.  

These aren’t the only motivations that people have, but I think these are the most popular 3 especially when it comes to getting your team to share what they do. Understanding which of these apply to each team member ties in with helping them actually build the skills they need and understanding what types of stories and problems they want to share.

Help them keep wanting to

Now that we know what each team member’s goal is how do you encourage them to keep working on this? I think there are 2 sides to this:

First: what makes them stop? You need to understand what each person’s fears and blockers are. I often hear things like I’m not an expert, I can’t write, nothing I do is worth sharing. They’re all valid fears and reasons why someone will stop or will never get started. But once you know what their fears and blockers are, you can help them come up with a plan to overcome them.

The flip side of this is: what pulls them forward? Make them set a goal, like speak at a conference in a year’s time or write a full length blog post in 2 months time and help them break this big goal into more manageable chunks. I haven’t quite done this with my team yet, but am in the process of creating some progression paths for writing, speaking and workshops, so that people can pick and choose from these when setting their personal goals with their line managers.

Finally: lead by example. Make sure your team is not only aware of the things that you do, but also how you got there. For instance, when I started this 2 years back, I hadn’t ever spoken at a conference before. Even now I still get super nervous giving talks. So I know the types of fears my team were feeling – I’ve been there – but constantly sharing with them what my journey has been and how I deal with my fears and nerves, it shows my team that this is just as attainable for them as it was for me.

Help them actually get better

The final and largest area to look at is how to help your team actually get better. How do you help them improve their skills?

The first part of this is perpetual exposure. This is the idea that to become better at something, to become an expert at something, you need to be exposed to high quality examples of the things that you’re trying to get better at. In this case of getting people to share things make sure your team is exposed to good examples of other people sharing.

So to start: have a library. This doesn’t have to be just books, but also blog posts, articles, screencasts, videos, basically any content that is worth sharing with your team. What are good examples of content that other people have created? Besides that we’ve also got lists of recommended material to help people get started with public speaking and writing.

Another thing we organise is Talks We Love – in this we watch a recorded video of a talk together that one person on the team really enjoyed or found useful, followed by a discussion on things we might want to do ourselves.

Beyond highlighting external content, you also need to try to highlight existing good internal content. Our teams are already creating content: just think about good commit messages, or emails or slack messages explaining things. Most of the time it just requires someone pointing out to them ‘did you consider turning that into a blog post? Or a talk? Or a workshop?’. Be that voice that champions the work that they’re already doing.

The second part of helping your team get better – is giving them the time and space for deliberate practice. Rather than throwing them in the deep end – you need to allow them to build these skills gradually. I’ll give a few examples of how we support practice with speaking and writing. They’re not the only things we do, but it’s just to give you a sense of what types of activities and support you should be thinking of.

Lightning Talks: These happen every 4-6 weeks and anyone in the company can give a quick 5 minute talk about anything they want. This is a great way to get people to recognise that they have something worth talking about and it gives them the experience and confidence to do more talks.

Learning Hours: In these one person on the team, teaches something they think other people might find useful. These tend to be more hands-on and workshop like. And these can be about anything – past learning hours have been about command line tools, how to run retrospectives and understanding database indexes better. Rather than learning to speak in front of a larger audience – this allows people to practice these skills in front of a smaller group of people they’re already working with.

Conference Club:  This is an internal meetup for everyone that wants to speak at conferences to get together and help each other with everything that goes into creating a conference talk. So coming up with talk ideas, helping write proposals, giving feedback on practice runs. It’s making sure that people aren’t doing this completely by themselves.

Collaboration blog posts: We pick a specific topic, like women that inspire us or foreign words that we like, and ask for paragraph submissions. So rather than having to commit to a full length blog post, we get people started with writing small snippets.

Internal Blog: Another thing we have is our internal blog, for sharing problems or stories with the wider team. Again rather than having to publish something immediately for the entire world, we basically provide a stepping stone inbetween.

So give your team the time and space to practice these new skills. These won’t grow overnight and you need to create a supportive environment if you want to get everyone involved.

What was the effect on our team?

So what was the effect of all this on our team? Now when I started this role we barely had anyone from our product team writing blog posts or speaking at events. Here are some stats of where we got to now.

Not including the people that joined our team recently, about 35% of our team have now done an external talk. That percentage rises to 60% when we take into account the lightning talks and to 78% when we add the learning hours. With blog posts we’ve got 75% of our team that have written full length blog posts, and 89% when we include the collaboration posts. And the awesome thing is, if we combine this all, this means that everyone in our team is sharing their knowledge in some way.

Tying it back to the start of this post – from the last round of hiring, 50% of the interviewees explicitly mentioned having seen a talk or read a blog post. This wasn’t us asking them if they had – this is the percentage of people that brought it up themselves in their conversations with us. So the actual number might actually be higher.

Final thoughts

If there’s one thing you take away from this blog post, let it be this: Every team can do this, but more importantly I think every team should do this.

While I think employee evangelism is great for your company, in the end it’s about making our community great. Embedding these type of practices within every company means that we get more people sharing what they do, and what they love. If we want to see more diverse speakers at events, if we want to see more diverse writers share their stories, we need to support everyone to learn these skills and as tech leads we are in positions to change this.

So I want you all to think about this – the next time you came across something that one of your colleagues have done that could help someone else, help them to share it with the world. And maybe next year thanks to you, they will be somewhere on a stage sharing that story and trying to make the community a better place.

Enjoyed this post and want more? You might like: Blogging tips: How to start writing , How I got into conference speaking and Imposter Syndrome: How we act and work together.

Curious about how we do more things at FutureLearn? Read our “Making FutureLearn” posts.

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2012

It’s Thursday, July 19th 2012.

That evening after sunset there will be a fire garden installation at the National Theatre, to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic Torch in London. My friends and I plan to check it out, cause pyrotechnics (do I need to say more?). Since it’s lovely weather, we agree to meetup earlier that evening at the Southbank and have dinner somewhere around there.

Now up until this day I think we all felt slightly cynical about the Olympics. In the past few months there have been constant subtle reminders that this is going to happen, but to us it’s mostly materialized as station closures, roadworks and other disruptions to our daily lives. There’s this wary acceptance that ‘yes, this is going to happen’, but it’s mainly going to throw the city into turmoil and be an annoying thing that we’ll need to deal with while we continue with our day-to-day. The Olympics are an event that we Londoners need to weather, not enjoy.

That evening those feelings disappear.

The moment I emerge from the underground tube station at Waterloo, I can sense that the city feels different. Just walking through the buzz and busyness of the Southbank you can tell that the cynicism has been replaced with this feeling of anticipation and hopefulness. Everywhere around me people are laughing, random strangers are enjoying conversations and there’s a general vibe that everyone is waiting with bated breath to see what happens next.

The air is full of not just excitement, but this collective feeling of pride of our city, of our London. The Olympics are coming and we’re going to show the world what it means to be a Londoner, to be a Brit. We’re going to welcome these athletes from all of the world and cheer them all on as they set their records and do amazing feats.

In the weeks that follow, my friends and I get thoroughly swept up in the Olympic spirit. We manage to get tickets to several of the actual events, watching various sports up close – and when we can’t get tickets, we attend the fringe events at the parks and Olympic Houses. Everywhere you go the city is cheering on the triumphs of the world.

This is our city and our city is celebrating.

2016

It’s Friday, June 24th 2016.

That evening after work, friends of mine have pre-organized a meetup in the pub, jokingly mentioning the chances of needing a drink that evening. It’s been in my calendar for a few days, but I casually dismiss it as a fun moment to meetup with friends, not expecting that maybe I might actually need a drink that evening.

Now up until this point I think we all felt worried that Brexit could happen. It’s not until I wake up that morning and see that the result is LEAVE that it truly sinks in that today is a turning point.

Walking through London that morning – it feels like a city in mourning, with people expressing their grief in different ways. My trip on the tube, while never a very social experience, seems full of much more solemn quietness than usual. While catching up with friends and colleagues at the conference where I’m at that day, I can see the panic and defeat in their eyes. My entire Twitter and Facebook feeds are full of finger-pointing and blame and distrust, tons of voices lamenting the fact that we could ever get this far. And at the end of the day, there’s a flurry of people flocking to their closest pubs hoping to drink away the end of the world as they know it.

I’m not going to comment on the politics of this all – there’s still a lot that seems super vague to me. There are much more knowledgeable people than me out there who can explain what might happen and what we can do. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know what effects this will have on me, on my friends, on my colleagues.

But: I want my city back.

I want that London that we got during the Olympics. A London that is hopeful – a London that can stand strong and show the world that ‘yep, things suck, but we can get through this’. No matter what happens, this entire pointing fingers at each other, blaming this group or that, criticising the things we could have done differently, it’s not helping. If we keep looking back and bemoaning the things that could have been, we’ll wallow in the world of ‘What-If’ and never make a difference.

We’ve had our day of mourning.

What’s next?

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I also initially thought it was going to be another live-action but-slightly-different adaption like Alice in Wonderland and Malificent, but it turns out they’re keeping most of the songs from the animation! Plus the cast sounds amazing: Emma Watson as Belle, Dan Stevens as The Beast, Luke Evans as Gaston, Emma Thompson as Mrs. Potts, Ewan McGregor as Lumière, Ian McKellen as Cogsworth, Kevin Kline as Maurice, Josh Gad as LeFou… yeah, I’m totally onboard for this!

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These tips aren’t really about how to get you blogging more often or how to set up your blog – rather, it’s about how to write a long form blog post/article. There’s also a lot of overlap here between how I approach creating my blog posts and my talks: you could easily apply a lot of these tips to creating a talk too!

What story are you trying to tell?

Before writing anything, I try to sit down and think through all the different aspects of my blog post. For starters, who am I writing this post for? Are they other developers? Users of my product? Fans of a TV show? What’s their background, what do they know? Knowing who you’re writing for frames the entire article – for me, it makes it easier to understand and define the scope of what you’re attempting to write.

Once you know who you’re writing this post for, think about what story you’re telling them. What is it that you want them to take away from this post? What’s the key message? Are you trying to convince them of something? Are you sharing something that you did? Have an idea of what effect you want to have on your audience.

Create an outline

My process of writing typically begins with post-it notes. I’ll start with all the key points I want to make, including some of the answers I came up with to the questions in the previous section. Once I’ve got all those post-its I start grouping them and moving them around to create different sections. What I like about this method is that it allows me to play around with how I tell the story – it’s easier to move post-its around and come up with the structure that works best without being bogged down in paragraphs and paragraphs of text.

When done right, the groupings of post-it notes give me a good idea of the flow of my blog post. I’ll know what points I need to make in my intro and conclusion, plus the groupings will give me a rough idea of headings and their paragraphs. Of course, you might not necessarily have any post-its handy, but I think the main lesson is to think about the overall structure before diving in to write something.

Write the part that comes easiest to you

Once you know what to write, actually sitting down and writing can be quite tough. For me, it depends on the type of blog post, but often I’ll find that it’s the opening and intro I struggle the most with. In those cases: I initially just skip it and leave it for last. Start with whatever section is most clear in your mind and write it! There’s nothing stopping you from writing the post in the same order that somebody reads it.

Refactor and rewrite

It’s rare I’ll write something that I’m completely happy with in one go. Typically I’ll have an initial draft and go through it completely again – cutting parts, moving paragraphs around and turning it into a better story. Just like with refactoring code, you need to keep in mind that it’s all about making the end product better. Sometimes I’ll have written a sentence or paragraph that I completely love, but I know I need to cut, cause it just doesn’t work.

It will never be perfect

Finally, the main thing I’ve had to accept is that whatever I do none of my posts will ever be ‘perfect’. It’s sometimes super tricky to hit that publish button on something that you feel could be better, yet at the same time you can’t keep every single post in a drafted state forever.

Even now, just looking at this post, I feel as if maybe I’ve forgotten something, maybe there’s something else that should be included in this list. But it’s been hanging around in a draft state for about 2 weeks now and I haven’t made that many changes.

Waiting for perfection just gets in the way of sharing you know and helping others.

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Sense8

What if 8 people each in different parts of the world were suddenly mentally connected? That’s pretty much the main premise of Sense8. It’s created by the Wachowskis and J Michael Straczynski, and they’ve gone on record saying they have all 5 seasons figured out. Whether or not we’ll get to see all those seasons… Hopefully! The first season starts off a bit slow and the characters initially feel quite sterotypical, but stick with it. I think this show really made me question my own beliefs about the world, the people around me and how I see myself, which is a rare thing to find in a TV show.

Mr Robot

Most of the time when TV shows or movies feature ‘hackers’ or ‘developers’, chances are they won’t be portrayed very realistically and that’s putting it mildly (case in point: Scorpion with their Ferrari + airplane + ethernet cable). In Mr Robot though, we find a reasonably realistic hacker in our main character, Elliot (Rami Malek), who’s recruited by the mysterious anarchist Mr Robot to take down one of the largest corporations in the world. It’s a great show and thoughout the entire first season I couldn’t quite guess where the story was going. Still can’t. I’ve got my own theories of where it might be headed, but am so curious to find out whether I’m right or not.

The Man In The High Castle

Based on the Philip K Dick novel of the same name, The Man In The High Castle is set in an alternative 1960s America where Germany and Japan have won the Second World War. The east coast of the US is controlled by the Nazi’s greater reach, while the Japanese empire rules the west coast. The pacing of the show is a bit slow, but I think that helped build the atmosphere – there are a lot of scenes that maybe don’t necessarily move the main story forward, but they show what this alternative world is like – how would people behave? What would people aspire to? How would our world have changed?

The Expanse

Another show based on a book series (written by James S.A. Corey), this show is set two hundred years in a future where humanity has colonised the Solar System. The first season follows several characters: the main ones being Detective Miller (Thomas Jane), a police officer on Ceres; James Holden (Steven Strait), the executive officer of the ice trawler Canterbury; and Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), the U.N. Deputy Undersecretary. Again, it takes a couple of episodes to get into, but I love that we’ve got a proper space SF show on TV. The cinematography, visual effects and set design are all awesome, creating a believable futuristic yet somewhat grim world. The next season won’t be airing until 2017, so I’m super tempted to read the books now!

What are your favourite shows you’ve watched recently? Let me know in the comments!

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Ooh, this is looking like fun! There’s also a really cool hidden link to Paranormal Studies Lab within the trailer (apparently hidden within the physics equation): so geeky!

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Marquet has also written a book about this topic called ‘Turn The Ship Around!‘, which goes into more detail on how to apply Marquet’s approach to create a workplace where everyone takes responsibility for their actions. I’ve just started reading it and so far it’s great.

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I’ve featured my 4 favourite dresses here, but check out the entire 16 dresses of the collection, they’re all wonderful!

LB Code Print Dress

It’s a dress with code on it! And not just any code: it’s the source code of DOOM. Want.

Also: if you want your own code on your dress, you can get that for an additional fee.

Fibonacci Sequence Dress

We use the Fibonacci sequence for our estimation sessions (to give a rough idea of how much work we think certain features will involve) and I just love the idea of wearing a Fibonacci dress specifically for those!

Circuitry Print Panel Dress

If you want something geeky but a bit more subtle, go for this dress. It features a lovely circuitry print and doesn’t obviously scream geeky as much as the others.

Blueprint Rocket Scientist Dress

I love this dress: it features NASA blueprints of Apollo lander on the front and the Saturn V rocket on the back. Check out the photos of the back, cause it’s awesome.

As I said at the start of my post, I’ve only featured my 4 favourite dresses here, but check out the entire 16 dresses of the collection!

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