GopherConAU was a blast! Not only did I present a talk on learning Go, but I also had the chance to lead two half-day workshops, introducing a new group of developers to the Go language.
If you're curious, I wrote about my experiences in more detail here:
Involved in the Melbourne Golang Meetup since 2015. Running a workshop at the Go Hack Day March 2016
At our October 2023 Meetup I presented some key takeaways from GopherConAU 2023. there was a lot to cover. It was a great event. Always inspiring to hear from others. I have written up some of the talks I attended.
It has been amazing to see the growth of the Go community over the years. When I first conducted the survey in 2016 we had only 6 people reporting that the worked at a company that used Go. In this years survey, presented at our June 2023 Meetup at ANZ, people from over 40 different companies reported that they use Go at work.
At the inaugural GopherConAU I was asked to run a one day intoriduction to Go Workshop. It was a great day. When GopherConAU returned in 2023 I ran the worksop again.
Workshop description
"Description
An introduction with lots of hands on practice
• Development Environment
• Programming Fundamentals
• An introduction to the basic syntax of the language
• Debugging
Prerequisites
None! If you already know, how to code, please consider William's
or/and Roman's workshops.
What an attendee is expected to learn
• Learning in a friendly environment
• The initial setup to get started with Go"
GopherConAU Workshops
The repo for the workshop: https://github.com/leahgarrett/go-intro-workshop
An online Women Who Code event Thursday, April 29, 2021
The talk aimed to review when and where to use CSS animation. There was a focus on enhancing usability. Animated introducing and removing screen elements to avoid surprise or confusion.
The attendees had a range of experience. There were some great discussion around best practices.
Talk description:
"April Animation! Come along to this workshop and learn how to create
animations with CSS. No need for fancy and complicated tools, the
knowledgeable Leah will show you what you need to know on Codepen. We
can't wait to see you there."
A Women Who Code event Thursday, August 26, 2021
This talk had no prerequesites so provided a fun way to review coding basics.
Using the weather API An in person Women Who Code event Thursday, January 30, 2020.
This workshop used a step by step walk through to use a public API.
Repo of the talk with sample solutions for each step:
https://github.com/leahgarrett/go-intro-workshop-wwc
As host I have occasionally stepped up and presented. I have presented several times. The talks for DDD by Night are lightning talks, so I have made shorted versions of other talks.
For Melbourne DDD conference I volunteered as speaker coordinator. We ran some abstract creation workshops (I used a lot of the content for the Global CFP Day) and speaker training sessions where I asked speakers to prepare a 5 minute talk to practice. I ran it a few time. When people got to practise multiple times it was amazing to see the improvement. Also, from a facilitator perspective, it was great to be a part of feedback people were all giving one another.
Some speakers for DDD attended the Global Diversity Call For Papers Day at Microsoft.
I have co-hosted this event a couple times. It is a one day workshop with lots of activities to get people started on their conference speaking journey.
From the event description:
"We have 3 lightning talks on different aspects of remote work
followed by Q & A - and will keep the conversation going afterwards
with casual chat and networking with the presenters."
The three lightning talks were from a designer, a developer and an agile coach (Does that sound like the start of a bad joke? :P ).
The host pointed out the different tools we used to present; the designer presented in Figma, the agile coach used Google slides and I, the developer, used an app built with Revealjs. The presentation was hosted on Netlify so I could easily present on someone else's computer.
How remote work has changed our crafts - streaming & in person
Thursday, May 13, 2021
The hype cycle did not seem to have peaked yet and a lot of developers and web professionals did not know what the impact might be, if in fact they needed to become hardware people.
I first presented this talk at a Melbourne Port80 Meetup event in September 2014. Most of the attendees were small to large web agency owners. My focus was to assure them that there is space for web professionals in the IoT. IoT will need front-ends and dashboards which will likely be web based. In fact I went on to develop a web dashboard for an IoT solution as part of the Telstra IoT Hackathon.
Additionally, I presented the talk at Alt .Net Meetup where I received great feedback. People had heard the hype but did not really understand what it was all about. For this version of the talk I made the content a bit more technical, going over some publisher-subscriber examples to show how current knowledge can be used in this domain.
Talk description:
"Where do we fit in with the internet of things?
A dive into some examples and look to where we will be in relation to
the internet of things personally and professionally. This is more
than just turning on the security system and heating. Leah Garrett
will present to us on her current passion."
Melbourne Port80 Meetup
