Upcoming & Past Appearances

Making Accessibility Testing Suck Less: An Intro to Pa11y. (video)
Society (n+1).0: smashing the patriarchy and other ways of changing the world (video)

January 8th-11th, 2019

Codemash

Sandusky, Ohio

Handling Angular 2+ Forms Without Losing Your Sanity
Lash It Up! A Speakers Guide to Being Extra (lightning talk)

December 6th-7th, 2018

Stretch Conference

Budapest, Hungary

The 10 Commandments of Community Organizing

November 14th-15th, 2018

PHP[WORLD]

Washington, DC

Hacking your work life __ balance to take over the world

November 8th, 2018

Tribute to Success

Kansas City, Missouri

Keynote

November 2nd, 2018

RVA JS

Richmond, VA

Handling Angular 2+ Forms Without Losing Your Sanity

November 1st, 2018

Thunderplains

Oklahoma City, OK

Jewelbots: How to Get More Girls Coding!

October 21st-23rd, 2018

All Things Open

Raleigh, North Carolina

Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding!
The 10 Commandments of Community Organizing

October 13th, 2018

Women Techmakers Leads Summit '18

New York, NY

Hacking your work life __ balance to take over the world (video)

October 8th-10th, 2018

Devup Conference

St. Louis, MO

Hacking your work life __ balance to take over the world
Handling Angular 2+ Forms Without Losing Your Sanity

September 21st, 2018

PubConf Sydney - CHAMPION!

Sydney, Australia

If Choosing a JavaScript Framework Was Like an Episode of the Bachelor

September 17th-21st, 2018

NDC Sydney

Sydney, Australia

Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding!
There Are No Snow Days When You Work Remote

August 6th-8th, 2018

That Conference

Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin

Hacking your work life __ balance to take over the world

July 13th, 2018

PubConf Kansas City

Kansas City, Missouri

How to Run a Dev Team ... Into the Ground

July 11th-13th, 2018

Kansas City Developer Conference

Kansas City, Missouri

Hacking your work life __ balance to take over the world

June 14th, 2018

PubConf Oslo

Oslo, Norway

How to Run a Dev Team ... Into the Ground

June 11th-15th, 2018

NDC Oslo

Oslo, Norway

Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding! (video)
Hacking your work life __ balance to take over the world (video)

June 6th-8th, 2018

Nebraska Code

Council Bluffs, Iowa

Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding!
Hacking your work life __ balance to take over the world

May 16th-18th, 2018

We Are Developers

Vienna, Austria

Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding! (video)

April 21st, 2018

KALAMAZOO X

Kalamazoo, Michigan

Does Evil Really Exist?

February 17th, 2018

DevFestKC

Kansas City, Missouri

Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding!

January 15-19th, 2018

NDC London

Westminster, London

Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding! (video)

January 9-12th, 2018

Codemash

Sandusky, Ohio

Making Accessibility Testing Suck Less; An Intro to Pa11y.
Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding!

October 16-18th, 2017

Devup Conference

St. Louis, Missouri

Why Aren't There More Women Developers?
Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding!

September 9th, 2017

Elevate Women

San Diego, California

Should is a Fantasy Word

August 13th-18th, 2017

DjangoConUS

Spokane, Washington

The 10 Commandments of Community Organizing (video)

August 2nd-4th, 2017

Kansas City Developer Conference

Kansas City, Missouri

Why Aren't There More Women Developers?
Jewelbots; How to Get More Girls Coding!

June 22nd-24th, 2016

Kansas City Developer Conference

Kansas City, Missouri

Staying Inspired; The Power of Developer Communities

June 24th-26th, 2015

Kansas City Developer Conference

Kansas City, Missouri

Gender Imbalance & the Understated Importance of Mentoring in Technology
Stubs, mocks, and spies, oh my! A beginner's guide to JavaScript testing

October 9th, 2014

Thunderplains

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

The Importance of Building Developer Communities (video)

July 19th, 2014

Iowa Code Camp

Iowa City, Iowa

Mentoring - The Future of Technology Education

May 15th-17th, 2014

Kansas City Developer Conference

Kansas City, Missouri

The Importance of Building Developer Communities

Talks

Future-Proof Your Company by Effectively Scaling Engineering Teams

The current market for hiring senior developers is brutal, and there's no foreseeable relief. The pool of experienced, senior-level engineers is shrinking rapidly, and sometimes even winning the salary bidding war isn't enough to acquire the skills your company needs to move product forward. The demand simply outweighs any institution's ability to produce hit-the-ground-running ready developers. If companies want to be successful in the future they need to start building the workforce they want to see. Creating a sustainable model that ensures your engineering teams will be able to scale to deliver your company's product must include growth strategies beyond just what you can hire. This talk will cover how to interview better, how to spot skill gaps in current team members, how to build sustainable mentoring processes that don't overburden the current team, and how to create a long-term growth environment.

Slides

The Problems Micro Frontends Won't Solve That No One Wants to Talk About

Everyone wants to ship more software faster, and following the lead of the MicroServices craze the front-end community has begun to reach for Micro Frontends as a silver bullet solution. Micro Frontends promise large teams the ability to independently ship pieces of applications without code collisions, bug creation, that can be team-agnostic, and with Webpack 5 leaning in to offer Module Federation, this seems to be the way of the future. But what problems aren't solved by Micro Frontends? There is a large gap in what large complex teams need to ship better software and what Micro Frontends are able to provide ... and that gap is the basis of this talk. We'll discuss what Micro Frontends are, approaches and tools to using this architecture pattern, and discuss the consequences that arise that no on seems to want to talk about.

Slides

Indiana Jones and the Hidden Secrets of the Forms API

You may know basic Angular forms, but what hidden secrets will you unlock when importing the ReactiveForms Module? Come on an architectural adventure where we explore hidden gems of the Angular Forms API and learn how to use them to save humanity from scary, messily-written code.

Slides

Angular Magic with Angular Schematics

Learn how to take advantage of writing Angular Schematics to boost your teams productivity.

Slides

Onboard New Developers Faster with Custom Snippets!

Onboarding developers to new projects can be a time consuming process, especially if there's not dedicated documentation explaining the ins & outs of your codebase or the brilliant design system your team created. You can help ease this process by creating code snippets of your project's custom components for new team members to use! Learn how to build and share custom snippets in VS Code, Sublime, and Atom and spend less time with onboarding woes!

Slides

Hacking Your Work Life __ Balance To Take Over The World.

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, so how do some people seem accomplish so much more? It’s time to learn to hack your work life __ balance to have more time to pursue your passion projects, spend more time with those you love, while keeping your work ethic strong. Let’s take over the world!

Slides

Handling Angular Forms Without Losing Your Sanity

“Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?” - Avril Lavigne, implementing Angular forms in 2019. Forms are such a basic part of web applications; how did they get so complicated? This talk will very briefly walk through Angular template driven vs. reactive forms and use cases for their implementation, then move into more complex form validation, custom component implementations like typeahead and date-pickers, and use of the little known but quite powerful Control Value Accessor to handle the trickiest of form problems! This talk will also include some useful workarounds for those more complex PITA requirements that always seem to pop up in projects. You will leave imbued with the power of the CVA.

Slides

Building Blazing Fast Super Performant Static Sites with Gatsby JS

This workshop is your chance to update your personal website, get a blog going, and blow people's minds with your green Lighthouse scores while serving brilliant content. Gatsby.js is modern static site generator for React with performance in mind. In this workshop we'll walk through spinning up a new blog, build out custom data, dabble in GraphQL, explore performance audit tools like Lighthouse and WebPageTest, and ultimately render and launch a wonderfully optimized and performant site. Are you ready to get your JAMstack on?

Slides

Leadership Without a Paycheck

People quit bosses, not jobs. In managing a team of volunteers - there is no paycheck on the table and people stay solely based on your leadership competency and ability to lead them towards a common goal. Learn lessons from many years of managing a volunteer team and what it means to be a true leader. With these techniques you can build + lead a passionate, talented team anywhere.

Slides

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Your Code)

Does your code spark joy? Marie Kondo’s art of tidying has taken the world by storm, especially since the release of her Netflix special. What can we learn by taking the Japanese art of tidying and decluttering to applying it our codebases? Let’s embark on a magic refactoring journey to find out. “Tidying in the end is just a physical act. The work involved can be broadly divided into two kinds: deciding whether or not to dispose of something and deciding where to put it. If you can do these two things, you can achieve perfection.”

Slides

Jewelbots: How To Get More Girls Coding!

Girls just wanna have fun … coding their own programmable jewelry! Jewelbots are the latest in wearable tech with a great feature - they allow you to write your own code. This live demo of programming with Jewelbots will introduce you to the Jewelbots API, showcase the latest awesome firmware updates(and how to get them), highlight fun projects, and talk through tips on running workshops, mentoring, teaching, & encouraging young women in tech. Loops are easy to understand when accompanied by color coordinated led lights!

Slides

Become an Accessibility BFF with your new friend Pa11y!

Like Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen, Pa11y is an accessibility tester’s BFF. You already have a million issues on your plate, so how do you find a way to get started on accessibility testing? Pa11y to the rescue! Pa11y is a lightweight JS a11y testing tool with some serious “it” factor. This talk will explain what pa11y does and does not cover, review examples of both command line and scripted usage, dive into the pa11y web service and show how to best accessorize a Pa11y setup with your current testing process. Bonus content: how to convince the rest of your team and business why accessibility is totally worth prioritizing and how getting started with low-hanging fruit can vastly glamorize your product. Now you can take on creating a more accessible product like S & B take on the Upper East Side. XOXO Accessibility Girl 💋

Slides

There Are No Snow Days When You Work Remote.

There’s been a huge push towards working remote lately - but is it the best choice for everyone? With different personalities and different work styles, developers may or may not be a great fit for a remote-work lifestyle. This talk will explore how to decide when working remotely is a good fit for someone personally, and how to figure out it their current or potential employer is capable of supporting remote work in a way that allows employees to be successful. The meat of this talk will be HOW to make #remotelife work for you by discussing strategies, best practices, and boundary-setting + changing thought patterns to make remote work successful and fulfilling.

Slides

The 10 Commandments Of Community Organizing

Welcome to the advanced class on community organizing. You’ve got a decent amount of members in your Meetup.com group, you hold events fairly routinely, maybe you’ve pulled in some legit speakers at your last conference or event … and you want to do more. This talk will focus on community organizing for growth and longevity by building out teams, improving communications, implementing processes, and most importantly will discuss how to maintain sanity in your work-life-volunteer balance. If you’ve ever had to answer the question “Oh, this ISN’T your full time job???” - this talk is definitely for you. If you’re just starting out organizing and don’t want to fall flat on your face, this talk will be very pragmatic for you.

Slides

Why Aren't There More Women Developers?

I have been asked this question more times than I can count in the last few years. In the last few years, I have also typically been the only female developer at the companies I worked at. What’s the deal? In 1984 women were at an all-time high for enrollment in Computer Science, at 39%. We’ve seen a steep drop since then. There’s a lot of speculation as to why and I’ll highlight some reasons for you, but if we want to solve the diversity in tech problem we’ll need to stop speculating and take action. I will highlight programs that are working towards gender balance in technology and talk about how to bring them to your community and through mentoring and advocating.

Slides