In preparation for the conferences I'm attending this fall, I came up with a hundred questions. In doing that, I found that I had at least a hundred stories behind them.
I knew I'd be meeting lots of people at LeadDev StaffPlus and the Grace Hopper Celebration. I wanted something fun to hand out so people might remember who I was.
When Ben Lloyd Pearson of DevInterrupted mentioned at the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit that he was handing out affirmations, I suspected he was onto something.
After his talk, I asked him about the affirmations. He presented me with a deck of small cards and invited me to choose one.
I chose “Delete the code you don’t want to see in the world” from the deck. Clever!
I tried to copycat, but I only came up with two or three affirmations. But once I decided to make it “questions for reflection” instead, then the ideas started to come to me.
Questions
I thought of 50 questions pretty quickly. That's enough to make a full set of cards.
And then I thought of another 50 questions.
I made a design, using my creature friend. Then I whisked them off to moo.com. Here’s a moo.com referral link that gets both you and me a discount, if you want to try something like this yourself.
The “soft touch” finish that MOO’s website bot suggested turned out not to be what I was looking for. They came out more silky than smooth, which makes it hard to draw just one card.
But otherwise, I’m pleased with how they came out.
Here are a few of the questions I liked best:
- How do you meet other developers at your level? Do you have peers you can reach out to as sounding boards?
- What does "developer experience" mean to you? To your boss?
- How do you think organizations might change with AI? Team size? IT and business integration? New roles?
They weren't all developer-specific, though:
- Think of times when you were very busy. When was it draining? When was it energizing?
- Are there skills you're great at but don't want to use professionally?
- What parts of your job do you dread? How can you do less of that?
They were a hit at LeadDev! Looking forward to handing out more at Grace Hopper.
I kept offering a second card to anyone who didn't like the one they drew, but just about everyone said "oh, this is a good one," or "wow, this is really appropriate for me right now."
It was also fun for me to watch people reading and reacting to them. I realized that I have at least one story to tell for every question.
Stories
At least one person caught on that the questions came from my personal experience. But rather than telling my stories, I focused on listening to the stories that arose instead.
Stories are also the frameworks for the talks I've given. My talk at LeadDev StaffPlus was entirely centered on one story, sharing the lessons learned along the way.
And I think the stories are helping me, as a writer, to be more comfortable as a speaker. I've started approaching speaking events as an opportunity for storytelling. Then I'm using my skills as a writer to figure out the structure of the talk.
I wrote up notes about it for my blog: Writer enjoys speaking.
Speaking at StaffPlus was so fun that now I want to be on more stages. Just need to identify the stories that are worth telling and the audience they need!
Drop me a note
I would love to hear from you. Hit reply and let me know what's on your mind, or where else I should consider speaking.
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