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hi everyone thank you so much for coming to my talk here welcome to railsconf
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2021 I'm here to talk to you today about how to engineer in Dei tangible steps
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for teams so hello my name is Jeannie Evans I use
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she her pronouns I am a software engineer at snapdocs I live in Denver Colorado with my
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partner Tegan and my cat zombie and we are into all the Denver activities we
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like Mountain hikes we like going to breweries and parks and recently one of our favorite quarantine activities is we
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just got a bird feeder and it's right outside the window so we love watching our cat watch the birds it's been a
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really exciting past couple of weeks um sometimes this girl shows up anyways
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uh thank you so much for showing up this topic of Dei and how to engineer it in
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is it can be a heavy one and it can also be very draining emotionally mentally
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and even physically so thank you so much for showing up and engaging
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so what are we talking about today we're going to start off with what is di we're going to Define that
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a little bit more of a lengthy introduction because some of this might be new to you
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um some of this might be review but we're really going to dive into this introduction and get on the same page
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next we're going to be talking about Engineering in Dei so that's where those tangible steps for teams comes in quick
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wrap up and then we will have a live q a so that live q a is Thursday April 15th
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from 3 40 P.M to 4 10 p.m Eastern Time
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there's also a Discord Channel I think it might be displayed somewhere
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um it should be visible to you now feel free to ask questions come hang out I'm going to be checking it throughout the
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conference and I will also be posting a lot of resources uh I am just taking a
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sliver out of what is Dei in engineering today so I'm going to be adding lots of
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resources and feel free let's just keep that conversation going as much as you'd like throughout the conference
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so what is Dei Dei stands for diversity equity and inclusion
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diversity is the presence of differences so that might include race nationality sexual orientation religion age ability
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or disability Etc Equity is promoting Justice impartiality
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and fairness within the procedures processes and distribution of resources by institutions or systems so you might
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recognize this picture on the right I have seen I think the first time I saw something like this it was
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um it was like this this same kind of image but they were looking over
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um a fan set a baseball game now inclusion is really kind of what we're talking about today because what I
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really want to hit on and touch upon today is like what can we do in our engineering bubble okay
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um and you know there's only so much that we can do as Engineers about diversity next week when we go back to
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work okay there's only so much we can do about Equity um in terms of like these procedures and
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processes but there is so much we can do about inclusion okay so inclusion is an
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outcome to ensure that those that are diverse are actually um or that are diverse actually feel
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and or are welcomed okay so we can kind of take this idea of inclusion and we
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can bake it right into our code so who am I um a little bit of a
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background about me so before Tech I had a career in education and non-profit work for about 10 years when I was
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getting my undergrad degree I studied International Affairs and peace studies
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so what does that mean it means I studied the anthropological side of post-conflict societies how do people
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reconcile how can Western influence help the reconciliation process how can it
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often harm the reconciliation process so Dei was a big part of just what I did
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and what I studied but you know all this is to say like I I love solving big
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complex seemingly impossible to solve problems and this is ultimately what led
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me to software engineering that and the fact that Educators don't get paid nearly enough to survive but that is a
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topic for another time so when I got into Tech I started asking
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the question how can we engineer in Dei like what can Engineers do and I asked
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us at meetups and conferences and presentations informally um in school and
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I I was just kind of uh bummed out by the answer I was just not satisfied because it would always kind of come
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back to make sure you Advocate talk to your manager put pressure on leadership talk to HR talk to product talk to
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design make sure that this is part of the product and I'm not satisfied with that answer
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because it's not answering the question and it's just putting the responsibility on other parties
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um but I want to know like what can we do so that's why I'm giving this talk today so this is this is me trying to answer
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that question and I'm going to share a little bit about how I've been able to
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um do that in my own work at snapdocs additionally um why should you care about this I care
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about this a lot why should you too first of all it's the right thing to do but if that's not enough you can think
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about it this way leadership managers and other folks are
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waking up to the fact that um diverse teams produce uh better results that's
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just a fact it's googleable I will put some articles about that in the Discord
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Channel but that's just that's just fact and it is no longer a better business
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business tactic to not include Dei if you think about 2020 that was a huge
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year um for social justice and change people are looking to leadership and saying we
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demand a change we're going to be really scrutin scrutinizing and we're going to make sure that we feel good about where
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we are spending our dollar so um you know it's really built into to
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the um the business case as well so moving forward we will start seeing
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more expectations that Engineers know what their role is in supporting Dei
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um and also we're the ones that build the damn thing so we have so much power okay like nothing gets done without
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without us putting in that work so uh let's use that to our advantage
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and lastly uh I do have some assumptions about the audience today that I want to share with you uh because we are in a
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virtual space I can't ask you to raise your hand if this is true for you or that's true for you
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um so what I'm assuming is that there's a lot of back-end engineers in the house probably some
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full stack as well I'm assuming that you have some experience with Agile development maybe
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the philosophy but and with some aspects of scrum ceremonies at least
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I'm also assuming that we have Engineers here who are of all experience levels
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and of differing levels of exposure to Dei both personally and professionally
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so what is Dei as an engineer so I think of Dei as an engineer like
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it's whitewashed it's lost it's meaning a little bit it's constantly changing
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um so what if we say active allyship okay that's a little better or maybe we
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should just scrap it let's just scrap it all together uh maybe the term co-conspirator is better that's actually
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kind of my personal favorite or accomplice but you know for our purposes
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today we're going to stick to the term active allyship emphasis on the active
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we cannot really call ourselves an ally we can't really identify um as one but we can participate in
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active allyship so there are phases to active allyship
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and I've seen a few different allyship Journey maps and philosophies but I'm gonna just stick to these two kind of
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painting a little bit of a broad brush but what I really want to hit upon today
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is this idea of awareness comes first and then action
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so awareness can be your self-awareness and systemic awareness so noting this
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image here you know I kind of I think of awareness as a pretty introspective time it's about digging deep you know
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self-awareness is about thinking like what is my unconscious bias uh where
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does it show up what have we been taught as children or by our communities that we have internalized what have we been
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taught about others that we've internalized what might we need to unlearn what might
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we need to learn about other people and about ourselves okay
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systemic awareness now systemic awareness is about uh you know what systems have you benefited from or on
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the flip what systems have been actively working against you now I'm going to
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pull a quote from building allies um and I'm going to read it to you now because I think it sums this up really
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really well generally as individuals we do not directly cause these inequalities
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those of us with privilege however directly benefit from these systems of inequity and we simultaneously maintain
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them even while wanting to change them
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so after we do a lot of work with awareness we can then start moving to action so personally this action can look like
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handing out pamphlets or protesting calling your local and state representatives it could look like
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um standing up for somebody who's actively being discriminated against or you
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notice there's microaggressions now that you've done this awareness maybe you're like that's a microaggression and you
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call it out in your own community now professionally this is a little bit more on theme with this talk today that
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could be like joining um ergs employee resource groups at your company
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um as an ally you could ask your company hey uh do we have a dni officer why why
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not how do we get there is our platform ADA Compliant why why not how do we get there
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now as I was thinking of a story to kind of demonstrate the importance of doing
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awareness first and action next um I realized that this story might be
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familiar to you um so what I have found uh just in my
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own research reflecting on my own work as a queer woman at work
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um was that something something happens very commonly to underrepresented people
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in the workplace where we go to our manager to complain about harassment or general disrespect
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and in an effort to take action the manager will bring in both parties to
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have some sort of mediation and the issue with this is that this is inviting someone who has already been
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harassed for being a member of an underrepresented group to an unsafe situation and
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also they don't have anything to talk about right they didn't do anything wrong so if that manager had done their
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homework they would know that that response isn't appropriate
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okay now let's uh talk a little bit about Engineering in Dei this is really
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where those tangible steps come in
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okay so first we're going to talk about agile workflow
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so again I'm assuming that you have some experience with agile and at least a little bit of aspects with scrum
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ceremonies like daily scrum retrospectives uh Sprint planning Sprint
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reviews so it's so important because so many of us
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um use this philosophy and workflow that um you know it's important for us to
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talk about this because it lays the foundation for what we do and how we do it and most importantly agile is begging
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for Dei to be a part of it and here's why
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so I'm going to show you why by highlighting some key themes of agile and this is what this kind of is what
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stood out to me so these first two are from the agile Manifesto
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individuals and interactions over processes and tools
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customer collaboration over contract negotiation these next two are from the 12
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principles behind the agile Manifesto business people and developers must work
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together daily throughout the project build projects around motivated
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individual individuals give them the environment and support they need and
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trust them to get the job done think you might be able to tell where I'm going with this and then lastly the
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concept of self-organizing teams now these first three are just inherently
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talking about diversity right when we treat folks as individuals when we truly
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treat them as individuals that there's inherent diversity there customer collaboration uh I think most
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companies want their customer base to be quite diverse and business people and developers must
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work together again uh business and developers they both have over-represented groups they both have
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underrepresented groups and uh probably very different levels of experience
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um go just even walking through life right so um again talking about diverse groups
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this fourth point is Dei okay um we cannot have motivated individuals
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a supportive environment or trust if we do not have active Dei
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so lastly self-organizing teams so when we are not incorporating Dei
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into our agile practices we run the risk of structurelessness so I'm pulling a
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little bit from the essay tyranny and structurelessness and I will put that in the Discord Channel as well
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so what structurelessness really means is that the informal structure takes
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precedent so this is giving power to those who already hold the greatest
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amount of power and the greatest amount of privilege in our society so these are power dynamics kind of
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infiltrating our agile flow so unfortunately these power dynamics
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don't just go away because we want them to they don't just go away because we've we've entered into a daily scrum or
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we've entered into a retro so what are some of the ways to act on that Dei that agile's asking for combat
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structurelessness in our professional communication and relationships and make sure our societal power structure is not
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the dominant force in our space so how do we do this
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um you guessed it active allyship so go back to that awareness you know you might be new uh again so that's why I'm
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uh kind of harping on this awareness piece but if this is not new to you still this is a constant growing
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evolving thing next is facilitation um facilitation uh these are real skill
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sets so if you are in a position to facilitate a meeting even if it's casual like I get to know you a new team member
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event um happy hours study this like you would study a new
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language or a framework study facilitation skill sets like you would study a new language or framework
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additionally provide a couple of ways to contribute writing meetings surveys and
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you know I know a lot of us have zoom fatigue I know I do but Zoom is actually
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a really great way that a lot of these different ways to contribute are all packaged together because you can mute
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yourself you can add a little emojis in the corner you can um raise your hand you can
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um there's the chat functionality so let's say you're facilitating a meeting and it's just like a little stale you
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know make sure you're reminding folks like hey you don't have to always just like unmute yourself you can uh throw an
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emoji in the corner or something uh just to just to continue that participation from everyone
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now the next idea to do this is Mob programming so mob programming is when
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you code together on teams to solve one problem so each team member has a role
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and you rotate through those roles so this kind of evens the playing field uh
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for juniors new folks and folks that have been uh traditionally silenced in
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the workplace and in society so again with those societal power dynamics okay
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so this gives a chance for everyone's voice and opinion uh to be heard everyone gets a chance to put their
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fingers on the keyboard um and this becomes really difficult for that loudest voice in the room to
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dominate the space this also has an effect on end users um
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if you think about this from the an age perspective so let's say that you have a group of people leading a project and
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they're all um like around the age of 30. we have lost the perspective of a huge
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percentage of our potential users so like anyone over 35 that's massive
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um and I'll give you an example of when I've seen this play out in my own life so recently we had a BuzzFeed quiz uh kind
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of floating around our family we were sharing it and the quiz was called how privileged are you
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and the idea behind these quizzes at least what I feel like is it's just meant to stimulate conversation you know
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the results are are um are so so but it's meant to kind of get the wheels
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turning so one of the questions was are your parents still together and my partner's mom was like no my parents
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aren't together they're not doing anything they've been dead for 15 years and you know she meant it kind of
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humorously but the impact was quite big because she lost trust in the results
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she lost trust in other people's results she lost trust in the platform uh she
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did not want to engage in the conversation so now apply that logic and reasoning to
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your users interacting with your platform and how easy it is for somebody to disengage and say this isn't really
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for me this is I can tell this is for this kind of person but it's not really for me and I can tell you as a lesbian
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woman that I have felt that way on pretty much most women's apps that I'm
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like this really isn't talking to me additionally um mob programming is known to for there
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to be less mistakes in the code less mistakes means less bugs more testing fewer meetings which I know probably a
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lot of you are down for an easier onboarding now to me
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this sounds really really scary um but like I like to have my own
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tickets and then pair what I need when I'm stuck or collaborate kind of on a as
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needed basis but you know think about where you might do this already uh maybe
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some like higher intensity situations if you have larger bugs in the code that need fixing right away
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so you might do that already and think about how the structure of mob programming might help you out
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okay so what about accessibility we can't talk about Dei and Engineering without talking about accessibility
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so accessibility is really hard to get right and mostly I think it's because there's so many parties involved right
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there's design product third-party audits there's QA there's Financial concerns
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um and it takes a lot of time now I think a lot of when I have like
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gone to talks about accessibility it's kind of like Engineers you need to do more
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and actually I think Engineers are doing a really good job I think Engineers are
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some of the more knowledgeable people when it comes to what does accessibility really need to look like but where it
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breaks down is that collaboration with those other parties so I'm going to talk a little bit about how to
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kind of use some tools and how we can do a little bit more in terms of yeah like
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I said the tools and then also collaborating with these other teams
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so this this slide says tools but I'm really talking about tools and like a potential workflow so again I'm assuming
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I'm talking to back-end Engineers if you're doing um if you're more full stack and then you're in the front end every once in a
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while then this might be a little bit of review for you but um I'm also going to tie this back to
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how you can actually do this us back in Engineers too
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so the first is HTML um review semantic HTML this is especially true if you're back-end
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engineer who's like uh kind of touching the front end like just sometimes
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um one of the engineers on my team called front the front end is Kryptonite uh but there's it's okay just review
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semantic HTML there's so much accessibility built into HTML so there's
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no need to try and recreate the wheel okay um there's also some great tools that
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that can help you you can do like a quick audit of your own code in the UI so wave is a Chrome extension um I like
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wave I that's what I use Lighthouse is just in-ear uh Dev tools Safari has web
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inspector and under the audit tab you can click accessibility and we'll do
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a quick um uh kind of audit of your of your UI there and lastly my kind of favorite
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Point here is so so easy and I think it can have a really big impact on
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accessibility and that is incorporating it into your incorporating accessibility into your PRS
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so incorporate it into your description even if the accessibility isn't great just make note of what's what is going
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on with the accessibility just make a couple sentences and whoever's reviewing your code might say hey actually I know
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a way to make this accessible and um you know you're pretty much just making that opportunity
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um you're just you're just making you're just giving the opportunity for your viewer to give you feedback there
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um additionally and that same token when you are reviewing somebody's PR uh push back a
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little bit make sure that it is an accessible uh uh the code is accessible in that PR
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so before I move on uh to collaboration just wanted to show you picking on the
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railsconf website a little bit here but this is um The Wave extension at Play
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I really like it I'm a visual person so um I like this visual feedback it's also
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really great because if you are working with folks um like your design team for example you can take a screen grab and
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you can say hey this contrast is not accessible it's not does not have enough contrast or I think it says it's low
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contrast and um and so it's a little bit easier for other teams non-engineers to use as well
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this is what Lighthouse looks like I work mostly in the back end as well so I
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am not as familiar with Lighthouse but here's just a little view of um what it looks like when you use it
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so the last thing I'm going to talk about for accessibility is collaboration um who are you collaborating with how
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can you leave accessibility into those conversations so you might be
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um working with front-end teams and you can work with them and say hey
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how are you planning on rendering uh on the front end what you're getting from the back end because this might impact
00:25:11.580
the names of your columns and tables right so you might change those names or you might update those names or you just
00:25:17.460
from the beginning um create those tables with those names just knowing that it's going to be more
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accessible work with your product team budget in some time for accessibility tickets
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maybe you can dedicate a couple of tickets per Sprint to just kind of
00:25:34.020
um improve the accessibility piece by piece QA when I brought up accessibility to
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the QA engineer on my team he got really excited and I
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think you know they are a great resource because it is their job to pick your code apart as best they can you know
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they are trying to break stuff so uh you might have somebody in your company who
00:25:58.260
knows a lot about accessibility and accessibility testing lastly design
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um mostly talking about color contrast I think that is a really easy Overlook for
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some reason I feel like I've seen so many um uis where there's a white background
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with light gray text that is so inaccessible but people still keep doing
00:26:22.140
it so let's say that's the design you get and let's say you okay you you build it out and then you take a screen grab
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with wave it will just be all red with errors so make sure that uh you're
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collaborating with these teams if you can so hopefully you are collaborating with all of these teams at least a little bit
00:26:41.580
um and projects aren't just being tossed over the wall from one team to the next so in that case uh there should be
00:26:48.419
plenty of opportunity to have some of these conversations now
00:26:54.720
um my last kind of idea and topic for engineering ndi is preferred naming and
00:27:01.140
this is a project that's close to my heart it's something I've been able to implement at snapdocs and so I'm going
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to tell you a little bit about how I did this change what this change looked like and some takeaways of of that process
00:27:16.140
so real quick take five seconds to answer this question what is a name
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so Webster's Dictionary says a name is a word or phrase that constitutes the
00:27:34.320
distinctive designation of a person or thing now I think that's a pretty good definition
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however I I doubt that's what anyone just like immediately thinks of when
00:27:45.960
they think of a name you know you think of what is somebody called right so let's break it down a little bit more
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on like what is a name what can a name be it could be a legal name
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it can be a preferred name maybe this is the same thing can be a chosen name maybe all three of
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those are the same thing if if you get a name change and nicknames
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so for me my legal name is Jean Marie Evans I don't really want people to call
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me that um I want people to just call me Genie it's been my name since I was a little
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girl I want people to call me that I introduce myself as that it is my preferred name
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chose the name I don't really have one um I never had to choose my own name again Genie was just a name that I had I
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don't know maybe it was a nickname that stuck but in any case um I don't really have one of those
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uh nicknames I've got plenty uh blueberry jam was my favorite uh that
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didn't really stick like I wanted it to but that's okay so that's just an
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example but obviously like out of all these preferred naming is the
00:28:55.260
most important right and what makes preferred naming so
00:29:00.299
important now originally this idea was presented to me from when from within my own
00:29:05.520
Community I was presented to me by a transgender man and he had a
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um he was telling us a story about his own project at work with preferred naming
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and he was talking about how when a legal name is displayed for a transgender person or non-binary person
00:29:25.559
who has not legally changed their name either yet or they live in a place where it's really hard to change your name
00:29:31.320
that is dead naming somebody right so that is harmful that is triggering and
00:29:36.960
it's re-traumatizing and we obviously don't want to do that to our users we want to make sure that we're including
00:29:43.260
everyone okay on our platform and he also had a story that really impacted me about a young man in India
00:29:50.940
who applied for or applied to a job at this company because of their trans
00:29:56.100
support and representation he was not yet out to his parents but he was able to go to work and be out
00:30:04.500
um it was a supportive work environment and then he because of the support that
00:30:09.720
he was getting at work it actually facilitated this journey to have him come out to his parents that's really
00:30:16.320
really powerful stuff and so I brought this story back to my uh company and so I presented the idea
00:30:24.059
my team was super supportive but then the idea kind of went stagnant for a while
00:30:29.399
and so I just did it I stayed late one night and I just um I just did it and
00:30:35.640
put up a PR and I showed it to a couple folks and my engineering manager was
00:30:40.679
like okay love the enthusiasm but slow down we need to make sure all the right
00:30:46.260
folks are involved so finally we got some tickets on the board and it should be going out um into production very
00:30:52.980
soon and actually um you know I'm recording this in March so uh by the time you uh watch this it'll already be
00:31:00.179
in production which is super super exciting and something I'm personally very proud of so some findings and takeaways
00:31:08.640
be realistic I went into this thinking I'm going to be an advocate for the trans and
00:31:14.760
non-binary members of my community it's really important um that we're not triggering or dead
00:31:21.059
naming anybody but then I kind of realized that this just makes sense as
00:31:27.000
as do a lot of things with when you're you're combining Tech and Dei it just
00:31:32.820
makes sense it makes sense to let folks customize their profile
00:31:37.980
also there's a lot of people with names like mine okay they don't really want to be called their legal name they don't
00:31:43.980
have a huge connection to it they they want to be called their preferred name
00:31:49.919
um also there's folks that would rather have the phonetic spelling of their name up something I didn't even consider but
00:31:55.200
it's something that when I started presenting this idea folks started saying yeah you know that's been an issue for me I I really don't want
00:32:01.980
people mispronouncing my name I'd rather spell it phonetically next patients
00:32:08.760
um there's a lot of learning to do for everyone and this might feel really really slow
00:32:15.140
but what is slow is what sticks
00:32:20.760
there's a business case so um you know I think for me it's hard for
00:32:27.000
me to like want to advocate for the business case just because I feel like this is the right thing to do why can't
00:32:33.179
we all just get on board but uh you know not everyone
00:32:38.700
um thinks that way which is which is okay and um people need this business case
00:32:46.140
to justify um you know something like an accessibility audit for example or
00:32:51.299
spending the time to incorporate preferred naming so but what we know though is that di generally is a
00:32:59.279
business case in itself you know people are watching people are choosing where they spend their money wisely so tailor
00:33:04.860
this um idea to your company like what are your company's specific goals and what might an idea like preferred naming
00:33:11.700
makes sense and lastly this is like my favorite takeaway is it is so much
00:33:17.640
easier to do this work up front like think about it if you have a first name
00:33:22.679
field that's legal names and you want to change that by adding pronouns so like for me I said my
00:33:29.100
pronouns she her um just for those of you who don't know what pronouns are
00:33:34.260
um but if you want to add pronouns in a preferred naming field and display those instead of a legal first name that is so
00:33:40.440
much work you have to do a massive investigation period because it's displayed in multiple places it's used
00:33:47.519
in multiple places you have to check with a number of different teams in a number of different departments this is
00:33:53.820
time energy money just confusion and so
00:33:59.399
um if you just do this up front what is that just incorporating um two additional columns in your table
00:34:06.059
that's it that is so much easier than doing all this work um you know for my project most of the
00:34:12.780
work was literally just changing the label on an input field and it took months just the
00:34:19.980
label very little functionality was changed and that in itself took months
00:34:26.220
so that is pretty much it for those Engineering in Dei
00:34:32.280
um tangible steps and now I'm just going to kind of wrap up with some closing thoughts
00:34:39.000
so my first closing thought is start at home I've said this many times in this presentation but I can't say it enough
00:34:46.919
um make sure that you're focusing on awareness first and that you're kind of
00:34:52.080
constantly revisiting that because the last thing that we want to do is jump to action and cause harm
00:34:59.880
communicate and collaborate um this kind of work doesn't get done with without it
00:35:06.480
um so communicate and collaborate with your team outside of your team and you know a friendly reminder here that
00:35:12.900
communication is actually more listening than talking
00:35:19.800
and lastly Dei is not a finite goal to accomplish but a process to stick to and
00:35:25.920
learn from and I'm a fan of metaphors so I'm going to share one with you now so kind of in
00:35:31.619
line with this last piece it's a process to stick to and learn from and that reminds me a lot of gardening
00:35:39.420
um and so with this process you know you can kind of think of it like having a garden you know it needs a lot of care
00:35:46.920
and sometimes it gets messy sometimes you'll need feedback sometimes you'll have to move certain
00:35:53.460
plants around to different spaces um sometimes you'll have weeds in your garden that you need to root out
00:36:00.300
and um you need to start small you start with a seed and there's practically infinite things
00:36:06.720
to grow work on and tend to and lastly this gives you life right
00:36:13.020
your garden gives you life and gives makes the lives of those around you better too
00:36:20.339
so I'm just going to leave you with a couple of questions I will put these in the Discord um Channel as well uh these questions
00:36:27.119
involve like what is your responsibility to Dei uh bias in yourself or in the
00:36:33.000
technology you use I have a request um in the Q a um and in the Discord Channel I before
00:36:40.140
engaging I would really appreciate it if you took the time to think about these
00:36:45.240
questions you don't have to share your answers or anything like that but think about these questions reflect on these
00:36:51.119
questions before engaging and I know that we'll have a more meaningful discussion because of it
00:36:56.760
so thank you thank you so much um thank you to Heather thank you Cindy who's my um audience of one right now
00:37:03.780
and thank you audience members for showing up again I really really appreciate you taking the time
00:37:11.760
um again that live q a is on April 15th 3 40 to 4 10 Eastern Time
00:37:18.240
my um Discord channel is the same as uh the
00:37:23.460
title of my talk so engineer in diversity inclusion tangible steps for teams and feel free to connect with me
00:37:30.000
on LinkedIn um I would love to keep this conversation going especially if you're you're doing
00:37:35.880
this kind of work yourselves um and lastly snap Ducks we are hiring every time I look at the slide that
00:37:42.540
little duck is in a different place um but anyways thank you so much and
00:37:47.640
enjoy the rest of the conference