Articles and Talks While Shy

2022

21 Oct, 2022

Industry Representation Series: Scripps Alums in Tech Panel

Partnered with Scripps Career Planning and Resources

Spoke on a panel

Alongside four other alumnae spanning classes '91 to '18, we gave students insight into the world of tech and its variety of career paths. We spoke about our current professions, from web development (me!), mobile development, program management, to hiring, and how we arrived at them from our non-computer-science, liberal arts backgrounds at Scripps. Additionally, we shared what "hard" and "soft" (and "medium soft?" We criticized the dichotomy) skills we felt were important to be successful at our roles.

2021

16 Jun, 2021

Gave an internal talk

Created a meme for presentation slides

Illustrated cats for my presentation slides

Shared my experience interacting with open source

Demonstrated techniques for reading unfamiliar code

Interacted with open source VueJS code

Presented "Deciphering the Vue Multiselect Source Code: A Campfire Story"

Turned my recent experience interacting with an open source project into a talk for the engineering org. Showcased systematic process and techniques for getting oriented in an unfamiliar codebase.

11 May, 2021

Wrote first blog post

Shared my self-learning experiences with others

Wrote about self-learning

Published a blog post on dev.to

Wrote First Blog Post

https://dev.to/miffens/how-i-got-better-at-e-learning-by-ignoring-the-completion-bar-5060

After years of wanting to blog, inspiration spontaneously struck over a quiet weekend while I was organizing my online course library.

2020

01 Nov, 2020

Added keyboard accessibility to Angular Split

Presented talk "Robin 'Inclusive-Or' Hood: Contributing to Open Source on Company Time"

Added keyboard accessibility to Angular Split

Added accessibility feature to an OSS project

Structured immediate and backlog tasks to unblock team short-term and fulfill project requirements long-term

Researched tradeoffs of using OSS verses in-house solution

After years of thinking OSS contributors are the coolest, I got to work on open source during company time. Then, I turned the story into a lightning talk that I presented at my alma mater, Scripps College. The talk was titled "Robin 'Inclusive-Or' Hood: Contributing to Open Source on Company Time"

https://github.com/angular-split/angular-split

26 Oct, 2020

Presented "Tech Interviewing: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Vague Rejections and Ghosting"

Partnered with Scripps Career Planning and Resources

Created a meme for presentation slides

Presented a pre-recorded talk to Claremont college students

Shared experiences with hiring in tech

Mentored college students

Mentored women's college students

Highlighting a typical company's motivations and organizational challenges, I showed how these factors lead to ghosting and rejections far more often than the applicant's qualifications. Additionally, I gave tips on how to approach the job search with these factors in mind.

Slides and recording available on request via DM!

(Image alt: person labelled "me" serves bowl of food, labelled with "2 barely functional side projects, solved one leetcode in past 3 weeks, interdisciplinary (double-quoted)". The recipient sitting at the table, labelled "tech internship", yeets the bowl across the room. Above the thrown bowl says "The team you interviewed with will be pursuing other candidates for their openings." End image alt.)

2019

01 Oct, 2019

Became company's subject matter expert on web accessibility

Self-taught web accessibility

Followed accessibility experts on Twitter

Presented accessibility testing and development workshop

Refactored a web page in AngularJS to be accessible

Redesigned UX dashboard

Became company's subject matter expert on web accessibility

Knowing of my cognitive science background, my manager asked if I was interested in leading the accessibility work for our upcoming projects. I learned everything from scratch, made our app's first fully mouse, keyboard, and screenreader compatible pages, and gave presentations to teams across the company on how to achieve accessibility.