Why closed captions in your public speaking may make a difference

Team diversity refers to differences between members of startup team. Those differences can include demographic differences (like age, race, sex, ethnicity), personality (extrovert, introvert, and differing Myers-Briggs types) and functional (as in skill sets, like engineering, design, copywriting, and marketing). How does team diversity impact your customers’ experience from the moment they learn about you through their journey with you? You will attract and relate to customers how look like you. They will understand your messaging and you will understand their needs. If you don’t represent the right dimensions of diversity, you are leaving an amazing experience behind.

I recently gave a talk on my journey into the Azure Technical Community. While my day job is working for Microsoft, I get a lot of energy through blogging, podcasting and vlogging - ultimately, helping others grow, inspiring and encouraging them along their own technical journey. In this blog, I write about why I got involved with the technical community, some of my reflections on the journey and what I continue to look forward to.

In this session, Chris is joined by Dr. Keith McNally. Dr. Keith teaches Azure Cloud to help transitioning military members gain employment in the IT industry. By using a project-based learning structure, he helps adult learners the features and functionality of Microsoft Azure. In this session, Chris and Keith talk through how this work came together, typical learning strategies/styles that work well in these scenarios and the types of technologies/projects that cohorts have worked through. Tune in to gain some tips that may help your own learning strategy!

In this episode, Chris is joined by JJ Asghar as they talk through lessons learned from cultivating open source projects and communities. Over the last decade, JJ has had the privilege professionally of building and cultivating some Open Source projects and communities.This isn’t a tools talk. This is a talk about the soft skills you have to have to be able to succeed as a leader in an Open Source project. JJ’s journey started tending the frequently asked questions for a small Linux Distribution called CRUX, and then years later professionally moved to the OpenStack-Chef project to build OpenStack clouds. He has grown other projects along the way, helped build tooling and communities, some successful and still running today, others were just flashes in the pan. He’s learned a ton on this journey; and still is, but has some lessons that are hard-learned and hopefully will warn against pitfalls that can cause wasted cycles and pain.