Last month I had the great opportunity to speak at the GDG Denver Women Techmakers celebration! This event was also a ‘super meetup’ with the Denver Droids. It was a great combination of developers from different areas of the Denver tech community and a fabulous event overall!
The night started off with dinner and some wine tasting with a professional sommelier, which was a lot of fun.
The pressure is on! Johnny from @TheSqueakyBean doing a live blind wine tasting 🙂 #WTM15 pic.twitter.com/5WnDTfSrwj
— Kelly Shuster (@KellyShuster) March 19, 2015
There were 2 lightning talks and a longer talk. Abby Bullock gave the first lightning talk on programming , and Margaret Spyker gave the second talk on effective team building. They were both awesome!
Event @iTriage tonight for #WTM15 More than half women. Wine, then @KellyShuster, Margaret and Abby great speakers pic.twitter.com/pLBPugnul3
— 5280 Mark (@5280mark) March 19, 2015
Yay Margaret! Great talk! #wtm15 pic.twitter.com/pJ4wzF0wmI
— Leyla Eraybar (@Leylatweets2) March 19, 2015
I was up next with a longer talk on programming for accessibility. People seemed really engaged in my talk, and asked phenomenal questions. My demo app featured some Pokemon (of course!), and one attendee made the connection from my WTM Boulder talk. Haha so awesome!
What is it with Pokemon and Talks at #wtm15 ? Love the reference.
— JBMONCO (@JBMONCO) March 19, 2015
I am always a little nervous when I talk about accessibility that nobody will have questions, because they might not care about it. But, I’ve found time and time again that people are really intrigued by both the concept of an accessibility app, and the technical solutions. It was so cool to hear people mention “I didn’t even realize you could do that; I’m going to test out my apps and see how they measure up.”
@KellyShuster Great talk on accessibility! #wtm15 pic.twitter.com/y1zR8I86UM
— Leyla Eraybar (@Leylatweets2) March 19, 2015
Also, people asked incredible questions. I wrote down any of the ones I’d never thought of before (or couldn’t answer), and I’m incorporating them into my 2 upcoming talks on accessibility. My talk for DroidCon Berlin will only be 40 minutes, so I will have to do some rearranging to get the most important pieces in. My talk for AnDevCon Boston is a talk + workshop at 75 minutes total so I will be able to incorporate even more.
Thanks for having me, Denver Droids and GDG Denver!