146: Self.conference with Amber Conville

CHANTE: Hello and welcome to another episode of Greater Than Code. My name is Chante Thurmond and I'm here today with my co-host, Coraline Ada Ehmke. CORALINE: Hi, everybody. We have a great show today. I'm here with a dear friend of mine, Amber Conville. Amber is the Director of Engagement and Growth at Test Double, after several years as a software developer. She loves helping humans, code in lots of languages, and the software community, and can be found speaking at or helping out with user groups, conferences, and nerd gatherings wherever and whenever possible. Welcome to the show, Amber. AMBER: Thanks for having me. CORALINE: So, if you've listened to this show before, which I hope you have, you know we always start out with our trademark question. Amber, what is your superpower and how did you develop it? AMBER: I think that my superpower is being able to adapt to a situation 95% of the time. It's something that I think I've developed just through going through lots of different life situations with lots of different kinds of people. We all have like from trauma stories, but there's also just a lot of anxiety that I have. So figuring out how to navigate social situations with different kinds of people in the society. And then kind of learning how to navigate things like that in a professional setting, solving problems and learning about domains and helping people succeed without making them feel like I'm here to take their job or something like that. Back story, I've been a consultant for like a decade at this point. So that's I think where a lot of that came from and has really influenced my career now to help other people grow in the same way. CORALINE: And I know from personal experience I've spoken at self.conference, which you organize multiple times, maybe four out of five of the conferences. And I've always found you to be a very kind and very empathetic person and I'm sure that translates into your working life as well. AMBER: Thanks. I appreciate that. CHANTE: Speaking of self.conference, I was online just loving what I saw and I'm like, "How have I never heard of self.conference?" I mean, I'm in Chicago and I grew up in the Midwest and everything I've been here. But to just know that that was happening over in Detroit is just so heartwarming and inspiring and encouraging. Can you tell us a little bit about the back story and how you came to start with self.conference and why you named it self.conference? AMBER: Back when it started, there was kind of a homogenous software community in Detroit, in the city itself. It was very [inaudible] white male, it was very Java-focused. And there's nothing wrong with any of that, but there really wasn't any place for anyone else. A lot of the conferences that were local specifically would say they don't want things like soft talks because that's when this was back when people still send soft talks and they just didn't think that who would want to go to that and why would that have a place in a software conference? It's not software, it's human skill. So, a friend of mine and I just kind of got together and we thought we could do something that is similar, that's like inclusive to a lot more groups. We can do a lot of reaching out across the country. We could reach out to a lot of, Girl Develop It was still a thing at that time, Black Girls Code. Blacks in Technology has been a partner for years and years and we thought like, "People exist, we can bring them to Detroit." They can see that we're doing software in Detroit and we can talk about the stuff that the people who are already here are not getting. So we wanted it to be half tech talks and half people talks. And we wanted it to be a speaker lineup that didn't look like all the other speaker lineups in the area. So, we wanted it to be a lot more diverse, a lot more perspectives in it. And since the beginning, we've actually, we started with gender [inaudible], but we actually from the beginning got, I think 50% soft and people in tech talks right away and we all saw, I think that gender parity right away. And so we've been kind of building on that since we're coming up on our seventh year next year. And it's just been really awesome. We are really small conference. Not a lot of people have heard of us, so hoping to change that this year. CHANTE: That's super inspiring. And I love the fact that you started off with saying, "Hey, let's start with an achievable kind of basic goal," which was let's try to get more gender parity, more diversity and you have to start somewhere. Have you added more metrics or tried to diversify since then? Tell us about the evolution from conference one to now going into your seventh conference, you said? AMBER: Yup. A lot of it is partnering with the sorts of organizations I was talking about and kind of expanding that as we go. We actually post metrics every year from our survey. And the survey that we do: if anybody who has a ticket speaker or otherwise, if you'd feel comfortable, tell us what you identify as racially gender-wise and then we post it on the site. So, if you go to any past years on self.conference.org, you should be able to go through the menu and see a metrics link. CORALINE: That kind of transparency is really awesome and I think probably serves a few different purposes. One, to hold yourself accountable one to celebrate the diversity that you've managed to achieve and also to maybe inspire other conferences too, to start with to care about things like that. And then to scrutinize themselves and see what they could be doing differently to attract a more diverse audience. AMBER: One of my goals with the larger kind of umbrella organization is to put together something called ConfConf, which will be like a retreat for conference organizers to get together and talk about exactly these things. Like how do we build a more inclusive audience, how do we build a more inclusive conference? And kind of share that beyond just self.conference and the few conferences that are doing it. CORALINE: Is that a thing that you've already done or is that coming up? AMBER: It's probably next year or the year after that, I'll do that. For self.conference this upcoming year, if there's actually going to be a one day precursor conference called