In 2016, we gathered at AndXP to talk about using practices we love such as pairing, test driven development and frequent customer feedback through the lens of intersectional feminism. It was a great day of small sessions and connecting with each other.
In 2018, we are continuing this conversation and expanding it as Pear Conf! 🍐🍐
Friday July 13 -- Impact Hub San Francisco, 1885 Mission St., San Francisco
Pear Conf will kick off with an optional workshop day on Friday that includes two workshops designed to flow together: an Ally Skills workshop led by Leigh Honeywell and a Pair Programming workshop led by Betsy Haibel and Jennifer Tu of Cohere. This first-of-a-kind workshop has been designed to turn the desire to be a more inclusive pair into a pragmatic reality. Attendees will leave with an understanding of how to set up pairing so that power within the pair is more evenly distributed. This is where D&I rubber meets the road.
Saturday July 14 -- Github, 88 Colin P Kelly Jr St, San Francisco
Join us for a day of unconference style sessions bracketed with keynotes by Write/Speak/Code organizer and Githubber Neha Batra, and the amazing, brilliant, and fearless Sarah Mei. We'll close out PearConf with a Paint Night.
On both days we will provide a light breakfast, lunch, snacks, and beverages. Please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions when registering. Childcare will be provided at both events.
Conference Amenities
-- A quiet room
-- Childcare
-- Lanyards signaling photo consent of attendees
-- Buttons signaling interaction consent of attendees.
-- A quiet table at Paint Nite for folks who want to relax and paint without interacting
Neha Batra is an engineering manager at GitHub who, 6 years ago, was an energy consultant and quit to teach herself programming because “it was time.” She holds a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and enjoys foodie adventures, planning trips (and has docs for most of her trip plans), and collecting national park magnets. If you want to hear her ramble on a topic, ask her about pair programming, tdd, or how she came around to agile processes, in general.
Betsy Haibel lives on the east coast and started programming thanks to a love of fanfic. Jennifer Tu lives on the west coast and has a CS degree from MIT. Betsy is a white woman whose primary education classmates teemed with generational wealth. Jennifer is a non-black person of color who's a child of immigrants. Who has more privilege when pairing? Join the workshop and we will talk about pairing with privilege!
Betsy and Jennifer are two thirds of Cohere (wecohere.com), which offers workshops and technical mentorship to software teams. They love the multiuse properties of pair programming -- you can use it to teach! to learn! to align mindsets! to build out software larger than each participant could do separately!
Leigh has more than a decade of experience in computer security incident response. Prior to co-founding Tall Poppy, she was a Technology Fellow at the ACLU’s Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology. Her industry career included running security incident response at Slack, protecting infrastructure running a million apps at Salesforce.com, shipping patches for billions of computers on a monthly basis at Microsoft, and analyzing malware at Symantec. Leigh has a Bachelors of Science from the University of Toronto where she majored in Computer Science and Equity Studies, and is a frequent keynote speaker at security and software conferences around the world.
Would you like to see your name or logo listed above? Are you interested in sponsoring our cool conference?
It takes a lot of time, effort and pears to put on a conference. We are currently seeking sponsors and have the following sponsor packages available (also we won't complain if you are interested in throwing money at us, just please no throwing pears.)