Hazel Weakly

For several years I thought I'd be a graphic design artist because I really liked art and the digital medium. It wasn't until high school in tenth grade, when I was in a computer class that this taught you how to use Microsoft Office, and I was bored out of my mind sitting there doodling. I got to thinking about computer architectures and I came up with this 3D spherical CPU design in order to optimize cache lines and efficient energy and everything like that. I was trying to explain it to my teacher and he was completely over his head. He was like "if you like this thing maybe consider computer engineer."

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I had never thought about that before, but I thought "yeah, why not", and I went into college for computer engineering.

Yeah, always. I think "developer experience" is becoming a bit of a hot topic. There are a couple different schools of how you think about it. One is geared towards the idea of optimizing the 'factory line' of workers, getting the percentage points and numbers go up, or reduce these numerical properties of how long it takes to develop and how long it takes a system to recover from downtime, how long can you go between incidents—all these numerical things. Then on the other side there's this rethinking of what it means to do knowledge work and acknowledging humans are humans, and focusing on the collaboration and the friends you make along the way. And realizing that if you focus on that, you get more reliable systems and you get more productive engineers. Essentially, you improve the things by not my paying attention to them.

I think it depends on what aspect of the social side you want to focus on. If you’re a strong technical person moving into a leadership role, I would recommend books like Radical Candor or Reinventing Organizations is another of my favorites. Those are about taking the underlying assumptions capitalism tells us, like “in order to be effective, you need to to turn off your emotions” and flipping that on its head by saying instead “in order to be effective, you need to lean into the emotions and humanity”. 

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If you’re not on the people leadership side of things, you might benefit more from a book like Crucial Conversations. It’s about how to communicate with people when the stakes are high or emotions or tensions are running high.

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And there’s one more that I think is particularly relevant to women in tech. It’s called The Dance of Anger, and it’s a “woman’s guide to changing the patterns of intimate relationships”. It’s actually really broadly applicable to any situation in which you are not allowed or encouraged to show anger as an emotion. It shows how one of the important things about anger is that it’s an effective feedback signal in your brain, and how to differentiate between when to stand firm and when to be flexible.

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I had always wanted to learn some sort of dance. When I was in college, there was a poster advertising swing dance, and I thought “that looks fun”. So I went, and I immediately fell in love with it. Naturally, I went back to my dorm room after that first dance and did the thing that I do — which is to super research into it. I read everything I could find on the internet about the history of swing dancing. I found out the closest regular swing dancing to my area was an hour away, so I started driving an hour each way twice a week just to go dancing. Now, I’m fortunate enough to live in Seattle, one of the best cities in the world for swing dancing. You could swing dance in Seattle about five to seven days a week if you try hard enough. 

I tend to like darker lipsticks and fun weird colors. I have a purple shade I really like, a blue shade I’m absolutely in love with, and the green shade you saw me in at Kubehuddle. I’m always looking for new shades to try that are unusual, and ideally transfer-proof, which is hard to find. I have a couple new recommendations I’m going to try out, so I’ll let you know how those go!

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You can keep up with Hazel at hazelweakly.me.