Presentation: Shaving My Head Made Me A Better Programmer

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Duration: 
1:40pm - 2:30pm

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Abstract

How do perceptions and stereotypes affect those in the programming community? This talk tells the true story of my physical transformation, and the surprising and drastic ways in which it affected how I was perceived and treated as a programmer. This new perspective allowed me to take a hard look at our community, and how it can at times be less welcoming and inclusive than we all intend it to be. This talk also covers the effects of unconscious bias, micro-aggressions, and stereotype threat within our community, and how to make engineering teams and our entire field more inclusive to all, and thusly more successful.

Speaker: Alex Qin

Software Engineer, Educator and Founder of Code Cooperative

Alex Qin is a Brooklyn based software engineer and educator. She cares deeply about access to computer science education, and about leveraging technology to create positive social change. She works at Skillshare, where she leads an engineering team, and co-organizes Codeshare, an inclusive and intimate gathering of programmers interested in the intersection of code, creativity, and art. She is also the founder of the Code Cooperative, an open source educational program through which former inmates learn to code as a means to creating social change.

Find Alex Qin at

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Conference for Professional Software Developers