I emerge from the depths of a long writing desert back into what is hopefully a newly rejuvenated writing routine. (Fingers crossed, slowly, because I have developed some delightful carpal tunnel becoming a new parent.)

In the past few months, I’ve settled into my new role as a first time mother, and what can I say other than I’m overwhelmed with joy, happiness, weariness, and all that? I keep hovering over the keyboard in between baby naps, considering how I was going to lay down my next magnum opus with my philosophies and perspectives gained in snippets of lucid dreams, but then often find myself pulled away by the duties of my mostly mundane reality.

Parenthood is nothing like I anticipated. I actually steeled myself for the worst, and if you know me, it’s because you know I like to plan. Plan for the worst, hope for the best, that old chestnut. I had read up on every possible pregnancy/parenting resource there was, hoovering up information at a frequency of which many others constantly pooh-poohed my efforts on (sheesh, the number of times I was told, “you can’t possibly learn enough or prepare for what’s to come!”).

Well, guess what! I was prepared, dammit. Labor and delivery went great. Baby’s first few months had pushed us to adapt to a million new things, and we did it all. We absolutely love doing everything there is in serving this new wonderful little human’s life to allow him to survive and then thrive. And truly, it’s not been a particularly big challenge, because he’s the most wonderfully sweet and most adorable baby in this universe. Some of it is genetics, some of it is luck, and I like to attribute at least some portion of this ease to our hard work prior - that is, my hard work in eating and sleeping well, and reducing stress wherever possible.

Anyhoo, I leave you with something I found I wrote in an email to a friend many years ago that I stumbled across because I was trying to remember the context and history of why I had someone else as a mutual Facebook friend. There was a little drama and heartbreak in that email thread with my friend, so what I had written below was responding to that:

Oh man, what a saga - I think while there is this terrible loss and heartbreak, don't you feel like you've been wrapped up in this incredibly epic romantic tragedy worthy of poetry? I think the gravity and heft of a situation likes that lends an air of incredulousness and thus some sort of improbability to it. I hope that you feel, in the end, that you've come out of it with something beautiful and valuable gained as an experience, rather than something lost. I think that experience with another human being, albeit brief and doomed, qualifies to meet some astronomically high standard of beauty and truth - for what could never be, but could have been, that sort of wistful longing is the most lovely and mesmerizing type of painting of a memory, wrought from the ashes of what had burned brightly before. 

As for me, same old ho hum. My life poetry is more of the fridge magnet type these days - nonsensical and lacking certain words. I'm not sure how to complete that thought yet and I think, actually, that succinctly sums it up. I'm a bright and optimistic person, maybe more so than ever, but a bit weary of it. I feel like I'm constantly mentally cheering myself onward, but really annoyed at having to do so. I'm not entirely sure how to approach romantic love anymore, and to be honest my heart has been so full lately of so many friends and family it's no longer become a matter I actively pursue. I mean, the more you search for something, the more it eludes your grasp, right?

It’s so funny to read things I wrote so many years ago because I had obviously suffered heartbreak myself not that long ago at that time.

Now older, wiser and much more tired, I chuckled reading this and then glanced over to my husband and little guy, heart bursting in ways that I could never have thought possible.

Hello there!

I figure I should write a quick reminder here that somehow you had signed up for this newsletter at some point in time, and surprise! Perhaps months later you receive this (maybe pleasant?) surprise in your inbox. Nice to see you here. I’m Andrea.

It’s been a long pandemic. I’ve been lucky, healthy, and safe this whole time, but just living a very muted, dull existence. I picked up a couple of new habits along the way, and since we stopped eating out, I started to cook and try new things a lot more.

Settling deeper into domestic life, I decided to jump on the bread baking bandwagon mid 2020. I got a book all about baking bread, and put together a short list of the things I’d need from the author Ken Forkish’s suggestions.

I didn’t end up actually baking loaves until a year later, mostly because I panicked when I realized a couple months ago that I had forgotten I bought a 10kg bag of flour from Costco that’s about to reach its best before date. Welp, that’s a good motivation to get things going quickly before it all spoils.

I’m about 5 or 6 loaves in so far, and it will be a long journey to finishing the bag, but I’ve learned a few things. Here are some heady and minorly cliché life lessons I’ve gotten from wrangling gluten.

My first loaf - it felt amazing to smell fresh bread coming out of the oven!

The simplest things are usually the hardest

These loaves are just flour, water, salt and yeast. As an ingredient list for a recipe, it can’t be any simpler - just the four items! But the complexity lies in all the other variables and environment.

It takes experience to get to know your oven and how consistent it is. You need to get a sense of your environment in terms of ambient temperature and humidity. You have to be aware of how accurate your tools are and whether you understand the nature of them - for example, dusting a proofing basket with rice flour instead of wheat flour to ensure a smooth release prior to baking. It takes time to gauge margin of error. Is my dough rising as expected? Should I give it more time, more heat, more water?

There is just so much science involved. Every loaf feels like a delicious experiment.

It's so satisfying seeing a beautifully smooth and round dough

Go by the book, then observe and adjust

Jazz, as a form of musical improvisation, depends on the musicians knowing the rules and then actively flouting them in many cases.

It’s the same way with bread, in understanding how to manipulate the variables where it matters to get the right results.

The recipes I follow provide a specific temperature for the water in the dough. I’ve followed this exactly initially, but over time I’ve started to learn that it’s a bit chilly in the house. You’ll kill the yeast over a certain temperature, but finding the optimal temperature within an acceptable range is key.

Like most things in life, be aware of this especially when taking advice from others. Most likely, their circumstances and experiences differ from yours. Take the input. Observe. Adjust accordingly.

Enjoy the imperfection of innovation

One aspect of baking bread I most enjoy is using my hands and fine tuning the balance between art and science. There’s some level of precision involved, such as employing the use of a food scale and thermometer to check weights and temperature. However, some of the process is left up to fate - how the yeast behaves, oven performance, baker’s technique, etc.

Every loaf I’ve made so far I’ve enjoyed the process of starting with disciplined measurements, combining the art of the mix and rise, and finally crossing my fingers the moment I take the bread out of the oven.

It begins with some amount of confidence and precision, but it almost always ends with me praying to the doughy deities that a crispy, buoyant loaf emerges crackling. Each time I make the initial cut into a new loaf, I hold my breath as I anticipate seeing the crumb structure.

Planning is most of the work

Making these loaves isn’t really a laborious task in and of itself. There’s no kneading of these high hydration doughs - you dump all the ingredients into a tub, occasionally mix and shape with your hands, but there isn’t a need to put in much elbow grease.

Most of the effort involved is in getting the few instructions correct and ensure your timing is well scheduled. I’ve gone through a few different recipes now, but one favorite so far is the overnight whole wheat.

The learning curve in the beginning involved mostly logistics. Scooping and measuring flour, getting the water temperature right, and hand mixing techniques were all processes that I eventually figured out a routine for. Once you get the hang of the basics, the bulk of the work depends on your ability to schedule ahead of time. Start working on a dough in the late afternoon, and by morning you could bake it.

All these analogies and bits of wisdom apply quite neatly to what I’ve learned so far about being a product manager. I’ll have to spend some time to gather my thoughts before I write about product, but just replace all the bread specific talk above with product, and it’ll be pretty close.

If you’re interested in trying your hand at baking a loaf like these, here’s a recipe for an overnight 40% whole wheat.

Obligatory joke reference explainer in case you don’t understand the title and quote:

Strong Bad Email #45 - Techno

TL;DR: I talk about a new emoji-based service I’ve recently discovered called Yat, and what I think it means in terms of finding your way around online or establishing your identity on the internet.

3 letters to your virtual home

In my latest foray of Serious Research For Interesting New Things On The Internet (SRFINTOTI for short), I stumbled upon Yat. Right away I noticed the three-letter logo conjured up a familiar one that was buzzy and trendy a while ago in stirring up the email client world. Left hand, meet right hand:

HEY Yat. I actually know a guy named Yat.

For the sake of pattern matching but also because it’s relevant, hey.com and y.at are both in some way offering some part of the same thing: valuable virtual real estate and/or identity shorthand.

If you get an email address at hey.com, paying for it allows you to keep yourname@hey.com for life (well, that’s what they promise, whether they hold true to that is another matter).

While hey.com is primarily an email service, the fact that you can secure an email address at a 3-letter domain is actually incredibly valuable, and arguably a valid reason to pay for the 1 year subscription to keep it for a lifetime. That it’s also a relatively new service also means that there’s a good chance that if you check for your name on it early enough, you’ll also get the one you want.

Yat is where it's at

Yat, in its own words: “…is your emoji username, website url, payment address and more.” To put it into context of existing products, it seems to be sort of a mixture between a URL shortener (like bit.ly), social link profile (like about.me/Linktree/Linkinbio/Carrd), and micro-payment service (like Patreon/Gumroad/Ko-Fi).

Link is: https://y.at/🌸🐱🤖❄️

I chose a string of emoji and settled on sakura, cat, robot, snowflake - this combination was priced at a low price of $7 compared to pricing at higher orders of magnitude. I decided that selecting 4 emoji was a significantly better deal at single digit pricing rather than shelling out a couple hundred bucks for one emoji shorter. Example:

Some explanation here of the combined numerical "Rhythm Score"

Identity crisis

Over time, I’ve increasingly come to the conclusion that although virtual space is technically infinite, human behavior and preference defines it in a fairly finite way. In the sense that you can certainly still buy (some, not all, at a very high price) a 2-5 letter domain name these days, what are the chances that those are 2-5 letters that coincide in a catchy word that is valuable and understandable?

In that sense, I’ve become more concerned about capturing the relative scarcity of being able to keep my name across different social platforms or internet spaces. I currently have @andreachan on Twitter, but when it comes to the larger networks, I never used my real name if not necessary, nor did I attempt to try and get my real name on those (like Instagram). I do have andreachan.com which is pretty cool, but there are plenty of places on the internet where I’m not the “andreachan” there.

So when direct naming conventions such as finding your own dot com begin to become a competitive market and it’s harder to get your name on different services, abstracting that away and finding different ways to make shorter connections from A to B will likely be increasingly more common to make that ‘direct-ness’ more readily available to a wider audience. You don’t own yourname.com? Perhaps you might have about.me/yourname, or a Yat with some series of emojis that represent you/your brand/your business in a concise and easy to remember way.

As more people get online and realize the importance of claiming virtual land and direction signs to that land, some level of that complexity will continuously be abstracted away. I think that as more people become comfortable with figuring out what one’s fragmented/combined identity is online, the real scarcity will be having the option of being able to present a consistent and universally accessible identity profile (whether as an individual or business) across the internet.

I haven’t really reconciled or made a unified conscious decision of my identity online yet - there’s some real name “business person” type stuff, some real name “goofy person” type stuff, and there’s some anonymous identity “embarrassing in public” or “default to private” type stuff. The freedom of living online is being able to happily separate and create boundaries between all of those identities. Which Andrea are you reading right now? Heck, I don’t even know. I’ll let you know if I figure it out somewhere along the way.

Why I started networking

It all started from a powerful revelation I had partway through my career when I felt stuck – what was stopping me from taking on the role that my manager had? Why wasn’t I seen as the right fit to be promoted into that position?

I was initially frustrated that he was brought on board instead of me being able to move up. I made the conscious decision to understand what value he brought to the role that I didn’t have, and to fill that gap so I could move up.

On paper, my manager and I had fairly similar skills and qualifications. But really, the main differentiator was that he was an entrepreneur prior to the role, and in having built his own business, he developed a vast network that was considerably wider and deeper than I had ever developed within my usual circles from work and/or school.

Why was this important? Because whenever we had a problem, he always had someone to call. We needed more people for our customer support team – he knew a person. We were looking for marketing agencies – he knew a person. We needed to strengthen growth KPIs through partnerships – he knew people. Here I was, giving all my time and energy as an individual contributor, being the proverbial frog in the well that didn’t know of a greater world out there. I was stuck doing things the hard way when I could’ve been doing things the smart way.

Additionally, since he’d built his own business, he’d learned a lot more than most people do in just doing school. When attacking new problems, he brought a sense of savvy and business acumen that you can only earn by having been put through a never ending series of problems.

I concluded very simply that I needed to do more interesting things, and meet more people doing interesting things to get where I need to be. (Interesting is a broad category of what probably constitutes value, usefulness, and things that are unique). And really, if you’re already doing at least one of those things fairly well, you’ll get places.

Okay, so where was I supposed to start?

First: go to where the people are. (Pre-COVID times)

I moved to Toronto at the end of 2017, a city where I essentially knew no one and had no family. I had been working at a high growth startup in Hong Kong prior to the move, and I knew I wanted to explore more of the up and coming tech scene in Toronto.

I asked around in my existing network of friends and acquaintances to try and figure out my bearings. Where should I go? What names of people, companies, places should I know?

TechTO was the big event that kept coming up in my research as the answer to the question: “Where do all the tech people go to meet other tech people?” It seemed daunting at first to show up to a big conference hall filled with hundreds of people that I didn’t know, but I didn’t think of it that way at the time. I took everything one step at a time to avoid feeling overwhelmed.

This was the checklist to conquer an event with hundreds of attendees:

• Get event tickets, and commit to go. Paying for the ticket made it real. Putting it on my calendar made it real. Putting my preparation time blocks prior to the event made it real (for example: putting into my calendar the night before what to pack and get ready. Then before the event, blocking out the time needed to get ready and travel to venue.)

• Get business cards. This seemed obvious enough to me as I’d attended industry trade shows and conferences in the past. It was pretty fun to design and put together my own card on Vistaprint. I printed one side only because it was cheaper, but also if I wanted to use the blank back of one to write notes or to allow others to write notes it was available. What was printed was the immutable: all my contact information, as simple as possible. Whether the person used the contact information depended if they remembered me. See: ready your pitch. However, having your personal website on the card is a great way to remind someone if they forget.

• Bring a pen. Notepad optional. I realized later as I did this more often that what worked best for me was to have a good quality gel pen that dries quickly so that you could scribble on a variety of card stock when given business cards. If I didn’t get a business card from someone, I would scribble short notes on the back of one of my own cards.

• Try not to go with a buddy. Yes, it is a lot harder to go alone because it’s stressful and anxiety-inducing. However, in the best case scenario, you end up ditching them because you actually do go talk to many other people. Worst case, you end up only speaking with your friend all night and don’t make a single connection. If you can swing it, just go alone. I promise you that while it’s scary at first, you’ll learn more about yourself and others than you ever will if you don’t do something so bold.

• Ready your pitch. I’ll talk about this in depth in the next section.

• Be clear with your objectives. My favorite thing about attending TechTO was how straightforward it was. When arriving at the reception, you’re given a blank label and choice of Sharpie color. If you were looking for a job, you used blue. If you were looking to hire, you used red. Black was for everyone else. Great! I instantly knew which labels to look for and who to talk to.

• Practice your entry/exit move. As terrifying as it seems to strike up a conversation with a stranger out of nowhere, it seems worse to try to get out of one. I’ll share some phrases that might help you, and that you can practice so that when the time comes you don’t freeze.

I truly and genuinely enjoy meeting new people. Note that this isn’t a prerequisite to get good at networking, but it definitely helps, as you’ll be intrinsically motivated and have the energy for it. However, by sharing my processes here I’m certain that anyone less extroverted but equally determined can improve their chances of success at meeting awesome people.

What to say, how to say it

There are a few things that I found I used over and over again, to great effect.

Your elevator pitch

One of the most important things you could ever do to help yourself move forward in your career and your life is to have a succinct and uniquely descriptive way to introduce yourself. Whether it’s Tinder or LinkedIn, knowing how to get strangers to grok who you are quickly is an extremely valuable skill, and while you won’t necessarily get it right off the bat, just like almost all other things you get better at it if you work at it.

If you don’t know how to sell yourself, it’s much harder for others to see you the way you want to be seen. Additionally, in an attention economy where attention is the scarcest resource, you want to make it as convenient and straightforward as possible for someone to understand who you are without undertaking too much effort.

When you’re young, inexperienced, and don’t really have any idea what you’re good at or what you are meant to do, it’s obvious why forming a clear pitch about yourself isn’t easy. You’re still growing, and you’re a flawed human; how can you possibly fit your multitudes into a catchy 5-10 word sentence?!

The best way to go about forming your pitch is to leverage two different skills: the ability to be truly introspective, and the ability to gather feedback in a measured way.

I’ve used the Japanese concept of Ikigai frequently to think about where I am in life and where I want to be. The center perfect overlap of all four circles is an ideal that many may not ever actually achieve all in the same one thing, but that’s why we lead separate lives with different activities, jobs, and hobbies. I find this is a really informative and insightful framework to use every so often.

Adapted based on this Toronto Star graphic

Be introspective: ask yourself what you see as your greatest strengths and what you excel at. Don’t conflate your strengths with your passions; you may love music, but be unskilled or without much prior experience. You should be fairly clear on what you love and what you’re good at. Being clear about your passions (what you love + what you’re good at) is always a great way to lead an authentic introduction to who you are – and if that doesn’t necessarily align with your profession, that’s fine too! You might be a suit in your day job, and a moonlighting starving artist (so you’re not actually starving).

Get feedback: ask those closest to you, and those who have worked with you in a professional capacity or in some capacity where they would see you perform like a sports team. What do they actually say about you, and observe about your behavior? You may be saying that you love to be a team player, but if candid and honest feedback from teammates prove otherwise, you’ve got to close that discrepancy by either changing your beliefs about yourself or to change your behavior. It normally ends up somewhere in between.

Think comprehensively, then pare it down: I find the best way to distill your essence is to start with many parts of yourself. It can be as chaotic or organized as you like – a word cloud, flow chart, paragraphs of text, but using any combinations of words to describe you. Remove those that are irrelevant by gathering feedback from the audience you want to cultivate to know what’s important and what’s not. If you have a large “database” of words that make up You, the Person, it also makes your job easier later to extract specificities to allow you to easily craft different dimensions of yourself or styles/formats to different audiences.

Versions: An elevator pitch in person at a professional event is different from an introduction about yourself to a virtual community, is different from the summary on your resume, etc. Some common use cases are for your LinkedIn profile, in introductory emails, and meetings with new professional connections. Know the audience, know the right tone, and just practice practice practice until you finesse it.

Enter fresh, exit stage left

Although this information may not really be of any use to anyone during a global pandemic, here’s how I handled every large room of dozens if not hundreds of strangers.

To break into a conversation, you can choose among a few options.

1. Speak with a loner. Often the best ways to immediately get on the same page with someone, you already have one thing in common: not talking to anyone in particular at this particular moment. However, you should also learn to be confident in how you can explicitly close out the conversation and move on, otherwise it gets awkward and boring pretty quickly.

2. Speak with a 3-4 person circle. If you are pretty good at reading people and a room, you might notice if it’s a group of 4 strangers or if it might be 2-3 people who know each other with 1-2 other new people. Hover close for about a minute to listen in on the current conversation, and enter either by participation or by straight up interruption.

3. Join a 5-10 person circle. This is one of the least anxiety-inducing groups to approach in some ways; there might be smaller 1-2 person conversations within the larger circle, or there are just people hanging around in the vicinity waiting for an opportunity to join in. It’s easy to blend in and also easy to fade out.

Types of entry points and phrases:

• The “I asked you first”: If you’re extremely nervous and really not good around people, this is the suggested approach to take to literally every single human you can try to start a cold conversation with. You’ll learn far more by using this method consistently in the beginning, and when you practice with more people and feel more comfortable about when to insert yourself and when to move on, you can employ other tactics. It’s also a great study into the human condition to meet humans who are somewhere else on that nervousness scale – if you’re too jittery to talk about yourself at length, then heck, let someone else do the talking. Example: “Hey, I’m Andrea. This is my first tech event. How about you? What brings you to this event?”

• The hover and topical insertion: Hover nearby for about a minute or two to listen in on what’s being discussed. If you can find an opportune gap in the conversation, you can insert yourself by participating in the same theme of discussion. If you don’t know how to participate, a genuine question of interest is a good way to open things up. Example: “Hey, did I hear you just mention machine learning workshops? I’m interested in conversational AI, do you know if they run any workshops on that?”

• The straight up interrupt: If you’re at a large scale event and the point is to make new connections, then just do it. If you’re not interrupting some really deep conversation flow, in some cases you may even be saving someone from tedious small talk that they wanted to move on from. Example: “Hey, sorry to interrupt! I’m Andrea. How are you doing? How you enjoying the event so far?”

Types of exit points and phrases:

• The disingenuous: I had to list this first because people think this is mostly harmless, when in fact it is not. To get out of a conversation you might use going to the washroom or getting a new drink as an excuse. Generally, don’t do this. Your conversation partner might not be sure if it sounds like you’re coming back or not. You can certainly employ this tactic multiple times over an evening with lots of different people, but it’s not a valid end to a conversation. Don’t do it. Example: “Hey, listen, I just have to go the washroom. Good chat. Enjoy your evening.”

• The Always Be Closing: I assume you, reader, are maybe not a natural salesperson. If you were, I don’t think you would’ve read it this far. If you want to take a couple pages out of agood salesperson’s playbook (I emphasized good, as I suppose there are some negative connotations with pushy salespeople in the universe), here it is. You have already established some trust and understanding with a person in a short 5-15 minute chat. There likely aren’t other topics of interest to explore. Wrap it up by nudging to an explicit end with an ask – state the conversation was great, and before moving on make sure to leave a calling card. Example: “It was good to meet you and learn about what you’re working on. I’m going to go meet some more new people, but before I go – here’s my card – you can contact me if you or anyone you know ever need a digital marketing specialist.”

• The summarizer: Just as you would conclude an essay, you might signal the end of a fruitful conversation by recalling a couple of interesting points, paraphrasing in your own words, and then thank the other person for their time. In my humble opinion, this is possibly the most respectful way to make a real impact and to practice your conversational skills in the most advanced domain: using active listening. If you can get past monotonous small talk and pick up one or two unique details about the person you’re speaking to, and frame your recognition of those details in a way that shows your sincere interest, that person will likely remember you for a long time to come. Example: “It sounds like a lot of work organizing women in tech meetups so frequently, but it sounds like it’s really rewarding. I enjoyed learning about your entry into data science from a more traditional sector like oil & gas. Good luck and enjoy the rest of your evening! Let’s keep in touch on LinkedIn.

Go to where the people are (virtually, in a post-COVID world)

Thanks for reading all the way up to here, and bearing with me while I explained how I talked to strangers at large events that essentially are no more until we can resume a post-COVID life.

But wait! Don’t go! I have a process for networking virtually as well. What I described earlier with large events was the gatherer approach; once I started to build the foundations of my network, I figured out how best to fill the gaps by a hunter approach.

The gatherer approach built a more broad-based and generalized set of categories of industries, spaces, interests, and skillsets. Once I talked to more people and started learning a bit more about what I liked and didn’t like, that allowed me to hone in on specific domains that interested me more. For career objectives, I also prioritized making more effort to network with people more senior than myself to pave more pathways of opportunity.

In a virtual setting, the gatherer approach falls short; I attended Collision from Home a few weeks ago, and while they tried to add a handful of features to emulate some of what ambiance and serendipitous connection you would get from attending a large conference, it’s just not the same. However, it’s relatively easy to target specific domains of interest and knowledge, so here are the ways I do it.

Find communities, and become a part of them

I have tried these virtual community spaces:

• Facebook groups

• Slack workspaces

• LinkedIn groups

• Reddit

• Quora

• Product Hunt

• Discord Servers

• Twitter

I love tech, startups, and business, so I found some of the best and most active groups tended to be in more exclusive Facebook groups and some large public Slack workspaces. I have discovered which spaces I’m more familiar with now and have interesting people to engage with, so I’ve written a short blurb about using each of them.

Slack-based communities

As someone in the tech industry, where every single tech company I know of uses Slack for work communication, it’s a no-brainer that relevant interest groups and communities also end up on Slack. There are many extremely helpful communities with resources for topics like product management, to identity groups such as women in tech.

To get an invite to some of the public communities, you would normally start your search to land on a website related to your interest, such as Women Who Code. Many of the large communities are public and don’t cost anything to join, but there are also more niche or exclusive ones that require a membership to join.

Once you’ve joined a Slack community, most of the large ones tend to have channels reserved for new member introductions. I always have a tailored introduction about myself, about 5-10 sentences depending on the prevailing culture of the existing crowd. To understand what the vibe is like, just scroll around and read some of the main channels and see how people interact before working on your intro. A message worded in a format that is closer to the average behavior in the slack will elicit better engagement and response. So if people are relatively active and engaged such as in smaller niche communities, and newbies write detailed intros of 2-3 paragraphs, then use that as your format as well. If people are quite brusque, then don’t get too wordy. You get the idea.

Slack hack: Once you’ve introduced yourself and you’ve done it in a way that is engaging, occasionally you’ll get people who might reach out to you to connect and chat. So if you’re looking for a job, or a mentor, or a study partner etc, then make that ask in your intro – it’s your chance to take the little soapbox and make the most of it. Elevator pitch, folks! And if you don’t get much response, lurk a little and pay attention to the most active users, and reach out to them to get a conversation started to see if they can point you in the right direction.

Twitter 101

Why is Twitter valuable? I am paraphrasing (perhaps poorly from memory) something famous venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said about his choice of reading material is between books or Twitter, due to value based on time to print. You need to know what is happening right now RIGHT NOW? You get on Twitter; you don’t wait for the 12-24 hour news cycle (although small caveat here: using Twitter wisely also means you understand the fact that because the cycle happens so fast you should be skeptical of everything until it gains credibility over time) and you also get a direct line of communication to some of the smartest and most interesting founders and creators and technologists. Books, the best ones, are still going to be the intellectual and innovation vanguard.

I had talked to so many people about the value of Twitter, and I had said so many times that I was going to write an extensive post about how to get into it, but now here we are and it’s a subset of a gargantuan post of stupidly long proportion. I may extend this out to its own post later as I learn more, but for someone who is still quite doe-eyed and bushy-tailed about working Twitter, here’s what’s worked for me so far.

How to make Twitter work for you:

1. Sign up. Your username doesn’t necessarily matter too much as you are allowed to change it anytime provided the new username you want is available. I used to be @dreadotxyz because @andreachan was taken, but then I talked to the person who had @andreachan, negotiated, and then now I have it.

2. Follow voices you know. This usually means actual people you know in real life, plus the most famous people you probably already follow on other social media or channels, but that’s okay. Start from the broader range of interests and known personalities, then you can slowly work your way to the really good stuff.

3. Scroll through the timeline. Twitter’s timeline/feed is set to “Top Tweets” by default. You can click on the top right ✨ to change it to “Latest Tweets” – but personally, I find that the algorithm for Top Tweets does its job fairly well and surfaces things of interest at a good rate.

4. Have conversations. Pay attention to conversation threads and engage with topics that interest you. Quality control has improved on Twitter somewhat but it’s still full of minefields of trolls and serious echo chamber, so enter at your own risk.

5. Bonus/optional: Say things that matter. If you don’t want to deal with the potential ramifications of people actually noticing and having things to say in return, good/bad, then save it for another medium or don’t bother.

In general, you can likely find your tribe in any of these spaces/platforms, but it really is up to you to engage and try to talk to anyone. I’ve made some new internet friends in the past few months, and while it’s not the same as meeting in person, expanding the geographical range of those connections has been really exciting and novel.

As a tiny little footnote, as I really don’t think it’s worthwhile to go into the details, I keep track of all the people I meet and talk to on a professional basis in a spreadsheet. It’s really not complicated. I just write the date I talked to them, who it is, perhaps their LinkedIn profile, and a brief note about what we talked about. Whatever your method, it is always useful to take notes when it matters.

I hope that parts of this post were insightful or helpful, and to give you a little courage to go out there, and make some new connections. Your humanity requires it.

I have a bit of a problem with tools.

The problem is that I know when I have a really good tool, it’s going to ruin me forever. I can tell when I have something that is perfectly suited for the one thing it’s supposed to do, and does it well. That’s my idea of nirvana – the perfect kitchen knife (I have it – not one, but two – it’s the Misen Chef’s Knife), the specific cut of jeans that get me looking good, the exact app I need to suit my particular objective… you get the point.

You know the saying, if your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail? My saying is, you gotta have the full toolbox to cater to each specific problem. Well, it’s not really a saying. It’s more like a debilitating part of me that is equally annoying and powerful.

When I know it could’ve been done in a perfectly elegant way and it wasn’t, I always get this itchy feeling. It’s in my head all the time, like I have mental hives. Undercooked the popcorn by 20 unpopped kernels by using the wrong microwave mode? Itchy. Cleaned the floor with a traditional broom instead of a Swiffer that would’ve gotten dust out more efficiently? Itchy. Had the perfect opportunity to make that left turn at a major intersection but waited 2 seconds too long? Itchy.

I can’t rest until I get things just right. It’s definitely an irrational behavior that’s related to perfectionism; I’ve mostly resolved this over time to make sure that I can actually get things done in this century. Frankly, the only way I’ve been able to overcome this is by just gritting my teeth and forcing myself to forget the “what could’ve been” and instead focus on the result. I’ve exchanged my satisfaction derived from ideal solution to ideal outcome, and usually this works pretty well.

I really enjoy the process of problem solving so much – most of the fun is involved in finding the right method or tool to get to the core of something. The simplest way to put it is I love geeking out – whether it’s comparing specifications on electronic gadgets (swoon), or comparing features in competing apps (happy sigh), that’s the sort of shopping I live for.

However. On a number of occasions, this tendency paralyzes me by obscuring busy work for productivity. More specifically, I’ve begun to notice this in the past few weeks trying to get on track with one of my 2020 habits-to-do: journaling daily. These are the tools I’ve been using and how valuable I think they were to my objective.

Tool #1: Moleskine weekly planner

Still going strong in March/April, but nothing since May

I was very diligent in the first couple months of 2020, generally getting in a blurb by end of day or every few days. I stopped writing by hand because I have eczema on my writing hand flare up every so often, and it just becomes painful trying to hold a pen. That made me really sad, because there’s something fundamentally satisfying and more helpful to write things down by hand. I think the combination of pain, the general low-grade anxiety and feeling of blasé that came with the pandemic put a lot of friction between me and the physical notebook. I haven’t cracked it open since May 11. The weeks leading up to that date I had mostly done writing in spurts, trying to recall things that happened during the week or even two weeks prior.

RATING: 🔨🔨🔨🔨 4/5 hammers. It actually worked out pretty well, until I couldn’t comfortably pick up a pen.

Tool #2: iPad Pro + GoodNotes

What can I say, it’s gotta be colorful.

I love my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. It was something that I had wanted for at least a couple of years, and I tried to convince myself over and over that I didn’t need it (well – I still don’t, I suppose). I set aside money and saved up a budget to buy it and to this day I’m still so happy with it.

The best thing about my purchase was that it was second hand off of a guy who already decked it out, including a matte screen protector that allows you to use the pencil on it and get a similar feeling to writing on paper instead of a glossy screen.

RATING: 🔨🔨🔨 3/5 hammers. Writing on the iPad for extended periods of time is infinite crampsville. I end up using the keyboard more often. As an aside, the two power apps I work with on the iPad are GoodNotes and Procreate, and both are 💯👌

Tool #3: Notion

I get it, people are crazy about Notion. I can see why – beautiful design and deep customizability. No matter what I do, it just doesn’t work for me. When it’s in list view I just want to use the Apple Notes app. When it’s in board view, I just want to use Asana. I don’t really bother with the other views. I don’t know what it is that people seem to really hone in on with its use – maybe the ability to use a database without so much of the complexity as that’s been covered by the intuitive UI.

Anyway, if you look closer there’s only one real entry here and it’s titled in a self explanatory way. Next.

RATING: 🔨 1/5 hammers. Notion just doesn’t do it for me, no matter how many times I try. Maybe I’m too used to spreadsheets.

Tool #4: Bear app

I did end up buying the mechanical keyboard, btw.

Beautiful design and strong use of Markdown. However, I was too cheap to upgrade to sync across my devices, so even though 99% I’ll be writing on my MacBook, I just wanted the option of having it on my phone too.

I thought that because the design was so stripped down, it would be conducive to writing more, but that didn’t happen.

RATING: 🔨🔨 2/5 hammers.

Tool #5: DayOne app

There is a whole laundry list of advanced, customizable features to give true depth to the journaling experience. This includes different media (text, images, videos, voice recordings), use of templates, and password protect. Beyond the templates, I don’t think I really need all the other bells and whistles.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t think I like typing instead of handwriting for journaling. There’s some sort of disconnect which I don’t know how to describe. What’s interesting here is there’s an audio input feature, but I don’t find that useful.

RATING: 🔨🔨 2/5 hammers.

Tool #6: Apple’s Notes app

The OG.

There’s a saying in photographer circles to stop you from going crazy about how good of a camera you need to buy; the best camera is the one you have on you and that you take pictures with.

The same idea goes for the Notes app – it’s always there, and as an Apple ecosystem person you can pull it up on any device. It’s easy, it’s straightforward, it’s got all the basic features.

RATING: 🔨🔨🔨🔨 4/5 hammers.

At the end of the day, when I realize I get into a spec-comparing frenzy and can’t decide which tool I want to use, I just go for the hammer.

I’m going to keep it old school – back to writing in a real notebook with a pen I go.

What is Bridge Builders? Why does it exist? 

These are the two questions I get asked the most, and the answer to the first question has evolved in the past two years. It’s been a little ephemeral and hard to nail down that first one; and I’ve been reluctant to talk about it because it never felt like a thing. To an outsider, they can see the event details, workshop format, the domain, the logo, the same attendees at the next one… it all seems to be real. To me, it didn’t feel that way for the longest time, and I didn’t know how to make a conclusion that I was satisfied with.

First, let me start with the why.

I arrived to Toronto in late 2017, not really knowing anyone. I had a few close friends, but it was a bit of a career shock coming back to Canada after having worked in Hong Kong for a few years and not really knowing who to speak with to find work. I thought that having some work experience prior in Canada before would be helpful, but it appeared that no one was interested in my resume. I realized I had to build my network, and fast.

I had worked for a high growth startup in Hong Kong before moving to Toronto, and I loved it. I fell into startups purely by accident; I was doing a masters program at HKUST, and in one of my favourite classes on Technological Innovation & Entrepreneurship, we had a couple speakers from a local startup. What they described was so fascinating and so innovative – I just knew I had to be a part of it. And then I was. 

I knew there was a burgeoning tech scene in Toronto, so that was promising. I asked acquaintances, looked online, and signed up for a couple of tech events. I showed up to a massive TechTO event with hundreds of people, and it was completely overwhelming. I decided I needed to start talking to one person, and then another. And then, I had talked to most of the room by the end of the night.

I signed up for all sorts of tech community groups, events, workshops, seminars, bar hops, drinks, coffee chats, every damn thing. I went to every event I could manage to get to, mainly to feel less defeated about looking for work, but also to try and find some interesting people among all the many faces I’d likely only see once and never again. My networking spreadsheet grew monstrous, and I wrote a bit about my experience using the networking app Shapr.

With so many data points, a pattern emerged that was very clear. Every tech event I went to that had both men and women would be like a slowly failing mayonnaise (note: if this seems like an obscure analogy, mayonnaise is an emulsion of oil and water, which are normally two liquids that wouldn’t mix). It seemed that it may start off as an emulsified mix but slowly oil and water would separate out into its own gender groups. The men on one side, loud, boisterous, on their fifth drink: the sales, VCs, wannabe VCs, CXOs or all other tech bro categories under the sun. Or perhaps in smaller quiet groups: the engineers, the designers, the career-change web devs bright eyed and bushy tailed from their 3 month bootcamps. The women on the other side: marketing. Recruiting. Wives or girlfriends of husbands tagging along. Occasionally a designer, very rarely a developer.

Where were all the female developers and data scientists? It was only when I started going to womxn only events that I began to meet them. I met a ton of badass PhDs, data scientists, software engineers, physicists, quantum scientists, digital marketers, etc, but mostly in the safe spaces. And after having to intervene in toxic tech bro behaviour more than once at a tech drinks event, that I realized that there was no use being frustrated. 

I learned to use my voice.

One night at a bar meetup, I watched a tech bro, drunk off his tits, saying inappropriate things to the female bartender and making her visibly uncomfortable. I had spoken to him a bunch earlier that evening and he seemed like a normal enough guy, but I also watched as he continued to smash those drinks from open bar and get progressively more raucous. I was unnerved as he was considerably taller (well, to be fair, I’m small so everyone is taller than me) and getting pretty loosey goosey. 

I don’t know what the catalyst was, or how I decided that I was going to be the one to do it, but for the first time in my life I decided to speak up. Maybe it was the fact that most people had already cleared the event and it was pretty quiet; maybe it was the fact that I then realized I was the only woman left in the room other than the bartender; maybe it was the fact that I also had a bit to drink. But I said something, and I said it bluntly, and I had to say it bluntly many more times.

It was a 45 minute conversation. Back and forth. “Why is it inappropriate?” “I was trying to be nice.” “I had good intentions.” “I’m married!” It was exhausting. It seemed like it wasn’t worth the effort. I said what I had to say, repeated it enough times to drive the point home… and then he started to come around. He started to realize that his perspective wasn’t enough. He started to see things from my point of view and know how I was able to naturally gauge from body language the discomfort of the bartender. That I had so much more going through my mind watching that situation unfold.

By the end of the evening, I had to use a lot of physical, mental, and emotional energy to make a change in the situation and thinking of someone who normally had the privilege to not consider those things. I realized that, even if I hadn’t changed his perspective there, my action of making my voice heard was important. Whether the person on the other end is able to actively listen and be motivated to change is one thing; but if I never use my voice, it will never be heard. 

Speak, or forever hold your peace

I thought a lot about how I had somehow grew more courageous over the years. I suppose I’ve always had a sense of wild abandonment, and after having spent almost a year speaking to rooms full of strangers, I started getting really good at it. 

Everything is just practice, I thought. And that’s it – most folks just need practice, and know how to do tangible things when it came to speaking up about injustice and things that aren’t right. It’s not easy to hold a difficult conversation – in some ways it’s easier with a stranger because it doesn’t feel like high stakes – you may not see them ever again. It’s the hardest to hold tough conversations with those closest to you because you tend to have the most to lose.

But then, if there are such high stakes, isn’t it better to try even more in those situations? I thought about the workplace, and professional settings. How often I’ve had to deal with shitty chauvinism, egotistical male managers, and just idiotic men who are all confidence and no substance. I couldn’t speak up then because I was afraid of being ostracized or of losing my job. I’ve tried and have been penalized. I thought about toxic close relationships. I thought about family conflicts. Wouldn’t it be so much better if you could practice having those challenging conversations in a safe space, so that when the time comes, you’ve already mimicked the body language, the pace of your words, the expectations of the emotions you’ll feel?

Monthly workshops, to help you practice and learn.

It took a while to figure out the scope and gravity of what I was organizing. The more research I did, the more responsibility I felt; women do try to speak up on many occasions, but are ignored, not believed, mocked, belittled, or gaslit. There were so many potentially negative consequences of nudging people into action; I wasn’t sure if I was helping fling them off a cliff.

I decided to try things and to see what worked. (I do this a lot.)

The first event we had was a roundtable discussion, with about 15 people in the room. There was a pretty even mix of genders and somewhat diverse racial representation. It was a bit awkward at first, going around the room with mildly moderated conversation discussing gender and racial topics.

Then, it went off the rails. There was an argument, and there were raised voices, and then there were tears. Worst of all, the person who ended up in tears and leaving the room was an indigenous woman. What hell hath I wrought in the name of “conversations about justice”! Fuck. I felt awful. I thought – maybe this is it. I wasn’t meant to do this and to stir shit up.

But at the end of the event, we naturally gathered into a few small groups, and had smaller discussions. And something emerged from that cesspool of negative energy – a motivation to do better, and to commit to truly creating a safe space. The discussions turned into actionables and assignments, and then we organized the next one. We figured out how to hone in on the right topics. We figured out the right format. We worked on getting people engaged and practicing in small group discussions. We planned more, and now it’s two years later.

I learned a lot about intersectionality in the past couple of years, and I began to understand how much privilege I had. I’m a light-skinned Chinese woman with higher education, fluent English with no accent, fully able-bodied, pretty damn smart and capable. Sure, I’m a woman and that tends to put me at a disadvantage in some ways, but I had so many other things that worked out better in my favour. What use is understanding I have privilege if I’m not going to use it?

I need to do much more. We have a crisis. I’ve learned a lot in the past weeks about the Black Lives Matter movement. I thought I had some idea, but whew, I did not. My experiences and understanding had been very far from the Black experience, but I realized I needed to learn more about their struggles and to support Black folk and marginalized groups to get to an equitable position in the systems that govern our lives, like education and jobs.

I hate that it took me so long to realize what Bridge Builders not only meant to me, but what it meant to the community that all organizers and attendees have built together. My gratitude and heart goes to: Lisa and Joanna who were here since the beginning. Stefan, Maria for helping organizing and presenting. Supporters from across the tech industry in Toronto who let us use their beautiful office spaces for our cozy gatherings. Rashik, Don, Vivian for getting something out of it, and then wanting to give back and having done so in spades. Jesse, a friend before Bridge Builders, an even better friend since then, and someone who has been fighting and resting and fighting and resting and fighting and resting…. but never giving up. Giving your time to do the research, the organization, the running up and down elevators and stairwells to get people into the events, facilitating, and just all the discussions we’ve had of what worked and what didn’t work. I couldn’t have done any of this without you all.

Closing the gap

There’s this quote from Ira Glass that I think about a lot in all the creative and innovative things I pursue. And it’s sort of funny to realize how closely this related to any experience I had in my life as a creator. I never thought that hard about Bridge Builders as a creation, but of course it was; it came from my weary soul, my frustration with being a woman in heavily male-dominated industries, and my existential struggle with morality and justice. Here’s the quote:

Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? 

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.

And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal. 

And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

 — Ira Glass

There is no end point – it’s continuous iteration. We’re going to keep working hard to keep people informed, aware, and practicing. We’ll do our best to contribute to conversations and actions that will help dismantle white supremacy, destroy oppressive policies and thought processes, and to move the needle forward. Everyone’s participation is so important, and if you are going to do the moral, just thing, you must use your voice and you must use it often. You just have to fight your way through it.

Bridge Builders is a monthly workshop focused on how to have challenging conversations about discrimination in the workplace and daily life.

Each event begins with a presentation of current research and resources on a specific topic, then participants discuss in small groups.

I ordered the Luxe Moo size cards. What luscious packaging!

I discovered partway through my career just how simple it is to get your own business cards, even if you don’t run your own business or have nothing to advertise. I think I’ve only ever had two times where I thought having cards was super handy: one was when I gave my now-fiancé my business card because I just didn’t think he was going to figure out anytime soon how to ask me out; the other was at a massive conference where I needed to make a lot of vendor connections.

Having an assorted rainbow on the back is fun mainly for me when I have a stack of these together.

I hate to think that it’s generally not very environmentally friendly to hand out cards, especially at large conferences/events where there’s a TON of paper used at those sorts of things where they immediately become non-recycled waste. I tried to look for alternatives, but apps in general were kind of terrible.

However, there was a pretty cool contact info exchange app that existed a number of years ago called Bump that was incredibly convenient — you would switch it on, and with smartphone in hand, fist bump someone else who has the app to exchange information. It eventually got shut down, and while it seemed like a great idea at the time, I realized nothing was quite as simple and straightforward as handing someone your card.

Now you know who I am. Dat thicc cardstock tho.

I got these because Moo was having a sale (yes, I admit I *only* ever sign up for discount newsletters to wait for the best deal for everything), and I was stuck trying to figure out the design.

After some consideration, I figured the cleanest and simplest format works best. Why would anyone even need my phone number? I barely talk to people I am closest with on the phone, let alone new acquaintances. I have so many different social apps that there’s no need for a phone number to reach me anymore. The most I ever talk on the phone tends to be with complete strangers for things like making restaurant reservations or some such.

A business card is like the physical manifestation of your ego. You want to display it proudly, and wield it to get attention from others.

And if that’s true, my ego appears to be smaller than average and artificially simple. What a humble little thing. I hope these things don’t get lost in too many pockets in due time.

I recently watched this 10 min TED talk by Dylan Marron and it really stuck with me.

One of the things Dylan says that resonated deeply with me was this (which I also GIF’d up for your viewing pleasure):

“Sometimes, the most subversive thing you could do was to actually speak with the people you disagreed with, and not simply at them.”

One of the reasons that really compelled me to create Bridge Builders was that I felt there were two major components that were commonly missing when it came to opposing viewpoints: a sense of empathy for other human beings, and the ability to carry on a conversation with someone you may vehemently disagree with. When our beliefs distill into strong emotions, of which may end up carrying us away, it’s often much too easy to allow for the emotions to wash over us and deny us of critical thinking.

What seems to be happening most often online and even in meatspace are shouting matches, and unfortunately not reasonable discourse. Discourse and critical thinking tends to require us to hold the potential of more than one perspective at the same time, which reminds me of this quote:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I don’t believe this just to be the test of intelligence, but a sense of discipline that one can practice to control, and to hold the reins of our lizard brain emotions for at least a few seconds because there is a deeper belief that as human beings, we all have more in common than what we believe divides us.

Dylan Marron speaks further about the role of empathy (emphasis mine):

And empathy, it turns out, is a key ingredient in getting these conversations off the ground, but it can feel very vulnerable to be empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with. So I established a helpful mantra for myself. Empathy is not endorsement. Empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with does not suddenly compromise your own deeply held beliefs and endorse theirs. Empathizing with someone who, for example, believes that being gay is a sin doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly going to drop everything, pack my bags and grab my one-way ticket to hell, right? It just means that I’m acknowledging the humanity of someone who was raised to think very differently from me.

I also want to be super clear about something. This is not a prescription for activism. I understand that some people don’t feel safe talking to their detractors and others feel so marginalized that they justifiably don’t feel that they have any empathy to give. I totally get that. This is just what I feel well-suited to do.

My objective for gathering well-intentioned folks together to practice and learn in Bridge Builders is to generate a sense of discipline that comes from a core essence of empathy, and the belief that one can affect change. We all have to learn to incorporate multiple viewpoints and perspectives to truly champion diversity; and I believe many of us have a lot more capacity to do good than to shy away from the work that needs to be done to help support a culture of representation and inclusion.

To go deeper into the root of where empathy lies is a concept in psychology called the Theory of Mind. As a human being surrounded by other humans, the commonly adopted worldview is that other people have their own desires, objectives, domain of knowledge, experiences, etc. This is such a fundamental assumption about the world that in reality, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we have the ability, of which we sometimes just don’t exercise enough, to imagine the richness and depth of what another person’s narrative and history has been to lead them to come to certain conclusions about the world.

I believe there is no simpler way to avoid hard thinking about what or whom you don’t know but by demonizing or dehumanizing groups. It’s much harder to give someone the benefit of the doubt or some emotional buffer when you may feel what they are doing or saying is harmful.

But we must remember, what is the point of being antagonistic toward someone which may result in further polarization of perspective? It’s self-serving to our own emotions, but not what is required for positive change. It seems plain to me that in this day and age of echo chambers and little understanding of what are facts vs opinions, actions and statements that veer too far toward the extreme tend not to be ones that have been too critically examined. And if I am not the one to make the necessary and explicit statement to re-examine such a perspective, I do the world a disservice by not speaking up against it. So here we exist, to say what needs to be said, because not enough people are doing so.

I think this is why I’ve always been fond of learning about anything and everything so much. I’ve always felt a compelling need to overcome the fear of the unknown, and just knowing things allows me to grasp reality in such a tangible way that I no longer felt untethered. In my endless research on all the interesting bits of life, I also learned to test my boundaries a lot.

Today, I see my path forward as a series of events that can only ever come about by being fearless and taking initiative. Some people tell me I’m confident, and that they wish they could be like that or that I’m an overbearing, arrogant ass; some people think I’m naive, because I posit that so many things are possible. Whatever the perception, with age comes a certain comfort of being present in the world, and knowing that you can be an agent to affect change, rather than a passive player letting change wash over you.

People who know me superficially seem to see me as relentlessly positive, which I’m obviously not 100% of the time. But I think I’m still able to channel that at my lowest points, and I don’t think it’s necessarily my personality or where I am at any given moment; it’s just a learned skill.

This is why I never stop believing that good things will happen, that positive change will come. Everyone can do it: learn, practice, and believe that there is always something better next on the horizon.

Tomorrow is a better day, and it’s already happening, because I made it so. ✨ see you there.

The Cryptochicks Blockchain Hackathon + Conference, organized by the Cryptochicks group, is for and by women/female-identifying hackers and those interested in blockchain/cryptocurrency. I, along with over a hundred other ambitious and gritty hackers, worked hard to bring our ideas to life in the beautifully constructed and bright MaRS Discovery District building.

While the hackathon was simmering away, a conference was held downstairs at the same time with industry pioneers and thought leaders in discussion on a variety of topics that I unfortunately didn’t have time to enjoy. Apparently, at one point Vitalik Buterin’s parents were together in the same panel!

The hackathon was unique in that it was sort of a mixture between a normal hackathon and a business case competition; initially the organizers created a business track and developer track because they weren’t entirely sure how many developers would be participating. Luckily and happily, there were a significant number of devs and in the end, there was a good mixture of both biz and dev teams.

I initially joined in the business track, but through some mingling and chatting with fellow hackers, I switched over to the developer track as the business chick on a dev team. #bizchick

Left: Me, getting into that #hackerlife. | Right: TRADE SECRETS!

I enjoyed the process of idea generation, doing market and industry research, and testing the viability and feasibility of our favorite ideas. It felt a bit odd to front load some of that work prior to the hackathon, considering the expectation of these events (hackathons/case competitions in general) is to cram as much work and effort as possible in a short amount of time. However, also considering how new so much of this was to all the members of our team (both the industry and technologies), we appreciated having time beforehand to do research and work with the resources we were given to learn more about blockchain and smart contract development.

One of the most unique features of the hackathon was also its greatest selling point: all female/female identifying hackers.

My heart soared every time I listened in on a nearby team working on incredibly abstract and intellectually challenging concepts, and conquering all kinds of problems. The creativity I saw was astounding, but what made me the proudest to be a hacker in that space was the collaboration. We had some mentors present to help teams out with ironing out business/technical issues, and I was chatting with one who was a seasoned hackathon participant himself. He was pleasantly surprised at how well the teams meshed, and how healthy competition existed in a manner that was positive and constructive for all involved.

Let me tell you, there’s no better feeling than being in a room filled to the brim with talented, intelligent, hard-working and amazing women that run the gamut from business to technology, and everything in between. We were incredibly busy hacking away the whole weekend, but in the small gaps of exhausted breaks sprinkled in between mad dashes of effort, we got to learn more about each other and marvel at the energy and ambition of our fellow hackers.

Plus, I bet you’ve never seen a baby at a hackathon either.

My team was formed prior to the hackathon; Paula and Lauren worked on the backend, while Mariya took on frontend. When it came to developing the MVP I really wasn’t much help at all, but I supported where I could: scrappy searches on Stack Overflow, flagging down mentors to troubleshoot, and setting up our snack station. I felt a bit redundant as the night wore on, and holed myself away briefly to finish our presentation deck.

I rejoined my team at one minute to midnight to celebrate our momentous mark of hacking together, pictured below.

Left: The clock has struck midnight! Still going strong. | Right: How we were really beginning to feel.

I finalized the deck and interrupted my teammates again sometime at 2am, and I felt validated by Lauren as she extolled the virtues of having a dedicated businessperson on the team. (Yay! But it was also possible she was losing her mind at that point. ) Unfortunately there wasn’t much else I could contribute to at that point, so I went home to sleep a few hours, took a quick shower, and came back in the morning. Again, seemingly somewhat unorthodox for a hackathon. Shower? Sleep? What luxury!

Our concept was to utilize the blockchain to make requesting transcripts by students and issuing transcripts by university easier and faster.

I got a friend to record our pitch which I put up on YouTube here: http://bit.ly/transcryptopitch I transcribed it and you can turn on captions.

I never realized that truly the most difficult part was having to present it! I was sanctioned to get a few hours of sleep particularly because I was responsible for a large part of the presentation that required pontificating, but I have to give serious props to my teammates for literally not sleeping a wink, debugging in the wee hours of the morning, and still running through the process flow of the MVP. DAMN.

Watching it again on a screen is pretty cringeworthy, seeing all the cracks show through, but that’s what happens when you’re thrown in the deep end with no sleep. I don’t know how bank analysts or consultants who do this often get anything done productively, but first: kudos. Second: everyone should get more sleep, because it’s necessary.

I didn’t get as many pictures as I wanted and we also missed a bunch of presentations, but the ones we did see were incredible.

The incredible 16 year old in question: https://twitter.com/ananyachdh

You can see the finalists on the website, but I think we all easily came to consensus (heh) about the most impressive project that blew us all away.

Ananya Chadha, a scrappy 16 year old, worked solo on an idea that democratized and created accessibility to genome testing, which she described on stage in an enthusiastic rush to get all her work out in the squeeze of five minutes.

Judges voted for the winners through a blockchain voting system (of course) called Polys, and the results of which were posted up on the screen after.

As you can see, Ananya won by a CLEAN SWEEP OF ALL VOTES! It was so exhilarating not just for her to win, but for all of us in the audience. The moment was electrically charged and so inspiring for all of us attending.

I had an amazing and surreal time at the hackathon. I don’t believe any other experience has come close to this in the sense of empowerment and potential I felt. Other hackers agreed.

Thanks Team Transcrypto for the friendship, the lessons learned, and just being amazing human beings. We were so excited to know that our presentation and idea had stirred up keen interest among our audience and mentors, and we’re mulling it over on how to take it from MVP to reality. We’re still learning and doing, but most of all — we are having fun!

Shout out to all the amazing hackers out there, and to Cryptochicks for providing this visibility for showcasing female talent. Tech is still a male dominated space, and we all have a part to play to make sure that isn’t the case for our daughters and granddaughters. Innovation belongs to all, and from what I’ve seen at this hackathon, we’d sure miss a lot of it if we don’t ensure fair representation.

Tweet at me @dreadotxyz or email me.

All those options have slightly different but overlapping objectives, and meeting people from each platform has varying degrees of success (depending on your definition of success). Meeting mutual friends is the traditional route, but it was fairly limited, and I was interested in how far I could get with online solutions.

Meetup.com and searching for events that interested me was a good way to meet large groups of people with similar interests at the same time, but what it offered in breadth was lacking in depth. Or, at least the depth is dictated by how extensive you get into conversations with any particular person you meet at an event, which sometimes is pretty unlikely and downright difficult to accomplish.

Bumble was on my radar prior to coming to North America, and it was touted as Tinder with a twist: mainly for dating, and women shoot first. When I downloaded it for the first time, I wasn’t interested in the dating portion but wanted to check out its interface and see if there was a friends section. I noticed they had a business networking section but it seemed like it was in its fledgling stages, so I looked for an alternative. LinkedIn exists, of course, but a lot of people treated it as a professional profile page and not much more. I sent cold and warm messages throughout LinkedIn, and the results varied. Then, I came across Shapr.

I would describe Shapr as similar enough to LinkedIn, but seemingly for people who have the actual intention to make cold connections in real life. The Tinder interface is ever present, as Shapr also employs a “swipe left for pass, swipe right for yes” mechanism.

Shapr: like Tinder, but with somewhat fewer photos of dudes with tigers

Each person’s profile can be populated partially from LinkedIn, with a field indicating preference of method of meeting (e.g. prefer to meet for coffee? Phone call? Go on a walk or for a meal?). This helps structure meetings from the get go.

The best part that really helps move things along, in my opinion, are the template greetings embedded into messaging. When you successfully swipe a mutually interested profile, the different intros are offered above the message window, giving a conversation starter that can be done in 0.15 seconds. This is key — not only does it reduce dithering (after sending enough greetings, you’ll realize they are all mostly meaningless filler to get the essence of a conversation going anyway), but I personally find it inoffensive and highly effective. I can’t say if others feel the same when they receive a template message, but I see it as a significantly utilitarian process that helps build momentum and facilitates the real communication that follows.

The templates also match your meeting preferences, e.g. coffee chat like above

Now that I’ve been using it for about 2 months, I felt a wave of dread wash over me: I have not met a single woman from the app, and I knew I was part of the problem. Besides the fact that the pool already had disproportionately fewer women, I knew I cherry picked the profiles that I felt were interesting or helpful to my career. I found, unfortunately, that most of the female profiles I came across fit neither description. The self-selecting bias was perpetuating the types of people I met, and I figured I should overcome it by trying to meet people who were perhaps students or early on in their career, where perhaps I might be able to offer career advice or mentorship.

Even so, with a conscious effort in my mind each time I came across a new batch of profiles, the results were maddening. I still ended up swiping away a lot of women, and the ones I did contact never replied. My results are below as of today, and as if someone heard my inner thoughts while I was drafting this post, one of the women I contacted actually replied! And we might actually even meet! Awareness is indeed the first step to making change. Without further ado, the State of the Union in the Shapr world for me:

Note the highly technical classification.

Some notes:

• The initiate ratio skews heavily toward me mainly due to the mechanics of the app more than anything; after a swipe yes and a mutual connection, I press ‘Send Message’ and I immediately tap a template greeting to get things started. In my perspective, this is fantastic UI and UX — so efficient!

• I showed some percentages, but not an overall “conversion rate” of initial connections leading to an actual meeting (i.e. the conversion). Of 47 people contacted, 26 replied which is around half. Then of that 26, I have only met 9, which is 35% of those I’ve exchanged messages with. All in all, my total conversion is 19%. Sad.

• The classifications in the table above are tongue-in-cheek, please don’t lynch me for seeing the world as two shades of Dudes and Not-Dudes.

Do you use Shapr or some other method of meeting new people and making new connections? Do you have a better rate of success than I do? Do you have networking goals for 2018? I would love to hear from you in the comments, or feel free to tweet/email me.

YONGE ST/GETTING AROUND

How lost will I get on the longest street in the world? How fast do streetcars actually go? Do they still use tokens on the TTC?

flickr: Marcanadian

THAT TORONTO SIGN

I’d like to go to there.

DRAKE

How many Drake songs do I need to get familiar with before I can appear to blend in with my 6 (6ix? SIX?…) surroundings? Started from the Bottom all the way to Hotline Bling? Do I have to know enough Drake trivia as a sort of ambient knowledge?

TIFF

Seems fancy. And like a big thing!

IT’S COLD

Damn.

IT’S SORTA CLOSE TO MONTREAL

Baaaaaaagels!

×××

This is me. Image via webcomicname.com

Here I am, poised with a mental pen, thoughts slipping away as I try to find the right verbal adhesive to will and patch together the existence of Somewhat Original Thought. Moving from blank page to a single sentence of consequence is the most difficult thing to do when you’re the sort of naive completionist like I am.

I used to write, or some semblance of it, years ago. Some was shared with other humans, but most were left as a cozy union of ink and paper stashed away in a damp shelf. Wrangling words always felt like the only craft I could necessarily apply in any short amount of time and completing before I felt too frustrated with my lack of skill and interrupted myself with a vote of no confidence.

There are always a lot of hows or whys involved in writing; write something every day! Just start! Sit at your desk with your fingers on the keys and just hammer away until you have some semblance of sense!

I can’t seem to hack or fool my brain into these types of menial exercises anymore, possibly because I’m the last person able to motivate myself by misdirection. They say, go with what means you can muster, until you exercise a mentality of muscle memory to apply habit to come up with the end.

OK, blank page, I got you. I riddled you with big fat letters of minimal gravitas. Let’s see how this tango fares tomorrow…ish.