Opening Keynote

A great keynote on a very current subject, love the backgroud story telling a lot.

A few pointers for improving your presentation:
- Be consistent in using capitals in your bullet points (do not mix capital/non-capital character beginnings).
- Don't use full sentences in bullet points, people start reading and stop listening to what you're saying. Keywords are better or use a single keyword with a picture to create the atmosphere around the subject of the slide.
- While speaking, you sometimes mumble when you're really excited telling a story from your own experiences. As a non-native English speaking attendee it's a bit hard to follow the story.

Enjoyed!

Good keynote - slides were a little bit text heavy. But a lot of really good points, suggestions and ideas for getting involved with mentoring.

This talk is quite lacking in a lot of areas. There was very little in the content in terms of solutions or new information. Stories can be important for hitting points home, but the story she told here was very rambled through and disconnected from a delivery of what the importance was. Most of it was a reiteration of the same facts everyone already knows, but from one person's personal anecdotes. Minorities and women in tech are being marginalized, it's not acceptable, and it's uncomfortable for those experiencing it. What we need on this subject is a talk that outlines tangibles, what can *we* do about the problems? What real-world experiences and behaviours should we be paying attention to, to have an impact on the industry at large? What's our individual part in all of this? How should we be changing our thought patterns and ways of interacting? Again, if the talk was meant to just reiterate the problems we have, it certainly did fine. If it was meant to make a difference, there was very little to take away other than one person has had some struggles on a journey.

Maybe an OK talk for a track but not for a keynote. I expect keynotes to be relevant to the general theme of the conference. This wasn't about PHP.

I also think the talk needs more refinement and focus on what point it's trying to drive home. Wasn't sure firmly what the subject of the talk was.

Where most people talking about gender and minority issues in tech do so in a polarizing and blame-heavy way, Christina provided an extremely compelling and positive viewpoint that really earnt my respect.

I truly enjoyed the positivity Christina conveyed. Her talk was more about how adversity empowered her to improve herself and others, instead of being more of the usual fare about victimization and blame. I have nothing but respect for that.

I'm going to be looking to get involved in Ladies Learning Code back home in BC. It seems like a great organization with a positive, productive goal. I look forward to being able to support empowering more women and girls to get involved in our field.

I really enjoyed hearing about the work Christina's doing and her personal experiences added a lot of context.

Some great advice in there too.

Has the roots of a good talk, but needs a bit of a push to get the rest of the way.

The big problem was that there was a large collection of anecdotes but they were not used to emphasize any particular point. In the "what we can do" slides, there were very few concrete details or examples, but mostly generalizations. There were opportunities to delve into really interesting explanations from a psychological perspective, but those were also unexplored, even though it seemed like they were about to be.

Overall, the talk seemed to go in many directions without really paying off in any of them.

I think the mentoring advice included in this talk was really valuable, and very much appreciate the positive and inclusive tone as well as the very approachable call to action.

While the speaker seemed impressively comfortable delivering the talk, there were times when I had a difficult time hearing them.

There were also a few points where I found the slides distracting because the talk seemed to have moved well past the topic highlighted by the slide on display.

As a manager of both men and women, I found this topic very informative and helpful. The speaker made me reflect on how I approached certain scenarios and gave some helpful perspective/tips.

I didn't like this keynote. For an opening keynote I thought whoever was going to be talking would be talking about PHP and that the talk would summarize what we could expect out of the conference/what is new in PHP/would get us excited about the conference. I felt that this keynote was basically Christina talking about how she got into the field and talking about her negative experiences being a women in this field. At the end it was a bit more positive with her talking about mentoring women/girls in the field but I still don't think this was an appropriate talk for the opening keynote.

Was refreshing to see a talk on this subject that focused on ways to help get women, et al, interested in tech careers, instead of focusing on artificial means of increasing such representation.

I still don't understand this one as a keynote.

The stories might have been interesting individually if any of them had been deep but they all felt like offhand throwaway comments. Worse, I couldn't see what the common threads were connecting them.

Opening keynotes are generally used as an introduction to set the tone and direction of an event but this one felt like an aside that didn't tie into anything else going on.

I really liked how you structured the narrative, it was very engaging and illustrated a wide variety of situations women / minorities face.

Most of all I appreciated the concrete tips and information about mentoring. I took a class in college* about the pipeline problem and ways to address it. Your talk hit a lot of the same points, and we didn't have nearly as much helpful information on mentoring. I'd love to send a recording of the talk to the professor, if one exists.

*http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cfrieze/courses/