mental health

How to become a distributed company: a step-by-step guide

I lead a company called TEN7 and up until the spring of 2017, we were all in on the idea that a company needed a physical space to function. In fact, I was so sold on the idea that my wife and I purchased commercial real estate in Downtown Minneapolis in 2011 just so that we were committed to making a physical space work for the company. Fast forward to 2019 and the office space is no more, TEN7 is a fully distributed company, and it's been two years since we decided to take the jump.

Productivity Lifestyle Strategies to Make the Most of Your Day

Do you ever reach the end of your day and wonder what you actually accomplished? Even worse - do you have weeks where you feel like you didn’t get anything done at all? This session outlines multiple strategies on how to overcome bad habits in order to get things done! Drawing from personal experiences, we'll discuss how to life hack your way into nurturing a productive lifestyle to help you roll with the punches, how to bounce back from failure, and feel good about the work we do.

CommYOUnity - Fostering Healthy Contribution

A healthy “you” is the best contribution one can make.  For us to thrive as a community, we have to take care of ourselves. Explore self-care within our community, mindfully, in this session. Fostering a healthy environment of contribution includes providing self-care support and guidance for the members in the community. The Drupal software project and its supporting ecosystem is supported by individuals donating their time and skills. Donating. For free.

You are not a candle; don't burn out

This session will cover a topic near and dear to our hearts: How to juggle multiple complex IT projects without losing our balance. We’ll get real about distractions that we cause ourselves through unexamined habits or suboptimal work practices, and we’ll talk about how some basic Agile principles can support better work-life balance. We’ll also tackle how to recognize some systemic issues in a technical work environment, such as technical debt, and make a connection between small choices in our daily work-lives and big problems that snowball over time.

Dealing with Mental Illness: Or, How I Learned to Hate Myself Less

I’m JD and I have mental illness. I’m also not alone. Every year, roughly 20% of the US adult population deals with some form of mental illness, however that number is MUCH higher in the tech community.

Staying Passionate When the Days Continue to be Long

Passion. It’s what drives us and excites us. It’s the thing that makes us strive to be better, and work harder day after day. It’s the energy that makes a project exciting and energizes the team to deliver something never seen before. It connects people, and makes them more than just co-workers, but more like family. What happens though when that passion begins to dwindle? The days become longer, the project gets hard and burnout begins to set in. How do we push to deliver what we set out to do? How we do keep focused? How do we keep that passion?