Deb Nicholson
Deb Nicholson is an open source software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Executive Director at the Python Software Foundation which serves as the non-profit steward of the Python programming language. She’s won the O’Reilly Open Source Award and the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for her efforts to broaden the free and open source software movement. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Spritely Institute and on the Advisory Board for Computer Science at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Session
Cats are notoriously unbothered, adaptable creatures which seems like the kind of energy we could all use more of in our open source communities. It’s all too easy to be reactive all the time and let the current state of events, tech news, world news and internal changes set your course. This is where cats come in. They do not care about the news, internal or external, they just adapt and continue to pursue their own goals. As Pythonistas, leaders and project maintainers, I believe we can learn from the cat.
In this talk I will discuss strategies for staying on target with your goals, communicating with team members about what’s important and working around what isn’t and share a few tricks for absorbing and releasing everything that comes in via a high information environment. You may not be able to sleep 20 hours a day, but you can control your attention and your approach to a changing world and keep pursuing your goals.