Mental Wellness Day 2022 – April 8
Thanks to all our speakers, volunteers, sponsors, and participants for making our second annual Mental Wellness Day a huge success! We started the day with a keynote from Karen Lopez, followed by Chrissy LeMaire who presented a great session on a difficult subject, what happens to our tech footprint when we die and how to prep so it is easy for a non-tech partner to deal with all your stuff. Then we had a series of lightning talks from Eleanor Hughes, Drew Skwiers-Kobbala, Kristina Mishra, Jen McCown, and Deepthi Goguri covering a variety of topics. After the lightning sessions, we had a great panel discussion led by Eugene Meidinger, with Daniel Maenle, Ana Mae Alexander, and Jules Behrens, talking about self care and advocacy in the workplace. Then Gilda Alvarez gave us some tips for handling the work from home burnout, Cindy Gross talked about creating new patterns to deal with the circumstances life throws us, and Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman helped us learn to how to make work not suck. For details on the sessions, check out our blog post!
I am currently working on processing the videos and we will send out an announcement once the sessions are available on our YouTube channel.
Spring Speaker Schedule
We have recently updated our list of events with sessions by women speakers. Check it out!!
If you are speaking at an event and would like for us to highlight it, please send an email to dataplatformwit@gmail.com
UnitedWeTech – Episode Three
Our third interview was with Kristyna Hughes, a 3Cloud consultant. We had a great discussion on her hack of the Tabular Object Model to create dynamic column names in PowerBI! It’s a super cool technique. You can read more about it on her blog at www.dataonwheels.com
Keep an eye out for our next episode later this month with Jules Behrens!
Spring Thoughts
Each year as the dark of winter is overcome by the spring light, I always feel a sense of joy and wonder at the changes I can see all around me. The leaves start to show up on the plants and trees, small buds forming, the hyacinths and other early bloomers add a burst of color to the dull brown of the desert landscape. I always seem to feel the desire to purge my life of all the clutter and stuff that has collected in the past year. It makes me feel lighter and less weighed down to get rid of things that I don’t need. The stack of mail that may have been important at one point, but now is just clutter. Some things are harder to decide to get rid of because of an emotional attachment. The HP financial calculator that was my mom’s when she was a financial planner decades ago. Am I ever going to use it? No. Do I really want to just get rid of it? No. It is a reminder of someone that I love and I think of her every time I see it.
After the Mental Wellness Day, I was telling my husband about Chrissy’s session and he said that sometimes he sees some of the things that I take care of regularly, paying the bills, making sure our photos are saved to the cloud, financial planning, and he hopes that he goes first, because all that is outside of his comfort zone to take care of. This spring I am going to take steps to make sure he will be able to take care of all those things if something happens to me. I worry about him and this will be one way I can do something to help in advance.
In between reviewing the froopyland git hub and filling out the EOL documentation, I really want to get my garage cleaned out!
Leslie
