Saturday (Aug 6) was an exciting day for me. Hosted by Dogpatch Labs, an amazing travelling conference called AlterConf came to Dublin for the first time. An event that "highlighting the powerful voices and positive initiatives of local community members, we build hope and strengthen the community’s resolve to create safer, healthier spaces for everyone". It was finally a delight to meet the organisers, Ashe and Heather. There was so many amazing stories (and emotional) told on the day. I tried not to sniffle too loudly in the back. My eyes have opened up even more, and it's so great to see so many people turn up on the day.

I'm looking forward to the videos from the day, I didn't see all talks as I was running around outside with the event manager getting stuff ready and tidying up.

I've storified as many tweets as I could find, have fun and check it out: https://storify.com/whykay/alterconf-dublin-2016

Thank you so much, AlterConf Dublin, for coming to Dublin. You have made that day a tremendous day for me, and I am so proud to be part of it.

On Thursday (Aug 11), Etsy collaborated with Coding Grace and ran our first Allyship workshop. The idea was initialised by Vicky when she met the VP of Engineering, Mary Ferguson, and CTO, John Allspaw. We all agreed this would be a great workshop to run, and they had experience running it internally, and would be great to share this with the tech community. The turnout was amazing, a full house. The Etsy team did an amazing job with yummy Focaccias (instead of pizzas), scrumptious donuts, and various beverages to suit all tastes. We started with a short talk followed by grouping into seven different groups discussing about two scenarios. After a short period, the groups gave feedback on what they discussed about in each scenario.

Here are the slides :

And here's a link to the reading list, if you have any more to recommend, let us know via the comments: https://codeascraft.com/2016/08/10/recommended-reading-for-allies/

I've also storified some of the tweets from the evening, which you can find here: https://storify.com/whykay/etsy-coding-grace-allyship-workshop

Let's hope we can have another AlterConf next year, and if anyone interested in running an Allyship workshop, let me know via contact@codinggrace.com