Parallels Between Career Building and Home Remodeling a talk by Jackie Kazil

Ten years ago, I had a five year plan. A plan to fix an eighty‑year‑old house in Washington, DC. That five year plan turned into the ten year plan.

During those ten years, I went from working as a data journalist at The Washington Post, to working as a software engineer for the Library of Congress, to being a Presidential Innovations Fellow for The White House under the appointment of President Obama. I wrote a book for O’Reilly Media, I am “completing” a Ph.D, I created the leading library in my field in Python, and I started a family, giving birth to the keynote speaker for PyCon CZ 2042.

In the past, if you had asked me how I did all of these things, I wouldn’t have had a sufficient answer. It wasn’t until I was able to reflect back upon the remodeling of that house, that I truly began to understand my accomplishments. In this talk, I’ll impart the lessons that I learned in that house remodeling, and the interesting way in which they apply to software development and my career.