Jennifer Riggins is a culture side of tech storyteller, journalist, freelance writer, and event and podcast host, helping to share the stories where culture and technology collide and to translate the impact of the tech we are building. She captures the lessons learned where digital transformation meets culture, and tries to highlight voices under-represented in and marginalized by the tech industry. She has been a working writer since 2003, specializing in long-form features and profiles, while always being mindful of SEO. She is a working mom, currently based in London.
Since 2015, Jen has been The New Stack’s Culture Correspondent, where she has written more than 250 features on the impact of the work of the tech industry, as well as hosted several episodes of The New Stack Makers Podcast. Read her work: https://thenewstack.io/author/jennifer-riggins/
Since 2021, she has also written a monthly column for Container Solutions WTF is Cloud Native, as well as is a host for their tech events. Read that work: https://blog.container-solutions.com/author/jennifer-riggins
Jen also hosts the IR Digital podcast, is editor of the Sales Force Europe blog and social media manager, and has also written for InfoQ, ProgrammableWeb (now called MuleSoft blog), ZDNet (formerly SmartPlanet) as well as SaaS blogs like Redbooth project management and Telefónica’s Blog ThinkBig.
She was also recently a mentor for on DEI in Open Source at the University of Tennessee, for the capstone core run by Dr Vandana Singh and funded by the Google Award for Inclusion.
Always interested in more paid freelance writing, hosting (podcasts, events, panels) and mentoring gigs.
Subjects
Tech storytelling, tech event coverage
Tech culture, future of work, flexible work, remote work, hybrid work, collaboration
Tech layoffs, tech recruitment, tech hiring
Open source communities
Diversity, equity, inequality, inclusion, accessibility, a11y, DEI
Tech ethics, responsible tech, impact of tech
Cloud native infrastructure, cloud native mindset, app modernization,
DevOps, agile, platform engineering
SRE – site reliability engineering
Progressive delivery
Developer experience, DevRel, developer advocacy
APIs, documentation
Cybersecurity
Skills
Writing Credits
http://thenewstack.io/author/jennifer-riggins/
https://blog.container-solutions.com/author/jennifer-riggins
https://www.infoq.com/profile/Jennifer-Riggins
As author, unless indicated otherwise.
In the first installment of our new column about the tech workforce, Jennifer Riggins asks if we really need all those standups and status updates. Is there a better way?
Read
Open source is the backbone of the tech industry, making it an inherently sociotechnical concern. Its lack of diversity and inclusion echoes across community and code. But it’s possible to automate part of open source community management — like we do with technology itself, to reuse models and metrics for success. This is the only work of its sort to talk about sociotechnical tactics to increase inclusion in open source communities.
The tech industry works hard to break away from monolithic architecture. Yet, we’ve neglected to move away from the idea of the monolithic developer experience. This is the only work of its sort to talk about #a11y in software development to any level of depth.
Victims of the hate group KiwiFarms harassment targeted the vendor CloudFlare, which the group needed to stay online. The piece features interviews with some of its victims and offers a template for future cases.
Open source is 70% of enterprise technical stacks, yet it has abysmal diversity numbers, even when compared to the rest of the tech industry. This was a long-form reflection on the complex socio-technical issues that prevent open source from becoming more diverse, including the fact that it relies on mostly unpaid labor. This piece presents the problem and offers solutions.
Yes, there's a lot of headlines around tech layoffs. But those are really Big Tech Layoffs, which is an opportunity to redistribute tech talent across industries that desperately need it. One area that has so many openings – 3.4 million – has a serious marketing problem. This piece features advice to ease recruiting — and nurture security talent in-house.
Neurodivergent people make up one of the largest unemployed and underemployed groups, but have skillsets that should be welcome in the tech industry. This piece learns from neurodivergent tech workers and volunteers how best to recruit and retain this population for the success of all involved. Frankly a lot of the tips are just common sense ways to attract and retain talent in general.
If you work on a large enough tech team, you have Ukrainian colleagues. IT is the most exported service in Ukraine, the largest European exporter of IT services. That doesn’t mean it is the only country experiencing war and crisis right now but, for many in tech’s Global North, it brings war and worry a whole lot closer. You want to help your teammates, but you don’t know where to start. And you don’t want to increase the emotional burden on those who are already fighting, bunkering or fleeing for their lives. This article is focused on practical ways to help your colleagues in crisis.
A lot of managers swear by OKRs — objectives and key results — as a measurement of employee performance. A lot of employees just swear at them. OKRs are a divisive measurement in the tech industry, a true love-hate experience. This is the most thorough guide I could find to explain this complicated twist on the old KPI.
An example of Jen's event coverage from DevOpsDays London. Matty Stratton offers how to apply the DevOps principles of CALMS — culture, automation, lean, measurement, and sharing — with the foundation of cloud engineering — build, deploy, manage — all with a cloud native mindset.
