Category: Event

We don’t need to explain which Juliet Emma Broback is talking about. She’s here to shed some light on some common misconceptions about Juliet’s intelligence.

Sure, she makes her decisions quickly – but since when is decisiveness a character fault? Juliet isn’t dumb – she’s a woman with a plan. And in 5 minutes, Emma will walk you through how Romeo’s intellectual equal asserts her agency to get what she wants.

Rovina Broomfield knows a thing or two about working in tech. She also knows a thing or two about people making assumptions.

So when she found herself at a networking brunch, listening to people describing black techies as though they were mysterious and exceptional, she may not have been surprised. But she was upset. (Upset enough to submit a talk about her feelings to Ignite!)

Rovina will be joining us at Ignite #37 to tell Ignite what being black in tech really means about her and her peers. So, the next time you meet someone else who’s black and in tech, you better understand their identity.

Every summer has that song. You know the one. You hear it playing in coffee shops, on the radio, at sunset BBQs. Then next summer, it’s a new song.

You have to wonder though – when was the first Summer pop hit? How far back do these earworms go? And even though each song is very different, what do they all have in common?

Michael Hamm, composer and musician, gives us a multi-layered tour of the last 400 or so years of pop music.

Most people think there are seven continents: Asia, Africa, Antarctica, Europe, Australia, and North and South America.

Cindy Wu is not most people. As a board member of the National Speleological Society, she’s become very familiar with a secret, 8th continent.

Where is the 8th continent? If you’ve ever met Cindy (or looked up the word “speleological”), you might have a pretty good idea. Still, we’re not going to be the one to spoil the secret.

Join us on October 4th as Cindy tells the story of her first visit to this isolated place, gives us a taste for what it’s like to be there (“you kind of get a feeling for what it felt like to stand on the moon for the first time”), and explains how you can safely visit too.

We’ve all had days where we want to just throw in the towel, grab a backpack, and disappear into the woods. But then we think about camping every night. And rain. And where do we find food? And what was the trick to keeping bears away again?

Well, if you want the long-term hiking experience without the pain and suffering, Beth Jusino has a hot tip for you. Check out the Camino de Santiago, a network of ancient trails through Western Europe.

She’ll tell you how to get away from it all for weeks (or months?), while still eating good food, sleeping in a bed, and living on just a few dollars a day.

Most Ignite Seattle attendees are aware that Earth’s climate is warming (we hope) but speaker Elisa Bonnin wants to know the grim details. What will our future look like? To answer that question, Elissa, a graduate student in Chemical Oceanography, looks to the past.

Earth’s climate has changed drastically before… humans just weren’t around to see it. What were? A type of tiny, primitive creatures called Foraminifera. In her talk, Elisa will explain how we can use the shells they left behind (as tiny as four human hairs stuck together!) to learn more about the future we all face.

When Sumit Basu was a child, his mother would get out a weird metal pot, clamp it together, and tell the kids to keep away in case it explodes. Then she’d cook food in it.

Much later in life, Sumit decided to revisit pressure cookers, but as a scientist, he had new questions: What can you cook in it? How does the pressure help it cook quickly? And why does the food taste so good?

And, really, who hasn’t had these questions? We’re excited for Sumit to unravel the mysteries of the Instant Pot on-stage at Ignite Seattle #36.