Collaboration has always been one of the hardest parts of my career, and not because people are incapable or unwilling, but more often due to conditions make good collaboration difficult for those challenged with neurodiversity. Remote work, distributed teams, time zones, conflicting priorities, overloaded calendars, along with , personality mismatches, unconscious bias, power dynamics, and differing communication styles all get in the way. Even when everyone has good intent, meaningful collaboration can feel fragile, exhausting, or inaccessible…especially in deeply technical roles where thinking time matters as much as meeting time. Over the years, I’ve learned that the biggest barrier to…
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We organizers just wrapped up the Data Platform DEI Neurodiversity Day, which I helped host while battling a pretty major illness. During two sessions especially, one by James Reeves and another by Itzel Yagual, I had a bit of an epiphany about how my brain works and I thought I’d share. I’ve long known that I’m wired differently as a neurodiverse individual. I give the term multitasking a run for its money, as a professional once described my brain as having 25 McDonald’s drive-thrus, all taking orders at once. My daily goal, as someone with AuDHD, is to manage that…
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I’ve just returned from Data Saturday Oslo and Data Saturday Dallas, and tomorrow I’m off to Oracle Cloud World. Both Data Saturday events were amazing, even with the little hiccup of my lost luggage in Oslo. The experience was made even better by the incredible gluten-free options provided by my gracious hosts—special thanks to Johan for that! At the Dallas event, in addition to presenting on the benefits of leveraging instant extracts with Azure Fabric, I led a session on thriving with ADHD. The room filled up quickly, and while some may have been surprised by the large turnout, I…
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“Kellyn, how is it you always find the bullies/narcissists if there are just a few bad apples?” I was asked this question this last weekend at an event, and I’ve often wondered what it is about me that drives some individuals, particularly workplace bullies and narcissists, to implode shortly after working with me. It’s a great question, so let’s dive into it— We often think of bad apples as rare, but it’s really about percentages, personalities, and work culture. Encountering a bully, or even a narcissist, is something I expect at least once every one to two years. How I…
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So, this last week I had the opportunity to speak and attend at the SQLbits conference. This was high on my list after attending an Oracle event last year where even attendees and organizers there mentioned that they admired the conference and the way that it was run. I fully admit to running the full gambit of either hyper-aware or completely oblivious and with SQLBits, I’d been a bit of the latter and I wanted to change that. Now I want to preface this post with saying that I refer to this month as “March madness” and that means that…
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Each person’s experience with a diagnosis is going to be as unique as the individual and when it comes to ADHD, this is exceptionally true. Although diagnosis gave me an answer and a sense of relief, it also caused me confusion when I was presented with common challenges that ADHD folks experience. I was diagnosed after the age of 40, which means I had over three decades to build out coping mechanisms, accommodations/work arounds or simply battled an ADHD tendency into surrender. These are the traits that I neatly fit into the box when someone imagines ADHD: Folks with ADHD…