 Over the years I've gotten to know someone who's been quite instrumental in SVG as a standard And he's now working at Adobe. One of his more recent contributions was writing the SVG export from, or for Illustrator So since I know him and since I love SVG, I thought I'd share Let's try to get that mirrored. There we go How this actually works, how to optimize so I've taken the This is not the editable editable version because I don't really care about that What I've got over here is a whole lot of paths so every single letter is a separate path Chiang did mention that you should link those together because every single attribute in SVG is a separate path and then the Like the coordinates after that so if you merge all of those together you save every single path You basically link them. The best way of doing it is to actually grab everything of the same color let me just So I've grabbed a whole lot of black there for example and I'll merge those together So that's now one path And the result in SVG will be a lot smaller So basically every single black element on this in this SVG you'd merge into one This is obviously destructive So you only do this as you're exporting and you'd merge all the red all the green all the what that that's pink or something Merge all those together Unfortunately, there's no non Illustrator way of doing this Are you still use SVG go? Well, yeah, you still use that but the illustrator way is That it can reduce the file sizes compared to I think at least from my tinkering Yeah, it'll work it out. Yeah Now the main thing that I'm gonna pay any attention to so I'm just gonna save I'll call that export This is the key dialogue. I know this is quite small on the screen We use in presentation attributes not internal styles or CSS That gives you the easiest thing to override if you've got black you don't need to set a color at all because by default any path in SVG without a color is set to black We're embedding images, but we don't usually want any anyway ID set to minimal because you don't want any of those scattered through SVG I will take a lot of that stuff out anyway, but this one at the end is probably the most important setting the decimals to one NASA managed to get to Pluto using four decimal points. You don't need that many to render an SVG But this is one of those things that you need to do really careful carefully because if you Export too few decimal points by default you try it on one But then you need to actually inspect your final SVG because sometimes if the SVG is really complex It will be not fine enough. So maybe you'll need two decimal points But that's basically a big difference if you think for every single coordinate Shaving three or four characters off depends on how many points you're out originally that reduces your file size down significantly I'm also going to minify because I want it to I'm not going to do responsive that takes off the coordinates So let's have a look So I've gone from seven ninety three K to a hundred and sixteen This is a bit unfair because the seven ninety three is not being optimized. Do you know how big yours is the final one? Yeah, I'm curious to see like without having gone any further what the best one is Which one sorry this one Will it tell me three nineteen? Yeah, so just by going through illustrator I've dropped it by about a third and most of that is down to the decimal points It's probably possible to do this through SVG O But the illustrator way is really fast So if you've got the designer whoever's actually come up with it or if you are happy with illustrator yourself I'm also designed to do it for you show them what to do or Work it out yourself and then run it through SVG out the end or any kind of optimizer from there But it makes a huge huge difference on the size of the SVG's Good any questions on SVG optimization? Thank you. What's next? What kind of hack have we got up next I Need to actually do this with my notes because I'm really badly prepared. So I'm just gonna copy that and Hang on I've really really badly repaired prepared for this. I can't really emphasize that enough All right, my notes Let's try that. Hey Now this is not CSS related, but it's Like wider scope of world related One thing that I'm painfully aware of in my own office and looking around the room at the The makeup here is there aren't very many women in software development There are a lot of reasons for this But there are things that we can actually do about it basically breaking down the barriers to make things more friendly In my current role, I'm an engineering manager. I Have no women reporting to me in my software team Which is terrible basically I'll go into what? balance actually means so What I've started doing is Researching what I can do about it because I'm not just gonna sit there and say oh well We didn't get any women applying. So, you know too hard didn't try There's a lot that you can actually do and I'm determined to try to improve the gender balance in my company I should say the company I work for is like predominantly women my CEO I think seven out of ten executives are women Like it's fantastic. It's a really great company to work for except in our software development section where I Think we've got two women now out of how many are we Fred 20 something? Yeah, and climbing and it's yeah, it's not good enough So instead of sitting on my hands and complaining about it. I'm trying to do something about it I'm also really horribly prepared for today because I haven't spent enough time on it So I'm gonna call this part one And I'll I'll get back to it over time because I'm really determined to actually make a difference here And when you talk about gender diversity you see nice companies like this one Oh wait, this is over. This is one of the worst companies out there at the moment This just came out today actually this is over's attempt to say hey, we're a nice place to work for Percentage wise this is about like less than 10% of their workforce And right now every single one of these people is probably brushing up this CV to get out of there So that there's when you talk about gender diversity or just diversity in general I'm not really interested in uber per se because I would hope that the culture like that is not one that pervades in the company I work for you're always at risk of things like that happening If anyone's not aware ubers basically done one stupid chauvinistic and racist thing after another recently in the last couple of weeks So this is exactly why they put this thing out to show that they're not like that at all Even though they're having a great deal of difficulty retaining their stuff But the problem is that Really starting in the 80s when personal computers came about the marketing at the time was towards boys and men I mean PCs at the time were you know toys basically didn't really do all that much in the early history of computing I mean Ada Lovelace in the 1800s a Woman came up with the concept of programming originally Like basically the pioneers of computing were women without doubt you look through NASA's history You look through the US military grace hopper Who invented the compiler? There's Hedy Lamar the actress who's instead of parting at night basically sat in her bedroom and invented Wi-Fi and Bluetooth All these pioneers up to a certain point and then everything dropped off and Around that time was the introduction of personal computers The theory that I've best seen is that it's really down to that marketing at the time that computers are for boys and for men And we've got an early generation where it's just not something that girls do So we had this really fantastic situation where But the gender balance was like pretty even Through to the point where everything just went really bad and has continued going that way And we again we can sit here and say like oh well too bad But I'm not the kind of person who does that I'd rather actually do something about it One of the problems that we often have and especially through our hiring methods is we we think we're hiring from it You know meritocracy so we look at how well someone does We judge them we'll ask them technical questions in interviews and we'll assess whether they're good or even in their jobs Based on that in practice. We are so full of unconscious biases That it just doesn't work that way at all And this applies to all sorts of different measures as soon as you're a minority in anything The odds are stacked against you if you're an ethnic minority if your agenda minority Male female you might be gay lesbian anything along those lines as soon as you are not the majority Then you have everything stacked against you And no matter how much you might have be aware of this the odds are not in your favor So when you say that hey, we've got a nice meritocracy. I only promote the people who do really well I'm not really, you know Consciously preventing women from going up through my hierarchy. You actually are unless you're addressing it properly If you're really thinking about what you're doing We heard before where's Alex gone? Has Alex gone I've been reading about the cultures and the like one of the things you mentioned is like Yeah, we have beers and things like that. How many women generally join in on beers like culturally It's not as common as men like looking at the demographics and I've researched into this if you advertise that for your company I hate to call them out because I'm sure they're a great company to work for But these are the kinds of things that we think yeah, this is great like we have a great culture This is what we do. Yet the women hearing this are just like oh, that's not my thing you're not going to get people applying for you and With all the best intentions in the world unless you're actually thinking about this really carefully Then you're going to be putting up barriers to stop people Applying for your jobs in the first place because this for me is where I'm at. I need to think about From the application process from our job ads to the hiring process How we're preventing minorities from joining in I know within my own company. We've got a really good ethnic diversity. We've just got a really serious gender imbalance one thing that's common is there's the confidence gap which is linked to imposter syndrome and Essentially, it reduces a number of applicants from those minor groups and Then we have Confirmation bias which reinforces the negative experiences So to give you an example if if I was a minority apply for a job. I get rejected It's like well, I probably shouldn't have applied for the thing in the first place basically confidence levels are lower when you're in minority and There's been a study on this Male applicants will apply for a job when they meet 30% of requirements Female applicants will apply when they meet 80% of requirements, but that is ridiculous You think your job ads are even and equal, but it's not the case at all One of the things we can do about that is by changing the wording And as soon as you have more than five requirements listed on the job ad You're dropping off your minority application rates right there because you're making those barriers too high and What one the thing that does get down to is instead of listing we need three years experience in this particular thing Something like that. You need to target the skills rather than the technology Especially based on the concept of the 30 you know 80% requirements versus 30 for women for men, sorry So changing your job ads around where you're looking for me. What skills do I really need for someone to work in my company? And key things that I mean for me when I'm looking for a good job. I want something that's got flexible work hours I want good collaboration Given generally with gender roles that women if they have kids will need more flexible work hours and men If you don't have something like that baked into your company If you're expecting people to work late every day or work on weekends or never take a day off because their child is sick Then you're not going to attract the right kind of candidates But it's not just a matter of having a policy for it. You need to live and breathe it. Otherwise, you just won't sustain The applicants in the drop-off rates for men in the first 10 years in tech 17% of men will change to another industry. I think I can't remember the exact number It's about 67% of women will drop out in the industry Usually that means they'll start into computer science or something along those lines And then they'll go into a parallel industry where they're still using their tech skills, but the culture is more In line with a happy place for them to work So it's like the bro culture basically needs to go away and we need to be that friendly collaborative workplace I'm kind of going beyond my initial job stuff here to an extent Something else that makes a difference is imagery. I'd be happy to work for this company if I didn't know what the name was So when you have images if they're on your website if they're on your job ads or anything else like that You need to use those minorities. I mean Uber's doing this really well in this Apart from the fact that they're Uber and don't mean it Did you read it if you pretty loud people did you read about the South Korean thing? I mean I don't know how much they made it There are some technical tools as well as one called Textio That will do a text analysis with machine like based on machine learning on your job ads to to weed out anything that has any kind of gender bias or Any other kind of bias towards minorities? I'm still going based on my preliminary research here because I haven't really done all that much Automated co-tests work for really well. There's also I think it's called headless Applications basically you take the names off CVs and universities as well But I don't know if that really means much to anyone. It doesn't to me if you take a name off I saw for a There's a truck fest which is film festival in Australia From last year. They had one female finalist out of fifth out of 16 this year They took the names off the applications. It was 50% women and there's I mean you can talk about differences in maybe the women Had a whole lot more successful movies that particular year, but it just seems unlikely And this is the hidden biases where we're not even thinking about it But we see a minority and it's like well, maybe they're just not going to be as good or something Having automated co-tests as part of the hiring process can help with that So I mean the whole idea of an automated test is you have a set test that's given to someone It's graded based on how well they do or don't and there's no human interaction into that So you've got as level a question as possible There are still potential flaws in that you might be going for something that's too technical In the in the co-test that you're providing which may skew you towards certain people But it's still something to think about the next section for interviewing is in structured behavioral interviewing And the concept behind that is that if I'm interviewing two separate people for the same role with the same skill set I will ask the same questions and I'll note down my results So I've got a fair comparison if you allow it to go Based on what you feel or what you think then your biases are kicking in Whether you're aware of it or not. We're all like, you know, I think there's something like a Success rate for hiring is like way below 20% for the number of successful hires for an interview And what people actually think in how someone actually performs Generally speaking humans are terrible at hiring other people and because we're so bad at that it makes hiring minorities even worse Further on interviewing Asking multifaceted questions where there's not just one answer Also opens it up to different approaches because when we're hiring someone we don't want everyone in our team to be exactly the same We really want someone to come in and challenge what we're doing Because otherwise we're just going to turn out the same thing that tomorrow is we're doing today And that's not a good way to actually change your company The reason we don't like this as humans and the reason we fight against it and interview against it and hire against it Is we're scared of change It's just part of human nature. It's the way we're evolved. We'd like tomorrow to be the same as today So when a candidate comes along and challenges your way of thinking Then you're automatically going to be against them And when someone is from a minority and then it's all the more so that that's going to be the way Um This is pretty much the end of what I've gotten up to so far My next step from here is going to be analyzing our job ads and like going through a text analysis and see what I can do from there Um changing our interview process so Next month or maybe the month after I'll continue from here Um and see where I can go Um anyone got any questions or Does anyone want to work for this lovely company If it would be a happiness picture So you bias you drop the company name off there and say hey, this looks all right I'm sorry to have any more pictures in this but you know Good good. Thank you