Glad the holidays are over? So are we. Tryptophan-induced food coma isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and Black Friday Deals are overhyped and overrated. Just don’t forget that you can still support OSMH anytime by shopping on Amazon through the AmazonSmile program. Set us as your charity once, and then all you have to do is remember to shop through smile.amazon.com rather than just amazon.com. It’s easy!
Amazon Smile is a program where Amazon donates a small % of every sale to a non-profit of your choice. There is no extra cost to you! Just remember to shop Amazon from our Amazon Smile Link:
Last week, our friends at Mental Health America participated in a fantastic Twitter chat with folks from the American Psychological Association's Public Interest Directorate, SmokefreeUs, and the Veterans Health Administration, US Department of Veterans Affairs. The theme was helping people quit smoking for a happier, healthier new year, and several of the questions focused specifically on how mental health plays a role in smoking habits and cessation. The graphic above provided by Mental Health America is particularly illuminating.
Check out the rest of the conversation on Twitter:
Tomorrow, January 31st, 2017, at 6pm PST, OSMH board member Dr. Jennifer Akullian, Psychologist and People Developer at Keen IO, will be joined by Julia Nguyen, Founder of if me and Software Engineer at IndieGogo, John Cutler, Senior Product Manager at ZenDesk, and Erin Frey, cofounder and CEO of Kip, for an evening of short talks, Q&A and open discussion, and mingling. The focus will be on the following topics:
The event is free and open to the public. It will take place at the Keen IO office located at 1458 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94103.
More information is available on EventBrite.
OSMH volunteers are still looking for help analyzing results from our 2016 Mental Health in Tech survey. This year, we're trying something new and experimenting with both Kaggle and data.world, and we're particularly looking for anyone who has experience with either of these two tools to help get our analysis off the ground, though we'd welcome a helping hand from anyone with any relevant background or experience with data and statistics.
Data nerds: please reach out and let us know if you think you can be of assistance!
Board member Gary Hockin is giving the Day 2 Lunch Keynote, titled Using Open Source for Fun and Profit (Saturday @ 1:30pm in the Grand Ballroom)
Founder Ed Finkler is giving his talk Graph Databases Will Change Your Freakin Life (Friday @ 5:15pm in the Grand Ballroom)
Board member Joe Ferguson is holding a workshop on Tutorial Day called Create Your Own Local Development Environments With Vagrant (Thursday @ 9am in Key Biscayne #1)
He is also doing a regular session on DevOps For Small Teams (Friday @ 4pm in the Grand Ballroom)
Volunteer Amanda Folson is giving a talk titled Not-On-Calliday: On-Call Best Practices (Friday @ 5:15pm in the Key West Ballroom)
Volunteer Matt Trask is giving a talk called Console Applications: Automate your life away (Saturday @ 11:30am in the Key West Ballroom)
Many of the other speakers are longtime supporters as well. If you're attending SunshinePHP, be sure to meet up with us during the hallway track to talk all things OSMH.
RallySecurity is an information security podcast by Ben Heise, Danny Akacki, and Tony Robinson. OSMH volunteer joined them as a guest for a thoughtful discussion about mental health in the tech community.
OSMH founder Ed Finkler was at Google's Chicago office yesterday afternoon to talk about mental health in the developer community and OSMH as part of the Talks at Google program. Stay tuned for the video.
Today, for every tweet using #BellLetsTalk, Bell donates 5¢ to #MentalHealth initiatives. Join the conversation: https://t.co/sTwPdpseFh pic.twitter.com/U3oLbYDTSY
— Bell Let's Talk (@Bell_LetsTalk) January 25, 2017
We are not affiliated with Bell, but OSMH is encouraging all of its followers to join the conversation on Twitter. More funding for mental health initiatives benefits all of us.
There's also a live Q&A with Clara Hughes and Marie-Soleil Dion at 2:30pm EST. If you have questions or thoughts about mental health or how to help de-stigmatize mental illness, join in!