Workshops and courses

AI foundations: making your business ready to use AI tools

We’ve all heard the hype. ChatGPT is (apparently) going to revolutionize how we do business, put hundreds of thousands of people out of a job and potentially gain consciousness and destroy us all. Midjourney and Dall-E are going to make all human art obsolete, forever. It’s not entirely clear how these tools are going to do all that, but it’s definitely going to happen!

… you can probably tell that, here at deadSimpleTech, we think that the current excitement might be a little oversold.

That’s not to say that AI can’t benefit your business: from image recognition and labeling tools to natural language processing and segmentation, there are a hundred applications of AI that can make your life a whole lot easier and make your business more money. Of course, as with all worthwhile things, it takes thought, practice and effort to implement it in a sensible way.

In this full-day workshop, we’ll go through everything that you as a business need to do to get to the point where you can use AI tools effectively, and discuss what you might do with AI once you’re there. We’ll discuss the importance of properly storing, documenting and structuring your data, the kinds of problems that AI can be applied to effectively and how to identify parts of your business where AI can have an outsized impact.

Duration: Full day (10 AM to 5 PM, including breaks)

Cost: $995/head + GST in person, $695/head + GST online

Communicating with your engineering staff: a crash course

There are many resources out there for teaching engineers how to communicate with non-engineering staff. Usually, this means treating engineers as having a communication deficit that needs to be rectified by making engineers speak more like salespeople or managers.

Unfortunately, communication is a two-way street.

This course is for every manager who wants to be able to talk to engineers in ways that they’ll engage with. In this course, we’ll teach you how engineers think, how we communicate and how we’re motivated. It’s invaluable for building high-performance, high-cohesion teams that consistently deliver good work.

Duration: Two full days (10 AM to 5 PM, including breaks)

Cost: $1995/head + GST in person, $1595/head + GST online

DEI for real: what you need to know to actually include people

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are currently hot-button topics, and many, many companies are investing significantly in training their staff in these matters. Unfortunately, actual results from these trainings tend to be disappointing: they don’t reach the people that they need to, and they lead to superficial diversity and tokenism more often than not: the people who get hired tend to be minorities that coincidentally think exactly like the rest of our staff. Meanwhile, the rest of us get pushed out of the workforce and have to start our own consultancies and outcompete you.

This course draws on our experience of deep diversity in the workplace to teach people how to look past superficial diversity and include people with ways of thinking very different to yours. We discuss simple real-life techniques for debiasing your decision-making processes, making your environment friendlier for a wider range of people and shaping your culture to include everyone, rather than just the people who already fit in easily.

Duration: Two full days (10 AM to 5 PM, including breaks)

Cost: $2995/head + GST in person, $2395/head + GST online

Trans people in the workplace: the politically incorrect guide

Over the last decade or so, openly trans and nonbinary people have become increasingly common in the workplace. Obviously, given that we've been historically mistreated something fierce, this represents a massive amount of progress: however, it's also come with challenges as everyone adjusts to the significant changes that this has caused. Moreover, much of the advice on including trans people in the workplace has been written by cis people, meaning that misinformation, well-meaning advice that turns out to be outright offensive and just plain stupid stuff is remarkably commonly encountered. This is our attempt to change this situation.

Over the course of this half-day workshop, we'll give you an honest, unvarnished rundown of what being trans in the workplace is actually like, what actually upsets us and how you can create a safe environment for us to flourish and be productive in. Covering subjects as diverse as what to do if a trans worker is actually the problem, how to tell the difference between legitimate complaints and specious ones and how not to wind up in the newspapers for all the wrong reasons, this course will let you and your team work with trans people confidently and in a way that respects the inherent value of all people involved.

Duration: half a day

Cost: $695/head + GST in person, $495/head + GST online

Automating business processes with python

Modern business is not a simple thing. There are a hundred little tasks that constantly need to be done, drawing attention and resources away from your core business, breaking up your time and draining your energy. And there are more of these tasks every week, making the problem worse and worse. In short, keeping your business processes under control is vital in any modern business.

This full-day course will teach you the basics of coding in python, a powerful, easy-to-use programming language, for automation, teaching you how to automate many of the boring, repetitive business processes that so many of us have in our businesses. With an emphasis on making everything simple and easy to understand, this is an excellent opportunity to build foundational coding skills and learn how to make your business way more efficient in the bargain.

Duration: Full day (10 AM to 5 PM, including breaks)

Cost: $995/head + GST in person, $695/head + GST online

Community programming: the basics

Wondering about how the software that you use day to day is built? Curious about how your phone or tablet work? Want to get a head-start on a career in tech, or just want to understand what all the engineers in your workplace are going on about? This series of workshops can help you do that.

Designed for complete novices, this course teaches the basics of programming using python, a very simple, human-readable and powerful programming language, over ten workshops. We’ll go over the basics of writing, running, debugging and deploying programs, working towards building a (very) simple project of your own.

Next workshop series: TBC

Maximum capacity: 16 people

Cost: $35/workshop, or $30/workshop if you pre-book for all ten

Code for creatives

“I’ve never been any good with technology”

You’ve heard creatives say these words a thousand times, and perhaps you’ve even heard yourself say them. They indicate a particular view of code and software: arcane, incomprehensible and largely used by other people to control us.

That view’s completely wrong, and in these workshops we’ll show you why.

Designed especially for creatives, this series of workshops will teach you how to express yourself in the medium of code, take control of your online presence and make cool stuff using digital tools. Over ten weeks, you will work towards building a portfolio website for yourself, learning the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and gaining confidence in your ability to use technology for what you want to do.

Next workshop series: TBC

Maximum capacity: 16 people

Cost: $35/workshop, or $30/workshop if you pre-book for all ten