2016 was an exciting year for writing! I migrated my website to a new domain (cate.blog)! My first (and maybe last) book chapter was published. I started a new writing project – Where The Hell is Cate – and sent 52 “digital postcards” from 15 different countries.

Overall stats are a little down on last year – I published 134 posts (vs 189 in 2015), just over 124K views (down from nearly 154K in 2015), 77.5K visitors (compared to 94.5K in 2015). I gave up using Google Analytics, so these are WordPress stats and slightly different from the ones I reported last year.

Most Popular Posts 2016

1. That Remote Work Think Piece Has Some Glaring Omissions (A Rant). I got annoyed about blog posts evangelising The One True Way of remote work and deconstructed some of the things that get left out.
2. Advice for White Men. I got tired of all the advice that I see that may work for white men but does not necessarily apply to the other ±69% of the US population (and rather more globally).
3. The Trouble With Women’s Events. I wrote about how the improvements in inclusivity for general tech events were throwing women focused events into relief. Many of them operate as fundraisers, which means they don’t provide the same level of support for speakers and this skews the perspective presented.
4. Big Co. vs Small Co. & Job vs. Career Stability. On trying to create career security, which is independent of job security, and how company size can effect that.
5. All the Leaves are Brown and the Sky is Gray. I got real about projects that fail, and the things we can take away from them – the things we learn, and our relationships with each other.
6. On 1:1s. 1:1s are hard for new managers, but one of the best uses of time. I wrote about the why and the how.
7. On Saying No. A story about the most impactful thing I did for “diversity” when I worked at the conglomerate – and why. Saying no as an act of resistance, because refusing obligations and choosing your own priorities is an act of self care and an expression of hope.”
8. Categories Considered Harmful. Technical post about iOS architecture. I wrote about using Categories and why they create Frankenstein Monster objects.
9. Bad Interviews are a Company Problem, not a Candidate Problem. On Technical Interviews, and how we have all these strategies pushing that problem off onto candidates, rather on training interviewers to do better.
10. Real Talk: Women in Tech and Money. The data that indicates women in tech have a career duration comparable to that of a pro-footballer – how can this affect financial planning?

Most Popular Posts Pre-2016

1. The Day I Leave the Tech Industry. From 2014, and still going strong.  I wrote about feeling like my time in tech was running out – it resonated with a lot of women, and still does. This is a wonderful thing as a writer, and a damning statement on our industry. I keep meaning to follow up with how I feel now but I have yet to figure out what I want to say.
2. The Hardest, Shortest, Lesson Becoming a Manager. From the very end of 2015, and one of the first things I wrote about management – I talked about letting go of writing code.
3. Extracting the Dominant Color from an Image in Processing. An early technical post (2013!) in what went on to become Show & Hide. It’s about determining the dominant color in an image.
4. It’s Not an Asshole Problem—It’s a Bystander Problem. The last post of 2014. I wrote about how the problem in tech with people (men) who let notice inappropriate behavior, but don’t act on it.
5. Corporate Feminism and Thankless Emotional Labour. From 2014. I wrote about deciding to stop doing Corporate Feminism, because I’d become convinced that it was at best thankless and at worst harmful.
6. Your Guide To Undermining Women Whilst Being Nice. From 2014, now something – sadly – of a classic. A series of techniques that get used to undermine women, with plausible deniability due to “good intentions”.
7. Interviewing @ Google. From 2010!! My study guide for technical interviews. Still relevant, which I guess you could a take as a statement on how technical interviews are improving — or not.
8. Creating and Comparing Images on Android. More technical work from Show & Hide (2015) – I replicated my work on iOS to create test images, and compare images against each other in tests.
9. Book: The Truth About Burnout. Review of the book I wrote in 2015, the ideas from this are the foundation of my (deliberately unpublished) talk Some Things I’ve Learned About Color. Includes some points about how these burnout factors can be created or exacerbated for under-indexed folk in tech.
10. iOS: Getting a Thumbnail for a Video. Another technical post from 2015!
11. Replacing KIF Tests with XCUI Tests. Technical (iOS) post from 2015!
12. Some Thoughts On Mentoring. A taxonomy of mentoring, from 2014.