Books
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Being Perfect
→: Being PerfectSacha recommended Being Perfect (Amazon). It is a charming, insightful book. I’ve never been very perfect, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying. It’s a reminder to look at our motivations, and to dance our own beat. I love it. Probably way too many quotes below – which I’ve added the emphasis to. Go and…
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4 Hours to Smash the CS Stereotype and Create Something Beautiful
→: 4 Hours to Smash the CS Stereotype and Create Something BeautifulAli and I will presenting our paper 4 Hours to Smash the CS Stereotype and Create Something Beautiful (pdf) at the upcoming CICE Education conference in Toronto. Christine Alvarado of Harvey Mudd college came to Google last month to gave a talk on how they’d brought female enrollment in Computer Science up to 42%. The talk is called “Three…
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Confronting the Brutal Facts of Reality
→: Confronting the Brutal Facts of RealityIn Good to Great (Amazon), one of the things they found to differentiate great companies is that they confront the brutal facts of reality. It’s a question I’m asking myself more often since reading the book – am I being brutally honest with myself? Is this how reality actually is? Am I ignoring anything that will come back…
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Stop Waiting; It’s Today
→: Stop Waiting; It’s TodayMy boyfriend is supposed to be moving out to Canada at the start of April, but his visa application got held up. He was contemplating keeping his apartment in London and staying another month. I said, Don’t do that. Spending an extra month living in limbo will suck. I give great advice (sometimes). I should…
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Being Yourself On The Internet
→: Being Yourself On The InternetI’m Cate, I work for Google as a Software Engineer (on mobile Gmail). For fun, I’m a qualified ski instructor and I love to kickbox. I was the Instigator of Awesome at Awesome Ottawa, and I do various things around getting more women into CompSci. I have a BSc from the University of Edinburgh and…
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Leadership and the Sexes
→: Leadership and the SexesLeadership and the Sexes: Using Gender Science to Create Success in Business has some insights into the differences between men and women and how that can affect various things in the workplace. A lot of it is, “oh, I can see that” – not that a reaction like that means the book is not worth…
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Right Now Is Just Fine
→: Right Now Is Just FineI travel completely chaotically. Most of the time I can’t remember where I’m staying (yay for free wifi at airports), I almost never exchange currency in advance, and I would never dream of arriving the “recommended” three hours before an international flight. The thing is, I know it will never be as awful as taking the boat…
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I ♥ My Kindle
→: I ♥ My KindleI finally caved and got a Kindle (Amazon). My friend showed me his, and it looked pretty cool, and then I packed up my apartment… and I have a lot of books. And it started to seem stupid that I was carrying around all these large, physical objects. Time to digitize. Ironically I had held…
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Making Ideas Happen: The Dreamer, the Doer, and the Incrementalist
→: Making Ideas Happen: The Dreamer, the Doer, and the IncrementalistMaking Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality (Amazon) is a must for anyone who feels their genius is insufficiently recognized and needs to start focusing on action, not ideas. In my In Pursuit of Awesome talk, one of the points was – “Ideas are Cheap. Execution is expensive.” This book is all…