Career
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A BS Metric for “Diversity”
→: A BS Metric for “Diversity”Recently, I got to use the fact that I am a huge art nerd, to help a team I was on. It was awesome, because I actually felt appreciated – and there’s been something of a dearth of that lately, and because it was a showcase of the positive effects of diversity (something we had…
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A Man’s Guide to Helping Women in Tech
→: A Man’s Guide to Helping Women in TechWhat can men do? Other than not harass women? Although not harassing is a surprisingly good start. TL;DR: Step 1 – Don’t drive women away. Step 2: Don’t stand by and watch other men drive women away. Step 3: Give women a reason to stick around. Step 1: Don’t Perpetuate Understand the range and extent…
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GHC13 – What Are You Going to Do Differently?
→: GHC13 – What Are You Going to Do Differently?I have a bunch of posts to write up from GHC last week, which was as usual, awesome. But the question I was interested in people I went with answering was – what are you going to do differently when you get back? For me, it was a reminder about the takeaway I got from…
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Thinking About Statistics
→: Thinking About StatisticsI’ve been thinking lately, if we really accepted the statistics about technical women as being likely to reflect our own experiences, how might that affect our behaviour? It can be hard, as technical women, as we deviate from the statistical “norm” for a long time, and it’s easy to think that will keep going… but…
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Three Phases of Technical Women
→: Three Phases of Technical WomenAmongst other technical women, I’ve observed three broad phases when it comes to their feelings and attitudes with respect to the issues of women in tech. These are my unscientific and generalised observations. Ignorance is Bliss This phase is where women deny that there are any issues facing women in the industry, and sometimes even…
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Highs and Lows
→: Highs and LowsI said goodbye to someone special recently, and after a long walk and brunch with a friend, I threw myself a little pity-party. I bought myself flowers and two delicious artisan cupcakes from a farmers market, and blew my $100/month Amazon budget on novels, one of which I devoured whole. Basically it was, “I’m going…
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Confidence
→: ConfidenceI was having a conversation with one of my mentors last week about a specific challenge I was facing, and she made this observation, and gave me a brilliant piece of advice that completely transcends that discussion and put so many things in context for me. If it’s affecting your confidence, then we have a…
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Women in Computer Science: It’s a Hard Problem
→: Women in Computer Science: It’s a Hard ProblemThere’s this class of problems in Computer Science, called NP-Hard. The short explanation for this, is that these are some of the most difficult problems in the field, where solutions are likely to be exponential in time. One such problem is the Travelling Salesman problem – finding the shortest path on a graph (or a…
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Medium Term: Tradeoffs and Refactoring
→: Medium Term: Tradeoffs and RefactoringAges ago, I wrote this post on meeting deadlines – things I’d learned, what had worked. One thing I wrote is about thinking “medium term”: Think Medium Term I don’t hack. I worry, actually, that I literally can’t hack. I can’t fight with something, and be happy with a one line fix labelled “DO NOT…