Programming
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Building Things for Humans
→: Building Things for HumansI had a bit of a career crisis earlier this year. I asked myself, when did I become an iOS developer? I did not mean for that to happen. And so I made a plan, where I would diversify, and expand my skills, and explore. There’s are many good reasons not to tie your career to…
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Trust and Team Dysfunction
→: Trust and Team DysfunctionI’m taking a leadership course at work at the moment, and this week we spent time discussing The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon). I’d recently read Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon) so it was interesting to hear what other people thought of the concepts. There’s a pyramid of things – Inattention to Results,…
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From Hard Focus, to Flow, to Stop
→: From Hard Focus, to Flow, to StopInteresting project the past few weeks. Basically I was swapping out a large and central component to what my team is building. It was really tough, to do that and keep everything functional. Normally I ask – what is the least amount I can do to make an improvement? This time, I had to ask,…
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Friends Don’t Let Friends… Become PMs
→: Friends Don’t Let Friends… Become PMsRecently, I heard about a school that has a mandatory “technology” class that students have to take in order to take CS classes in later years. It features: wood-working, circuit building, and Excel. This is horrifying. I want to go there with picket signs and stage a protest. Dress up as robots and chant things.…
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Misconceptions of What Software Engineers Do
→: Misconceptions of What Software Engineers DoMy first proper day on my new project, and our PM says to me – “Cate, you seem to like to travel. How about you spend time in New York?” – I’m tasked with helping another team out, and being the bridge between that team and my team here. Initially I was a bit… thrown.…
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How Not To Get Things Done
→: How Not To Get Things DoneI have had a pretty appalling week in terms of the difference between what I wanted to achieve, and what I did achieve. Things outside my control: Re-aggravating shoulder injury. So much pain. Increased sleeping due to pain killers. Two trips to chiro (feeling a lot better now – finally). Car is broken and needs a bunch of…
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Getting Started With App Inventor
→: Getting Started With App InventorA colleague and I are running a workshop for high school teachers this week, and we plan to use App Inventor (which will now live at the MIT Media lab). So I had a play around with app inventor and it is so easy to get started. The beginner app is one where the kitty purrs…
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Why Programmers Lie To Get Dates
→: Why Programmers Lie To Get DatesSlides and commentary for the talk I gave at Ignite Waterloo, June 15th. Missing two slides – title slide and end slide (with my twitter handle and website on it). Ignite is a tough format – 5 minutes, 15 seconds a slide, the slides auto-advance. The *’s are where I expect the slide to change…
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Exploring a Conference Hashtag: Part 3
→: Exploring a Conference Hashtag: Part 3I wanted to explore temporal rhythms around the conference, for example to pick out more popular or particularly tweet-able sessions. Color scheme: Is directed at someone by starting with an @ Contains a mention (@) of someone else Contains a link Disappointingly, no patterns are immediately obvious here – it seems like tweeting was reasonably consistent throughout. I…