Reflections
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The Story of a Girl Who Tripped, Fell, and Ended up in CS
→: The Story of a Girl Who Tripped, Fell, and Ended up in CSYou’ve probably noticed, but our theme for September/October is – “How Did I End Up In CompSci?” – it’s a question that interests me, because for the first three years of university it was something I asked myself a lot. Not in the way, “Wow I love what I do! How did I get here?!”…
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10 Things I Learned About Presenting in Extreme Blue
→: 10 Things I Learned About Presenting in Extreme BlueYou can distill a 15 week project to a 4 minute pitch. In fact, you can probably distill anything to 4 minutes if you truly understand it – the trick is learning what to leave out. Images are trickier than you think. For instance, our project involved a university and we wanted to have a…
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Books and Paper and Letting Go
→: Books and Paper and Letting GoMy mother, a busy GP, has accumulated a stack of newspapers that she has not had time to read. She keeps them in the hope that she will, one day, have more free time. I pointed out that she would be unlikely to want to spend this new free time reading newspapers from ages ago,…
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Email: I’m Sorry, but I Hate It
→: Email: I’m Sorry, but I Hate ItI loathe email as a form of communication, I do. Having an iPhone has not made me any better at dealing with it, in fact it has made things worse – I can now monitor it in dead time and if there’s nothing urgent then there’s no need to actually check my email. So, if…
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I am an IBMer
→: I am an IBMerTomorrow is the last day of Extreme Blue. At the US Expo in New York last week, I stood 6ft from Sam Palmisano, and listened to him talk about IBM’s vision for a smarter planet. He spoke about why we need to build a smarter planet and how IBM is trying to engineer this vision.…
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Defining Dreams
→: Defining DreamsRandy Pausch’s Last Lecture was, and remains, the most moving video I have found on the internet. It’s about how to achieve your dreams, but more than that – how to live your life. The thing is, I don’t really seem to have the kind of dreams he had. So from time to time I…
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Artisan or Technician?
→: Artisan or Technician?My friend Maggie and I were discussing the way compsci’s approach their career. Those who take the artisan track ask “What inspires me? What do I want to create?”; they evaluate their career in terms of the difference (and things) they make. Those who take the technician track say “I’ve checked these boxes and now…
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Maintaining Optimum Stress Level
→: Maintaining Optimum Stress LevelAt Ignite Waterloo a guy gave a talk about “Why All My Ex-Girlfriends Are Crazy”. Of course, I was dying to know why. The reason? They were women who having achieved at university and then started their career had got to a point in their lives where they no longer had the same level of…
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My Secret Life as an Introvert
→: My Secret Life as an IntrovertMy friend Maggie tells me I’m an introvert. Not because I’m shy, or because large groups make me nervous, but because I don’t get my energy from being around people. I was surprised by this, because I guess I’ve always considered myself to be extroverted and so I asked another close friend and he said…