Reflections
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Being Dispensable
→: Being DispensableI heard a horrible story the other day – someone had been off work because they were seriously ill, and a week before they returned to work one of their colleagues called all her clients and said she was never coming back. Shocking, right? Bitchy! Horrifying. Disgusting behavior. Hurtful. The last thing you need. If…
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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…