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Career life Programming women in computer science

Confidence

I 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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Education inspiration Programming Reflections

Geeking Out and Getting Happy

You might have noticed that last weekend, I overhauled the design on my blog. I felt that it was time for a change, and it’s one that is related to a change in attitude that I’ve had of late. One of the things I’ve changed is my tag-line. It’s now: Cate extends Human implements Programmer […]

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Programming Visualization

Math Error vs Code Error

There’s a fractal I’ve been wanting to make for a while. And the other week I woke up with a flash of insight and coded it, and it looked like this: And I was really happy, until I realized it wasn’t the fractal that I’d meant to make. Oops. So I revisited it and remembered […]

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Education Programming

What Makes a Programmer Great?

This is a post I co-wrote with Douglas Gresham. Douglas is a software engineer at Google, who blogs at www.douglasgresham.co.uk (less often than he should, go bug him for updates). I’m a graduate student, though I firmly believe that great programmers are not the result of university courses in programming. But university courses take us […]

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Education Presentation Reflections

Graduate School

I went back to school because I didn’t think I knew enough to go and join the real world, yet. Then I got to graduate school, and realized it wasn’t the place to learn it. I’m not a better programmer than I was before I came. I know a little more about some things, but […]