Accidentally in Code

Tag: inspiration

  • Happy Ada Lovelace Day

    Ada Lovelace
    Ada Lovelace / Credit : Wikipedia

    I really want to blog about a woman in tech today. I think Ada Lovelace day is awesome, and was charmed when someone wished me a happy Ada Lovelace day this morning.

    However, I have a dearth of role models. Does passively stalking someone on Twitter count as knowing someone? Even with the odd, brief, interaction? Of course there’s a female prof who I speak to perhaps, once every 3 months. A friend from undergrad, except she left computer science in order to be – of all things – an economist.

    I’ve uncounted many women who are geeks and proud, even if they’re not programmers – Kelly (who runs GGD Ottawa), Alex who’s in Human Factors, Caitlin who’s a grad student in Communications working on something fascinating to do with Twitter and the future of journalism, Treena who has a social networking startup (Betidings – it’s awesome, check it out). Tammy works where tech and design meet – always supportive, always inspirational. Emily, who’s just starting out as a programmer (and also has a start up).

    There are some female programmers – Sacha (IBMer, mentor), fellow grad students Oana, Jen, and Terri. Finally, Hilary Mason and danah boyd, neither of whom are aware of my existence but who I think are really awesome.

    But as of Ada Lovelace day 2010, there’s no one female programmer who is a significant inspiration to me. I don’t know any of them well enough.

    Is it weird to admit that I inspire myself, when I persevere, create, surprise myself by what I’m capable of?

    New goal. Step 1. Find more female programmers. Step 2. Learn from them and get to know them. Step 3. Have something better to write next year.

    Meanwhile, I leave you with that list of the most inspiring women in my Twitter network. And console myself with the thought – that compared to the situation in my undergrad, that’s a pretty huge improvement.

    Happy Ada Lovelace day.

  • Closing Doors, Opening Windows

    Credit: flickr / David Reece

    Graduating is another word for ending. The ending of your time at university, and the commitments associated with. It’s also another word for beginning – the beginning of your next adventure, your next challenge. The next chapter of your life.

    On Wednesday, I had to go to Kanata to fill in some paperwork for my next chapter – the internship I’ll be doing from May to August. I ended up having lunch with some people, including the guy leading the project I’ll be working on and we talked about that a little. I’m excited for my next chapter, these new challenges.

    Then in the evening, it was the last WISE Inspiring Women event. We had a wonderful speaker, Dr Mona Nemer, who gave an informal, inspiring talk. She talked about balance, and confidence, and underestimating yourself (and gave an amusing example of a time when she’d underestimated herself). She talked to us about not over-planning our lives, but being open to opportunities. I really enjoyed it – she was so warm, and open, and definitely inspirational.

    I’d decided that after her talk would be a great time to say goodbye because this would be my last formal event as president, and thank the girls who have worked so hard with me to make this past year a success. I talked briefly about how WISE got started, and what we’d achieved over the last year. And then, I thanked the other girls and gave each of them a small gift (the previous day, I’d been rushing about trying to pick out something different and thoughtful for everyone).

    It was funny, because we were all secretly planning things and hiding them. Because after everyone was standing at the front, I was kept there and Rachelle talked about what I’d done and they gave me a card, a giftcard (can’t wait to go buy some new books!) and some flowers, which was really lovely. She said some really nice things about me, and I was so moved. And there was hugging, and tears.

    I thought that perhaps I would just fade away and that would be it, no-one would notice how hard I’d worked, or that I was gone. But I was wrong.

    I was noticed. I made a difference.

    But – I couldn’t have done it on my own. So thank you – first and most of all to the other girls who’ve worked with me this past year, but also to every speaker who has generously donated their time, and to everyone who came to one of our events. Thank you.

  • Inspiring Words from Gabrielle Bouliane

    Why are you not being everything you can be right now?

    I have no answer to that. It’s time to stop making excuses.

    From 23 Moments.

  • Holiday Science Lecture Presentation: Art, Life and Programming

    Here’s the slidedeck! Because I’m presenting in French I’ve kept text to a minimum:

    Art, Life and Programming

    View more documents from Cate Huston.

    Posts with detailed notes about what I’ll be covering and the videos (which won’t work from Slideshare – boo!):

    Part 1: Introduction

    Part 2: Art

    Part 3: Life

    Part 4: Programming

  • 20% of the Time, 80% of the Value

    Pareto Principle Option 2
    Credit: flickr / Sleepy Valley

    If you look, you’ll see the Pareto Principle everywhere. Last week, I saw it in grad school. I was having my 20% – and it was awesome! But it does make me sad about the 80% of my time – this is the time that I spend marking, doing assignments that seem pointless and reading papers that I need to know the contents of, or might be useful, but turn out not to give me that zing of inspiration.

    In the 20%, I’ll work 12 hours a day and enjoy it. I’ll wake up every morning fired up and excited for the day ahead of me. In the 20%, things take less time than expected. They sometimes turn out better than expected, too.

    I think this is why I don’t want to convert to a PhD – the Comprehensive Exam, a thesis proposal, the TA-ing… I can see this will be the 80%. I think there are other ways I can get much of the value from the 20% of the PhD I want, basically by writing a large masters thesis. Perhaps I can summarize some choices, by saying, is this in my 20%, or will it contribute to it? Make it bigger?

    I want to live in the 20%. But I recognize there’s a lot of stuff that I do in the 80% that enables the 20% to happen.

    • I have to mark because I TA, but there’s a 20% when I really manage to communicate understanding to a student, and they go away excited about what we’re talking about.
    • This semester, I spent a lot of time on assignments I thought were pointless, but they did improve my understanding so in my 20% I implemented something that I wouldn’t have known how to do in September.
    • Yes, a lot of the papers I read are a little dull, but I hoard the knowledge and later when it’s time to connect the dots or something clicks… some of them turn out to be useful.

    So I think the question is, how do I maximize the 20%? I plan to explore this over the winter break, as after this week my TA-ing and course will be done with. I’d love your thoughts as to what your 20% is, and how you maximize it, if you do.

  • Ignite

    Ignite is a tough format – 5 minutes, 20 slides, and the slides advance every 15 seconds. As such, the talks aren’t so much informative as inspiring and I really enjoyed the evening. First such event in Ottawa, but hopefully there will be more to come.

    You can see the full line up here, however sadly some people couldn’t make it and so the line up was as follows:

    Adele McAlear – Death and Digital Legacy

    Jairus Pryor – How I Stole $15M from the Canadian Mint

    Ian Graham – Coworking

    Sue Murphy – Online Community

    David Akin – Media and Technology

    Kris Joseph – Shakespeare and Oral Culture

    Scott Annan – You Inc.: We’re all freelancers now

    Nick Charney – Public Service Renewal in 5 Minutes

    Al Connors – Improv and Everyday Life

    Death and Digital Legacy

    This is actually something I’ve been thinking about lately and had actually sat down with my boyfriend, given him my passwords and told him that if anything happened to me I’d want him to let people know. I will probably blog about this properly soon. What I hadn’t thought about, and what this talk brought into focus for me is OK, so I die, my boyfriend lets people know – then what? Do I want my Facebook profile to be a memorial? What do I want to happen to my Twitter account, my blog, LinkedIn etc. I still haven’t come up with any answers to that.

    Adele talked about Mac Tonnies who died recently. He had not planned his digital afterlife, as a result the problem of what to do with his archives is ongoing. His family apparently do not own a computer, and did not realize that he’d not just left a website, he’d left a tangible community and online ecosystem – an Amazon affiliate account where money is paid in, and also services that cost, such as hosting.

    Before this talk I realized that we had to think about our digital afterlife. Now, I’m starting to realize how much thought needs to go into it. I have more thinking to do.

    Shakespeare and Oral Culture

    Apparently Shakespeare couldn’t spell. I always thought that was just how people wrote at the time – but apparently it was more than that! Interesting talk and perspective about how rules restrict creativity. Mashups have no rules, and that’s partly why they’re so exciting.

    Coworking

    Fantastic quote from this – “The harder I work, the luckier I get” (originally by Samuel Goldwyn). This was a talk on entrepreneurship. He stressed the importance of small victories – celebrate them. Think you can change the world, because the people who do change the world are the people who think they can. Love what you do. Being an entrepreneur means you can choose who you work with.

    Summary: Work hard, have fun, surround yourself with great people and eventually you will succeed.

    Online Community

    Susan talked a lot about “Superstars”. In the case of her work in a production company, these were the people in the trenches, people with full time jobs spending 18 hours a day working on productions. Everyone working there was a superstar – they finished each others sentances and raised each other up. Acheived the near impossible on a regular basis.

    She started OttawaTonight.com (URL not currently working for me). after noticing the lack of good arts and entertainment information in Ottawa when out with a friend. She thinks that building stronger communities means building the 3 elements of a community, which are: soul (passionate to come together and create), everyone needs to be a superstar, space to come together and share. Concludes – we spend so much time thinking about technology and tools, but it’s not what’s important.

    You Inc.: We’re all freelancers now

    Scott starts by urging us all to quit our jobs, today (even if we don’t tell our bosses). We used to trade our skills and time as an employee so the company would make a profit in return for security, however that security doesn’t exist any more. Hence – we are all freelancers now! In the new reality, we won’t get to retire at 65, and thus rather than trying to earn more money we should instead look at our career as a journey.In Canada, the opportunity to have your own business is better than ever before.

    Focus on skill growth – broad, not deep as this means more industries open to you when you change jobs. Connect with people – social networking enables connections. Your social reputation is increasingly important. Because of connectivity, it’s possible to make a living in a niche market. Authenticity trumps brand. Don’t worry about what you put online, just get online and do something. Do something that’s big and important to you.

    In sum:

    • Dream big.
    • Quit job.
    • Build skills.
    • Build network.

    Recommends Network Hippo as a tool to help manage your personal network.

    Public Service Renewal in 5 Minutes

    Great quote (threat?) from this guy – “or I’ll retire on the job and collect my pay for the next 26 years“. Trying to encourage us to put pressure on the government to change, because it moves so slowly. Talks about how difficult his first year working for the government was, how he was in denial about being in the public service. However, through blogging and finding his personal voice (buried under bureaucratic bullshit) he was able to connect with “fallen comrades” and started to build respect – which he used to try and tear down walls. Finally he started to connect with the job, and now he’s excited to go to work every day. He uses social media technologies to try and make the government more effective but it’s a drop in the bucket. What we can achieve collectively is far greater than what we can do on our own, we need to try and envision new ways to do stuff.

    The goal of his talk was to be a call to action – a demand that we step up our civic participation and get our hands dirty. If you work in the government, be willing to think and act in color in a system that’s black and white. If you’re not in the government, you need to help to change the game – more pressure from the public is needed in order for the government to become more open and transparent – come up with ideas! Public servants need to be more engaged, and make change faster.

    Improv and Everyday Life

    Improv is increasingly popular – businesses want it, although they’re not sure why. Thinking on your feet, being able to work off the cuff and have intelligent things to say is helpful, great skill for job interviews – as such, Al owes every job he ever had to improv, especially those that weren’t improv related.

    Another word is “Yes” – positivity. Things happen when you say yes. If you say no, nothing goes everywhere. He thinks we’re at the start of a trend towards positivity, which will carry us through the next decade. It’s important to say yes because it makes stuff happen. Pessimists make great stand-up comics – but lousy improvs. Accept the challenge, move forward and defeat it. Yes it involves risks, but risks motivate. There’s the potential for failure, but celebrate your failures – if you’re celebrating, the audience is laughing with you. The wost thing to be on stage is boring.

    Concludes: MacGyver was an improv – didn’t worry about what he was going to do, just went for it and it was great. Make more improv in your every day life

  • Do Something Every Day That Scares You

    I wonder about this advice. Are there enough scary things out there? Would you not spend so much time scaring yourself that the necessary, but non-scary things, would get left behind?

    Perhaps I shouldn’t be taking it literally.

    Maybe, it means… push yourself – harder. Aim – higher. Dream. Aspire. Create.

    Achieve more than you knew you were capable of.

    Fail

    Be OK with failing, because if you’re not failing, you’re sat in your comfort zone.

    So perhaps better advice is – fail every day. Because, as someone said to me recently, only stupid people go home and pat themselves on the back for what they’ve achieved. If you’re smart, you’re looking at what’s still to be done / improved / created.

    I linked before to this talk by Randy Pausch’s, it’s his last lecture on Achieving your Childhood Dreams. It’s wonderful – watch it. Anyway, he talks about the dreams that he had as a child, and how he achieved them. Some of them, people said were ridiculous, and some of them seemed impossible – but he went for it anyway. When there were setbacks, he overcame them. I cried, watching this talk, it was amazing, moving, inspirational…

    At the end of it, he says that it’s not really about how to achieve your dreams – it’s about how to live your life.

    I think he’s right. If I stop dreaming, even about stuff that’s impossible or that people think is stupid. I may as well give up on everything.

  • Inspiration

    I’m having a slightly crazy week. On Monday, I went to democamp (this was really great and I met some really cool people – I’ll write more about it later). Tuesday, uOttawa WISE had a talk from Dr Rekha Mehta (really good – great turnout).

    Yesterday was not so great. I had my best TA session yet (last week I wasn’t feeling well and got a little flustered and confused by pseudo code in French – my answer sheet was in English). We’ve moved onto Visual Basic so apart from a bizarre VB error (it was appending the numbers rather than adding them for some reason – breaking the code up into small instructions fixed it) it went well. I worry about how good a TA I am in French, but I had a queue at the end of class and my office hour lasted two and a half hours, so I hope if they’re talking to me I’m doing OK! But yesterday I also had something occur (well, actually it occurred on Monday but I did not realize until yesterday morning) which had me hopping mad. I wish I could write about it here, but that would be inadvisable. Suffice to say, I’ve been fairly down on the level of unionization at the university – I’m not a fan of unions. I’m starting to realize why there are so many, though, as one begets another. I doubt that the problem of excessive unionization is one that will be solved by more unionization but worry that it may be the only way.

    Anyway, this morning I read this post by Penelope Trunk. It gave me some needed perspective. Yes this event was disrespectful and wasteful of my time but it’s not a catastrophe. It’s frustrating, but expending my energy on getting frustrated just wastes it. I realize the irony of linking to that post – about why the hell not share – in relation to something that I’m not revealing the details of, but I’ve evaluated the worst case scenario  and decided against it.

    I doubt I’m alone in having these days where I wake up and feel overwhelmed at what’s built up over the course of the week. Of resenting the fact that there’s things I did not get done, mostly as a result of other people’s disorganization. Fed up of feeling like my primary function is compensating for other people’s stupidity/disorganization/mistakes/apathy/arrogance. Wondering if “work with people who are competent and respectful” is an impossible dream – I do work with people who are more than competent and very lovely, but the bad experience cloud things and makes me temporarily irrational. So – here’s a few inspirational things I’ve come accross and saved for just such occasions.

    This series – Find Your Strongest Life – in the Huffington Post is awesome. I wrote more about it in this post.

    Penelope Trunk again, this time on having more self-discipline. Apparently, it snowballs, so get one area of your life in order and others will follow.

    A long, but brilliant and fascinating article about a longitudinal study of some Harvard students who were followed throughout their lives. The different stories of these people and what happened to them are fascinating.

    If you haven’t seen Randy Pausch’s last lecture on Achieving your Childhood Dreams – find an hour to watch it. This is honestly one of the best, most inspiring and profoundly moving presentations I’ve ever seen.

    What inspires you?