I’d heard about this book (Amazon) for a long time, but especially since I arrived here – the other women in the office are huge fans, and talked about it a lot. And I kept thinking I would get around to reading it, but no hurry, I’ve read a lot of the research, I think […]
A long time ago, when I was training in China, I was struggling to learn a form correctly and my master threatened me with no food until I got it right. This seemed like a terrible idea, I mean, it was hard enough to focus and be physical on the small amount of food (mostly […]
Interesting 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, […]
I 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 […]
Ali and I will presenting our paper 4 Hours to Smash the CS Stereotype and Create Something Beautiful (pdf) at the upcoming CICE Education conference in Toronto. Christine Alvarado of Harvey Mudd college came to Google last month to gave a talk on how they’d brought female enrollment in Computer Science up to 42%. The talk is called “Three […]
There’s an anti-pattern in Object Oriented programming called “God object” or “God class”. An pattern is a design to follow. An anti-pattern is something to avoid. A God class is a class that knows and/or does too much. Breaking a problem down into well-defined units of limited scope is part of writing good code that […]
When I was 5 or 6, the school thought I had learning difficulties because I couldn’t read. It transpired that it wasn’t so much couldn’t – as wouldn’t. I refused to read the nonsense little books about Little Jonny Red Hat. Clearly my aversion to things that I find pointless started at a young age. Once […]
When I left Ottawa, I had to find the new me to run my Processing Workshop. His name is Ali and he’s awesome. He’s had the idea to write up the ideas into a paper, so we’re working on that at the moment, but it occurred to me that I didn’t write much about it […]
I 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 […]
You’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?!” […]