nataliepo

Celebrating Rah-Rah-Ah-Ah-Ada

I love my people who work in, around, alongside, next-to, by-the-way-side, and with technology, and I don't give a damn what their gender is.  I do know that there still aren't a whole lot of females coding but I'm putting my money on the fact that that's changing for the better.

This holiday, in honor of Ada Lovelace, happens every year, and this is my third celebration. Otherwise, it's been my tenth year as a lady coder, fifth as a New Yorker, and my first as an entrepreneur. None of those things have ever been easy, but, nothing good in life ever is.

I will say it's been a good year to be a working woman in this industry. We've got female politicians vying for a spot in the White House (even I don't agree with them, but I acknowledge that their presence is female-forward), a pregnant woman of color sells millions of records and looks positively fabulous while doing so, women winning the Nobel Peace Prize, pop icons actively influencing our technology, and continued tech opportunities in this economy wedged quite deeply in the crapper.

Allow me to go a step further on the importance of a pop icon to young people. Even though many say Lady Gaga's appearances at places like Twitter or Google were fluffy public relations efforts, they certainly work for one demographic, and that's me: the Lady Coder who feels like what she's doing is relevant, important, cool. I'm not sure why young girls think working in technology isn't cool, but I sure as hell hope that appearances like this one will help to change their mind.  I can't even watch this Google-Gaga interview promo without tearing up!

 

 

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, to all the Ada's (including little baby Ada Gwozdziewycz, (c)2011). Get out there and kick some ass.

My iPod Nano is just too small.

God bless The Apple for making us some seriously good goods, but, they've really got to keep their vanity in check.  As much as their slick, clean designs work for the majority of their users, there will always be a rebellious cohort, like myself, who can't wait to break in their beloved piece of equipment. 

That, amigos, is a quarter sitting on top of my iPod nano, which is just SO FRIGGING TINY.  It's cute, obviously, and packs a ton of sound as I would expect my nPod to do, but, seriously, it holds like zero weight into my ginormous purse, so I'm already expecting to forget it on the regular.  Plus, my headphone cord is literally heavier than the entire Nano device, so I sorta forget that it's tagged onto the end, making it feel really fragile.  :(  I can't use the white earbuds because they won't stay in my huge lady ears. 

But the real question is: how am I supposed to make this thing MINE?  I'm pretty big on personalizing my tech so that they scream "N-POD" and people will know that I've staked my claim damn clearly, but I'm having a tough time with this one.  AND SO, I TURN TO ETSY.

I, Lady Coder, will probably never go to a Hackathon.

Yeah, you heard me right: I'm a coder who has zero desire to ever step foot in events known as "Hackathons".  Jeffrey To's article has reminded me that some developers find it puzzling that female developers aren't going to these coding marathons, and he even goes so far as to entice their attendance by describing the dimensions of delectable and datable geeks for our enjoyment.  </eyeroll>

Pitchfork-wielding developer dudes, please! I'm not upset with you.  I'm actually pretty flattered that you'd like me to come to these events.  There's just little in it for me, while you guys get some good publicity with me and my fine lady coder friends in attendance while you take the obligatory geek girls are cute picture.  NEXT! 

This is the fundamental question that I have a hard time answering: what is appealing about coding in the same room with competitive (albeit friendly!) folks for hours on end?  

Hear me out here:

1. I like coders.  All of them.  By no means am I putting my lady-coder nose in the air to say we're on different social planes -- I think geek stereotypes are bullshit, and any marketer that references it is out of touch with the industry.
   
   
2. I love coding culture in New York City.  I can't speak for other cities, but I've found people to be extremely friendly and approachable at Meetups, and have regarded me in the same way.  Getting developers together to network and spark creativity is a good thing!
   
   
3. Coding is my day job.  I do this for a living, and I take it seriously.  I am a good problem solver, a clear communicator, and I really and honestly want to help.  (Gut check: This is not the part where I brag about how good my code.  Take my word for it. I'M PRETTY GOOD.)
   
   

It's really the prospect of spending a whole day of my personal time towards disposible code.  I know that some Hackathons' sole purpose is to introduce a new set of API's or an otherwise new framework, and I respect that; I just need to find a tangible motivator to make its investigation worth my time.  And other Hackathons offer rewards, and they're certainly full of fun people, but, seriously, coding isn't something I do on the side/in my free time/in a vacuum.   There's no amount of free t-shirts, pizzas, or temporal bragging rights that outweighs getting paid to solve real-life problems for people that I care about.  And, sheesh, these things go all day and all night!  FYI, you'll never see a late-night commit from me, let alone my eyes open after midnight.  But, the whole morning-person thing is just who I am; sitting in the same room with people for hours on-end feels more than a little like hazing to me (I was in a sorority, though we didn't haze, holla!).  Plus, I've got things to do, like volleyball. And chores and shit.  I live alone!

So, seriously, what I'd like the organizers of these Hackathons to do is to look to the future.  There will be people interested in your API's or your sparkly-unicorn-infested-Platform-X that not only aren't comfortable with coding for hours on end but actually do not want to.  Consider a workshop with a finite scope and timeline!  Title it something nifty and succinct, like "Make Your Own Ultra-Doodad through Platform X in 45 minutes!".  Treat it like a course where you expect people to pay attention and get something out of it.  This, of course, would mean you'd have to treat developers like adults, because, NEWSFLASH, that's my point.

 

Ain't nothin wrong with a pink robot made by teenage girl geeks!

School was done for the day, and Yuan and her friends had gathered at the Lower East Side Girls Club on First Avenue to dress the mechanical teenager, which they built over the summer. Mounted on the base of an electric wheelchair bought on Craigslist for $200, and fashioned of steel piping, recycled electronics and fabric remnants, Girlzilla will parade through the Lower East Side on Saturday as part of the annual Howl! arts festival. “She’s one crazy diva,” Yuan said as she wove multicolored plastic streamers onto the robot’s head to simulate hair.

via www.nytimes.com

Awesome project, awesome name.  THIS IS THE STUFF THAT MAKES ME BLOG!  Too bad I missed its parade a few weeks ago.  I would have loved to cheer them on in person.

I do have mixed emotions about the author's overemphasis of these teenage engineers' girlish qualities, though. I mean,  they're teenagers from New York City!  Of course they gossip, of course they wear cute blue flats, of course they laugh, of course a 60-year old man lacks star quality, and of course Robert Downey, Jr in Iron Man makes for a cute engineering role model.  It feels like she went out of her way to overstate that these girls are completely normal.  

But I recognize this as a positive new spin on an old story.  And I'll take it!

Go Linux Chix, Go!

Some conference organisers will say "we didn't get any submissions from women" to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How'd we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That's a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

via ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

1/3 of conference speakers are female is a heckuvalot better than the 0  -  1/10 range we usually see, but it's still a lot less than then 1/2 distribution that I'd like to see.  Go Ohio and Go Linux Chix!  

Many props to the excellent, insightful, supportive, and fun grrltalk list for distributing this post. 

Make A ______ (Face, Memory, Polaroid, App, Meme)

via devblog.typepad.com

Like Motion sites, Make A Face is a community based site: when viewers join it, it shows up in the “Communities” list in the sidebar of the member's profile. (You can see it on mine here.) The photos posted to the site are also stored in a group, not in a blog.

Unlike Motion, Make A Face uses a Flash based photo uploader to take a picture from your computer's webcam. As you can only post photos, Make A Face can use the gridded view instead of the stream of posts view as on a regular blog or community blog. If you're interested in seeing more about Make A Face, it's on GitHub (and so is the Flash webcam widget).

Of all the sites we've made to reference our nifty TypePad APIs, Make-a-Face is, by far, my favorite. Where else can you find memorable, meaningful content as simple as a candid photo?  This is also why people love Polaroids so much: they provide the visual that surfaces your memory of a particular moment along with all the layers of where you were when the photo was taken, what time of day, who you were with, why you decided it would be a good idea to remember it, and so on. 

The thing that I REALLY like about Make-a-Face is the meta-trends that will crop up organically.  Remember that this site offers no post data beyond the photo, so it's a fun exercise to the user to find the commonality between photos, just like these:

See anyone you know?  More after the jump!

@mulegirl, I'm not in favor of a conference of just samesies, either.

[Conference organizers and publishers], it is your personal prerogative to hold a conference or publish a book or magazine featuring whomever you choose. It is your professional duty to reach outside your existing circle of friends and colleagues, outside of your snug familiar comfort zone to find new voices and new perspectives.

Are you doing this to shape the industry and the culture, or do you just want to have a beer with your most famous friends and feel validated because you got sponsors for it? If you are only surrounding yourself with people you already know, you are doing yourself a disservice. Reach out, and reach out before someone calls you out. You will win, personally and professionally, if you do.

...Are we clear here? Great. Now let’s all be awesome out there.

via weblog.muledesign.com

I'm with @mulegirl on this one. A wise man once told me that sometimes organizations give out awards just to make themselves look like the experts. This seems similar...

MDWIT '10 Conference Recap: Closer to Progress

My professional ecosystem is more or less centered in the web industry, and the more I hear about its goings-on so much from the blogoverse, the more I think that everything revolves around us. My first trip to the MDWIT (Multinational Development for Women in Technology) Conference this past Thursday reminded me that there's life outside Silicon Alley, and they're facing women in technology shortages in a different, direct way. 

MDWIT has worked with every agency high and low to come up with a solid plan to boost the number of ladies getting into tech.  It starts at the educational level by developing more scholarship programs for students interested in STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, or Math), providing a regimented mentoring program, fostering more internships, and directly integrating IT more tightly into the K-12 curricula.  Sounds ambitious and expensive, but the sense of urgency held by the DC Metro area is compounded by government agencies' aging workforce and increase in IT-related jobs, so funding for these projects is clearly available and comes with the promise of a return on the investment. 

Not only will there be a ton of jobs available in that geographic area (especially with the upcoming base realignment plan in MD), the breadth of IT jobs available is huge.  The government sector covers Defense-related technologies (planes, submarines, helicopters, radar or communication systems -- you name it) as well as general agency IT needs (HR systems, payroll, custom CMS's, sheesh, it could be anything), and the majority of my employed UMBC college classmates work for Uncle Sam. 

If You Don't Like People, Then You are Not a Woman.

CANDACE FLEMING’S résumé boasts a double major in industrial engineering and English from Stanford, an M.B.A. from Harvard, a management position at Hewlett-Packard and experience as president of a small software company.

But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.”

via www.nytimes.com

It's shocking to read this clearly sexist account in the NY Times' article because we don't hear about it happening in a professional setting (although it still makes for a racy opening for a Coding/Founding Damsels in Distress article).  But deeper discrimination than soundbytes on the venture capitalist circuit are preventing women from entering the tech industry in vast numbers.  Lemme break it down for you using the beloved If-Then Transitive Property.

Assumption 1: If you work in tech, then you don't like people. 

p =  "You work in tech"

q = "You don't like people"

Bear with me, my close and very social technical peers, and consider this statement for the industry at large and not just the recent web movement. 

If you majored in CS, chances are that one of your classmates switched majors to something less technical, and cited "I'm a people person" as their reason for switching.  If you didn't major in CS, you probably have an anecdotal story about the Math or Engineering Club as the collection of the most socially awkward kids in school.  Movies have historically overemphasized the nerd nature of anyone remotely technical.  Only in more recent movies has technology been used by all types of people in a natural and ubiquitous rather than character-foiling way. 

The statement is the most true for newcomers considering a career in the industry, or to those just getting started. 

Assumption 2: If you don't like people, then you are not a woman.

q = "You don't like people"

r = "You are not a woman"

Good Ads Targeted at Women? "Mommy Like."

The title gets air quotes because, obviously, I'm not a Mommy, but the product marketing is making women look pretty decent these days.

via www.youtube.com

via mini.sippey.com

Sippey found this incredible video of a new effing level of story-telling.  Confession: this is literally the first commercial that appealed to me and made me say "WANT"; all other previous WANTs were out of jealousy of my peers. Seriously, no black turtleneck is needed to sell this one, my friends.  You know how most Pixar movie reviews gush that "it's just as fun for the adults"?  Booyah, progeny, this one's for your makers. 

I nabbed my 'Mommy Like' catchphrase from these Toyota Sienna commercials.  The mom here is actually funny!  She's cute, not gorgeous; smart, not obnoxious, and purposefully painted as a little detached.  Her imperfection is refreshing.

I love these Kindle commercials -- both this one with the lovers and the original are both ultra-lady friendly. They play up the range of motions that books give me and how books can tie people together. ALL TO A CUTE INDIE DUET.

Why all of this commercial love?  Because ads for women usually suck, and Sarah Haskins taught me that there are three female commercial archetypes: the Hottie, the Mommy, or the Granny.  Only a selected few can Mom-A-Morphasize between the preferred types, one of them being Brooke Shields.