© Copyright Raymond Okonski and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence.

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, what’s the most I can eliminate and still remain functional?

A genuine challenge, and it was good for me.  The first couple of days were hard focus, and tough lessons. A day writing code that I couldn’t even compile until it was done, because it wouldn’t without everything. By 4pm I felt like my brain had bled out through my eyes, and went back to the hotel (I was in NYC) to collapse. At the end of it, I realized I had to do something else first, before I could test and check in.

So I came back and did that. Again, by the end of the 2nd large thing I felt physically exhausted.

Day 3 I put them together and checked in. After that I could do smaller things, figure out what wasn’t working, delete things, make small improvements. Change the way we were doing things – because we didn’t have to follow the way the replaced thing was working anymore.

Once functional, but not beautiful, I picked a new (smaller) UI component, and replaced it with an improved version. Again – hard focus. Desperate to be distracted. It’s like a fight. With the problem – because I’m still figuring out the best way to approach things – and with myself because it’s frustrating, and difficult.

The following week I have to do the same (UI component) thing again. By this time I’m flying – it’s flow. I’ve learned how to do things to build on each other he hard way, and this time I’m cutting CL after CL and I’m zooming. This little project is coming to an end, soon.

But… plans change, and this little project is now obsolete. I’m completely “in the zone” and racing towards the finish, and it’s like a rug being pulled from under me. All of a sudden I’m back to asking – what next, what order. Feeling discouraged. Someone reminds me that it’s the right decision, and what I always thought was right, but somehow when I was “in flow” I forgot.

Some observations about hard focus and flow.

• Hard focus is hard. It’s like a fight, and I would love anyone to distract me at any time.
• It’s also completely exhausting. 4 hours of hard focus will leave me physically and mentally exhausted.
• Flow comes after, it’s the sweet spot before something gets boring but you know what you’re doing.
• Still figuring out new things in flow, but it’s more like building on understanding, “oh I don’t actually need this”, or “this is neater”.
• Things stuck on in hard focus take much longer to move forward on than in flow. In flow a tea-break will do. In hard focus it’s more like lunch or a new day.
• Flow can last for days, effectively. I’ll get tired and stop, but I’ll come back the following day and pick right up again.
• Hard focus is a fight every morning, even more so than the rest of the day.
• Being derailed in the middle of flow, for whatever the reason, is horrible.
• In hard focus, I look at my task list to decide what to do. In flow, I look at my task list to mark off things I’ve done. The next step is always so obvious.
• I’m actually more on top of twitter etc when I’m in “flow” because I have more compile time, more waiting on submit scripts. Distractions are less interesting than what I’m doing, so they never really take me away from it.

Anyway, what can you do? Learn from it, and move on. After a day off, I’m heading back in search of flow.

Credit: flickr / Tom T

Recently, I heard about a school that has a mandatory “technology” class that students have to take in order to take CS classes in later years. It features: wood-working, circuit building, and Excel.

This is horrifying. I want to go there with picket signs and stage a protest. Dress up as robots and chant things. If someone deliberately set out to design a course that would put kids off CS without them ever getting an inkling as to what CS is, they couldn’t do better than this.

Wood work? WOOD WORK?

And then, I’m in “training” for something (external) where old white men are telling me how to talk to high-schoolers, and describing what I do – software engineer, programmer – as “builder”. Apparently I have an “isolated” job and it’s the kind of thing that can be out-sourced… really not that high-potential a career. They seem to be saying that students should be blending a little bit of the technical with business and voila they’ll have a great career and let’s all enourage girls to do this, shall we.

And I think, it’ll be a cold day in the hell I don’t believe in before I encourage anyone to study business period, let alone for a technology career.

I cry a little inside because I thought I’d signed up to encourage women to go into tech, not near tech.

Wood work starts to seem sensible by comparison.

Thankfully after that I go back to my team of 50% woman and we keep working on creating something extraordinary. We’re trying to build something that can’t just be in the head of one person, so we have to communicate. We’re trying to build something well, so every piece of code gets looked at by 2-3 others. And later I’m stuck on something and one of them steps through it with me and I realize what I’ve done wrong and fix it. We get creative trying to do things that we haven’t done before. We have so much fun together that our visitor goes back to his office raving about how lovely we were to him and how close we are as a team.

My isolated job, is not so isolated.

Things I worry about with respect to girls and technology. I worry about terrible math teachers and gender-stereotyping convincing them that math is not for them, that girls aren’t good at math. Regularly I have conversations with women not in tech careers and they tell me they were good at math in school, and yet somehow didn’t consider taking it further – it just didn’t seem like an option.

I suspect wood-working classes won’t change that.

Then I worry about girls in university who think “I’m ok technically, but where I really differentiate myself is that I have good communication skills… I could be a great bridge between the technical and the non-technical…” who then go and become product managers. And they never find out that they were just as good as many of the guys in the class, that a technical career was an option. I know, because this happened to a friend of mine – thankfully she rethought it before she took that path and now she’s an engineer. And because it was nearly me, too.

And so my friend and colleague complements me on my communication skills, and I quip that they would be distinctly average compared to people in any other profession, it’s just compared to engineers that they seem good.

My point – being able to communicate doesn’t mean that a technical career isn’t a great fit, just like I don’t think there is much correlation between wood-working and software engineering skills. I’m on a mission to urge university girls – think about being an engineer before you decide being a PM is for you. It’s been four years since I finished my undergrad, and in that time I’ve come to realize – those guys who thought they were great and I figured they must be if they could be that confident? No-one is as good as those guys thought they were. Under-confident does not mean under-qualified. Really.

Credit: flickr / novaldiflickr

My first proper day on my new project, and our PM says to me – “Cate, you seem to like to travel. How about you spend time in New York?” – I’m tasked with helping another team out, and being the bridge between that team and my team here.

Initially I was a bit… thrown. Part of why I’d changed teams was because I didn’t want to need to go to California as often. Whilst I’d joked that it would be different if it was somewhere I’d actually chose to spend time, like New York, I’d also enjoyed my time staying still, and wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue making (typically – June was the first month since March 2010 that I didn’t go anywhere) a trip a month.

Once I’d got over the surprise, two things struck me. The first, that this guy had – in a matter of days – noticed what I was good at and was working with my non-eng strengths – being a connector, and something of a nomad.

The second, was that what I was going to spend my time doing, completely debunked a very depressing conversation I’d had with two (female) CS teachers. They’d talked about why their female students didn’t want to go into Engineering – and one of them, why she left industry for education. It was… somewhat stereotypical. Girls like to make things pretty. They’d prefer to market something than build it. Women are more interested in the big picture, how things fit together. They want to spend time with people, not machines.

About a year ago, someone asked me if I was interested in working on a compiler team. I said, “I think I’d enjoy it for about 6 months, and then I’d start to miss humans”. He was amused and replied that my response was what he’d expected me to say.

I suspect you have to be a particular kind of person to work on a compiler team. I am not that kind of person. In fact, many of the things these teachers saw in their female students are true of me, too. I like things to be pretty. I care not just about what something does from a technical perspective, but why it’s useful. I’m better at a system design level than at bit-twiddling. I’m obsessed with humans and how technology can improve things for them.

Yes, I love to write code, and that is a big part of my job. But – it’s not all that I do. To say that being a software engineer is like X, and girls won’t like it because they don’t like X is a mistake.

In this case, I think the thing about girls not liking X is a massive over-simplification and generalization. But my point – even if it is accurate – it doesn’t mean that being a software engineer isn’t a good fit. Being a software engineer is not “like X” – that’s far too simplistic. There’s so many different kinds of things you can work on, and they require different skill sets. I would be unhappy and not very good at compiler work, but the kind of person who would excel at working on compilers would likely be unhappy and not very good at the kind of work that I do.

I don’t just write code. I also think about user interaction – working on features, I will say, I think this flow is more consistent. I work on the design of components from a perspective of the overall system – and testability. I work with other people who have less experience on the codebase or in the language to get them up to speed. I write up patents, and get to explain what I’ve come up with to lawyers. I put myself in the perspective of the user and think about what will be most important to me as a user. And I’m a connector – sometimes the most useful thing I bring to a discussion isn’t what I know, but that I know who will know about it.

Of course, there are things that I’m terrible at. I can’t see pixel differences, in fact if you show me one UI and then another similar one I will be pushed to see the difference between them, and certainly not in a matter of pixels. I’m not great at convincing myself that something is programmatically correct – probably why I love testing. I can’t “hack”, it makes me nervous when I don’t know why something works. I can’t write assembly. When I need to optimize, my preferred plan is “write it in Haskell”.

To take a narrow view of what you need to be good at in order to enjoy being an engineer, is crazy to me. All over the world, software engineers are building an unimaginable number of wildly different things. I’m incredibly lucky, but I think if you work at it you can often create the flexibility to make it whatever you want.

So what if girls want to make things pretty. There’s too much ugly software out there, and I say – go for it. All I think matters is – do they want to solve problems? Build cool things? Can they think logically and break down a problem?

Credit: Flickr / programwitch

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 work, so we have to decide – do we buy a new one?
• Server issue on something I was working on sent me down a rabbit hole where I assumed it was my fault.
• Hotel sent me away with someone else’s bill (turns out, you can’t use that to do your expense report).

A colleague and I are running a workshop for high school teachers this week, and we plan to use App Inventor (which will now live at the MIT Media lab).

So I had a play around with app inventor and it is so easy to get started. The beginner app is one where the kitty purrs when you pet it. Useless. Yet given the popularity of cats on the web… genius.

I followed the setup instructions here. It took maybe 30 minutes to get everything installed and have the app done and running on the emulator. Downloading things and waiting for things to start was the bulk of that (it’s slower first time, apparently).

It’s annoying to have so many windows – I feel like this was designed with a big monitor rather than a small (I was using my 15″ pro) laptop screen in mind, but at least they are all different programs so switching between them (via the dock or cmd+tab on the mac) is not too bad.

I didn’t package the application for a phone (I don’t have an Android device) but that looks to be pretty simple too.

Overall, I’m really looking forward to playing more around with it. It’s a bit like Multimedia Fusion for app-development. I’m not a huge fan of teaching “programming” via visual means, but teaching “game development” or “app development” and sneaking in some programming and making kids want to take it to the next level is something else. I’ve found that to be a pretty successful strategy!

I was talking to one of our facilities people recently, about someone behaving a little… strangely. And she said, “they’re an engineer”. To which I replied: “I’m an engineer!”. She responded, “Oh,*but you shouldn’t be”.

Take the Quiz: http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/

Actually, I really love my job and so I’m pretty sure that it’s exactly what I should be doing. But, I have noticed something, where if an software engineer seems, y’know, normal, and well-dressed* and functions socially then people are surprised, or even skeptical of their profession.

Credit: flickr / g.naharro

Back when I was a student in Edinburgh, I went to a ceilidh. And I met a guy. And he asked me out on a date. Sure*.

Credit: flickr / papadont

And then ascertained from my roommate that I was single (apparently me agreeing wasn’t enough, but as it turned out him asking me out didn’t imply he was single, so fair enough). And then, he starts getting to know me. So he asks what I’m studying* – extremely normal, student, conversation – right?

Credit: flickr / Brian Hathcock

So by 3rd year I’ve finally accepted that I am not meant to be a chemist – mostly due to the sheer volume of equipment I was smashing. And so I say, CompSci.* And he says, “I don’t believe you”.

Credit: flickr / lin padgham

And then – you can tell we were both drunk at this point right? I mean, it was in Scotland – argue about this. And I’m all, if I was going to lie about it I’d pick something better. Like, “I’m in an elite program* that feeds into MI5. We take core courses in math and languages, and then weapons and advanced driving. I’m specializing in sword-fighting and snowmobiles.”

Credit: flickr / eskimo_jo

In the end, it probably would have been easier to convince him I was training to be a female James Bond than a CompSci student*. He just kept saying, “I don’t believe you. You’re too normal”. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out. And now I live in Canada.

Credit: SmugMug Pro / jfiddler

And honestly, I wasn’t that offended. Not so long before that I’d been dating another CompSci who had used to tell women he met in bars* he was studying “social anthropology”.

Credit: flickr / cypher23

I told this story in introduction for another talk I gave last summer, and afterwards my friend came up to me and said, “Cate, how did you KNOW?” – *she’d been telling people she was an English lit major.

Credit: flickr / Dawn Endico

Some engineers, even ones who have girlfriends, have taken offence, and they say “I don’t have to lie to get dates”. In this town, I can believe it.*

Credit: Mattel / http://shop.mattel.com/product/index.jsp?productId=4032107

But here’s the thing – engineers, we have an image problem. And maybe this is why in the US more parents encourage their daughters to be actresses than software engineers, a fact that horrifies and terrifies me.

But we also have a communication problem. We don’t *communicate the value we bring and what we do well. And we don’t listen well enough to what users want.

Credit: flickr / Michael Simmons

I was trying to explain to someone what I do. I was like, “you know, if you have an iPhone? And you get your GMail in safari? That’s what I work on.”*

Credit: flickr / curiouslee

And she said, “Oh, you work for the internet”.

Which is not really that accurate, but would be a pretty awesome job title, right? “Hi, I’m Cate. I work for the internet”. I guess Vint Cerf can really say that.*

Credit: xkcd

Meanwhile, my mom calls me because she can’t get Facebook to work, or her Windows machine to connect to a network, or some kind of question that I know nothing about, because I don’t use Windows and barely use Facebook. Last time I was there she complained is that my sister’s trainee-accountant boyfriend *gives better tech-support than I do. Which caused me to exclaim, “this is like asking a brain surgeon why your cat is shedding hair!”

Credit: flickr / Martha de Jong-Lantink

What’s the point of all this? I think if we could communicate better, then engineers would have to lie less to get dates,* but also humans would get better products.

Credit: Geek and Poke

Clearly, I don’t have the communication figured out. But I do know that we need to listen better, and ask more questions.

Engineers need to realize that humans don’t care about the things that we do. They mostly care *about getting what they want to do done, not how, or in what language, or requiring how much RAM.

Credit: Geek and Poke

Humans, writing code is not the same as using software. I literally spend all day every day using only Chrome, XCode, and an emulator. If you have a problem in an application running on Windows,* it’s extremely unlikely I know what that is. The big difference, I think, between engineers and humans when a computer is “not working” is that the engineer isn’t afraid.

(slide which only contains the words “DON’T PANIC”)

But the human shouldn’t be either, and if they are – that’s something that* engineers need to fix.

And finally, please tell your daughter to think about being an engineer. It’s awesome, and I think we need a more representative selection of humanity building our software, changing the world, and connecting, enabling and supporting humans*, to do whatever it is, they want to do.

Temporal Rhythms for #ESE

Color scheme:

1. Is directed at someone by starting with an @
2. Contains a mention (@) of someone else
3. Contains a link

Disappointingly, no patterns are immediately obvious here – it seems like tweeting was reasonably consistent throughout. I removed directed points to see if that made a difference.

Temporal Rhythms for #ESE - no directed

Not really! Although now there are some small gaps – session breaks, perhaps?

Code-wise, I reused this.

To start with, I looked at the social network that emerges when we look at the people on the list.

Future of the News Network

This network is pretty densely connected, with the exception of two users on the list. You can see their nodes floating away in the image below:

Future of the News Network - Outliers

The network graph that emerges from all the tweets connected is really busy, but may show who the most engaged users are.

Future of the News Network - Full

There’s just too much information here, so I started filtering it by eliminating nodes that had fewer than a specified minimum number of connections. Because of the dataset available, non-news-influencer nodes cannot be connected to each other. Thus, I was specifying how many influencers needed to mention a user for them to make it into the graph.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 2

Setting the minimum to two dramatically reduces the size of the graph. Many of the nodes remaining are also well known, for example @jack and @alyssa_milano.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 3

We can also see popular websites, like @techcrunch and @boingboing as well as @google (not surprising given how often google showed up in the earlier visualizations of tweet content.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 4

Future of the News Network - Minimum 5

Future of the News Network - Minimum 6

Future of the News Network - Minimum 7

Future of the News Network - Minimum 8

Future of the News Network - Minimum 9

Future of the News Network - Minimum 10

I find the graphs for minimum 8+ fascinating – I think they start to show who influences the influencers.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 11

Eventually, of course, we get back to our original graph.

Credit: flickr / nataliej

On the one hand, I’m delighted that Geeks are now pretty cool, and that all kinds of people who wouldn’t have before used it as a descriptor for themselves proudly own it.

On the other, my friends and I were discussing this “WAG” culture that has come as a result, and something we were terming “the girlfriend”.

Usage: “Oh X? She’s not a techie, she’s a girlfriend“.

Meaning: A woman near tech, by virtue of the fact she’s dating a techie.

Here’s what bothers me. A woman being celebrated as a “techie” when the actual “techie” work is being done by someone else (note, this does not necessarily have to be her boyfriend, we’ve just observed that to often be the case). If her boyfriend was into football, there’d be a similar role for her – coming up with “strategy”, promoting the team, whatever, but here’s the difference – no-one would be calling her a “female footballer”.

It’s frustrating to me and my friends, because we need more women in technology as role models. But we want those role models to promote being a geek not dating a geek! Geek culture is transmissible, but ML is not, it turns out, an STD.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of dating geeks, and glad that geeks are having an easier time finding dates. But we want to inspire women to stay up late at night learning how to code their own idea, not just to ride on the talent of someone else. Can we not describe someone who’s little more than a lead user as a “developer”? Can we be clear about the distinction between commenting on technology, and actually building things?

There’s a role for the girlfriend, for the lead user, for the commenter, but I think it’s a supporting one. I think we need to be clear who does what. People organizing talks and panels don’t always understand the difference, or that a woman who can’t actually write a line of code has little credibility presenting on that topic to a crowd of people who do.

Anyway, next time you see a girlfriend being lauded rather than a genuine tech woman, call it out. Suggest a better role model, or be that yourself. Explain the difference.

I know it’s hard. Every awesome technical woman I know is completely overcommitted. Maybe we’re not standing in the spotlight because we’re actually getting shit done. However the alternative is we have the story of what it means to be a tech woman told by the girlfriend, or another woman near tech, instead.

Sorry girlfriend, you’re not a geek. You can totally be one of us though, we’d love you to join us; but it does take some work to earn it.

Credit: flickr / Stinging Eyes

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 can be updated later by someone else, and hopefully reused elsewhere.

Three things happened last week that got me thinking about simplicity in general.

Physical Simplicity

My boyfriend hung my art and I finally finished unpacking. I am in love with my space, how open and clean and uncluttered it is, and the pictures from my travels filling my wall space.

I’ve been throwing stuff out, and trying something where I don’t buy anything in February. I mean, I buy things I run out of (soap etc), I bought picture frames, hooks for hanging them and the two bamboo plants that frame my window. And I bought Kindle books and a TV series on iTunes (weirdly, these did not seem like purchases due to lack of physical objects and I only realized afterwards). But, having this mentality that I shouldn’t buy anything has made me interrogate what I would bring in without thinking, usually.

My policy is that if I wouldn’t take it with me on a move to another country and I’m not using it regularly, I should get rid of it. I hope this month’s awareness will stay with me because it’s apparent that to keep the empty space and lack of clutter is harder than accumulating things. It means interrogating every purchase and saying, “What will this add to my life? What will this replace?” – and it’s a constant project to decide what I’m no longer using and should get rid of.

Simplicity of Reusable Code

One of my colleagues made a reusable component, that I also was to use in my code for a particular button. I wrote the code around it on Monday, thinking I would have to change one method. On Wednesday, I got his component which worked differently than I expected. What I hoped would be a short fix took much longer, by the end of Wednesday I had it working – but only when the image part of the button was clicked, the spacing around didn’t work. There’s a long and complicated reason for this, but basically we were using two different types of buttons.

Thursday, I returned to my war with the button and by the end of the day it was working wherever you clicked. But in the process the reusable component had become a tangled and horrible mess that I was not going to submit. Initially it had fitted my colleagues purpose a little too well. Now, it fitted both his purpose and my purpose a little too well.

A good night’s sleep later, I’d stepped back sufficiently to be able to have an idea of how I should redesign it. By the end of Friday, I’d reworked the class so that our individual code was a little more complicated, but the reusable component we both called was much simpler. Hopefully someone else will be able to reuse it, even!

It is so easy to think that your use case is the same as all that will follow. Everyone I work with is really smart and the design of this component had been discussed and thought through. My use case was similar enough that it didn’t seem like it would be a problem – until I started to try and use it. This component is really very tiny, and yet it was able to know too much and do too much.

As an aside, I wouldn’t submit code that hideous anyway, but the code review process really removes any temptation because it would get – rightly – torn to shreds.

Simplicity in Organization

Someone said to me that I was trying to add an excessive amount of structure to a rule-free organization. They were right, I was asking a lot of questions and suggesting a lot of ways in which we might quantify and/or measure what it was they were proposing to add.

We have something very simple. Everything in it has clearly defined responsibilities and purpose. It’s easy, and it’s clear. What they are proposing changes that somewhat, but I don’t think we should use that simplicity to add extraneous things – that’s how we’ll end up at something complicated.

Fight to Keep it Simple

I may or may not manage to keep my apartment clutter-free. My design may or may not work for the next person who wants to use it. I may or may not win the argument over complicating organizational structure.

My friend says, why do you need to get rid of things you wouldn’t take when you move, now? My colleague asked why didn’t I just use the thing that the reusable component uses. My friends ask, why do I care about the argument – I can just walk away from it.

And it all comes down to the same thing – I think you need to fight to keep things simple. So I’m not going to say, “I’m just not going to bother with this” without first attempting to make the case – via code or via argument – for a simple, reusable way.