I confess, I've never seen Star Wars, or Star Trek. The only video games I play are the Lego ones. And so I've been seeing people in these amazing costumes, and going to talks where there are these gaming cultural references that I don't get, and thinking... woah, I'm not geeky enough. It's a little amazing ...
In a recent discussion with a colleague, I voiced the opinion that the challenge of creating presentation software is to enable terrible presentations - zooming animations, tiny and unreadable text, endless bullet-points. Helping people create good presentations? That would be easy. Really, you could do it with some nice, full-screen image viewing software. He disagreed, arguing that there ...
Ignite is an intimidating format. 5 minutes is not a bad length of time, but the auto-advance format is very unforgiving. I'd had that topic in mind as an Ignite talk for a while, but it took me a long time to have the courage to actually present it. And by have the courage to ...
Commentary (I didn't have slides) for the talk I gave for UO WISE. I thought I was going to come and have an informal chat about how interviewing at Google is not that scary, and then I saw Krystal's tweet. I freaked out a little, to be honest. Like, woah - I need to be inspiring? I ...
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 Promising ...
I'm Cate, I work for Google as a Software Engineer (on mobile Gmail). For fun, I'm a qualified ski instructor and I love to kickbox. I was the Instigator of Awesome at Awesome Ottawa, and I do various things around getting more women into CompSci. I have a BSc from the University of Edinburgh and some ...
My coolest title right now is "Instigator of Awesome" at Awesome Ottawa. So what's Awesome Ottawa? It's a group of 10 trustees and a Dean of Awesome, and every month we give away $1000 to enable something awesome. So far, we've funded an art-flash-mob, a living-evolving installation, a 350-org climate change event. When Levannia asked me ...
You can distill a 15 week project to a 4 minute pitch. In fact, you can probably distill anything to 4 minutes if you truly understand it - the trick is learning what to leave out. Images are trickier than you think. For instance, our project involved a university and we wanted to have a picture ...
My friend Maggie tells me I'm an introvert. Not because I'm shy, or because large groups make me nervous, but because I don't get my energy from being around people. I was surprised by this, because I guess I've always considered myself to be extroverted and so I asked another close friend and he said ...
One of my closest friends works at another large tech company, and all summer we've been having conversations that go like this: ME: I've had such an awesome day! I found out about this awesome thing and made some progress on my awesome project. I love my job! How was yours? HIM: Good! I finally hunted down ...
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