Category: Career

Posts that either contain information about my career to date, talk about what I want from the future, and/or may contain helpful career advice.

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Kids These Days

I'm a great believer in getting kids to code early - after all, I'm of that generation that was taught

10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

at the age of 9. There are quite a few approaches to teaching today's kids in an engaging way, but I'm a bit wary of the sandbox solutions that teach kids things like how to navigate a virtual thingie around the screen, or lets them create things in a limited virtual world. I don't think kids will easily make the leap between these sort of games to seeing the full potential of programming - they're too limited and have no context for the kids. It's just another game.

Kids need to understand how programming fits into their world, they need to understand the context of coding, if they're going to fall in love with it.

Continue reading "Kids These Days"

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Adjusting to Working Remotely

One of the most obvious differences I faced when I moved from LMAX to 10gen were the working conditions. I don't mean like being deep underground in some dangerous situation vs being pampered by beautiful slave boys and girls. What I mean is that the working practices at one company necessitated being in the office for core hours, and at the other flexible hours and remote-working are practically mandatory.

Continue reading "Adjusting to Working Remotely"

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What Do You Do and How Did You Get There?

So yet another interview with me is available, but this one is in written form. It's for the Graduate Developer Community, the aim is to show undergraduates and graduates what real techies jobs are like, and how people doing them they got there.

It's long, but if you know anyone just starting out their career who wants to get a feel for where they might want to go, please point them at it. The site has a number of interviews with people in different roles so it's quite a good way to showcase the diversity of what's available.

(Update: 15 Dec 2020: Original article doesn't seem to be around any more, so I've reproduced the content here)

Continue reading "What Do You Do and How Did You Get There?"

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Update on events

Just a quick note to say I was interviewed for another podcast (Update 2020: apparently no longer available), again to talk about all-female events. It's only a short one and there's probably not much in there that I haven't said before, either on here or in person.

From the 21st May, I'm at GOTO, both Copenhagen and Amsterdam. I'll be talking about code & the Disruptor, thank goodness, and will be trying not to rant about the subject of women in technology. If you see me there, come and say hello!

On Friday 25th May, after all the GOTO craziness, I'm going to repeat the Disruptor presentation in Rotterdam at 010DEV, an event rather fantastically called "The Disruptor and the Perfect Programmer", which someone on Twitter correct noted sounds like a fairy tale.

After all that, I'm hopefully going to take June off to play Diablo 3 and Prototype 2, and read the next Game of Thrones book. All these joys I have been denying myself to make sure I get everything sorted in time for next week.

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First public appearance caught on video

Remember a while back I talked about my first public appearance?

Well, I chased down the video, because I'm masochistic, and here it is for you all to enjoy. Pleasingly my mannerisms are slightly less of a camp man trapped in a woman's body, which was my impression the last time I saw myself presenting. It helps that YouTube has made the video so dark you can't see me.

Slides are available for all to enjoy.

Special thanks to Playfish for hosting the event - as always, their hospitality was awesome.

The fact that they didn't serve wine is probably a Good Thing.

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My first public appearance

I'm finally moving up from working behind the scenes to actually doing a (short) presentation for the LJC. I'm going to be giving a lightning talk on Wednesday at the AWS Elastic Beanstalk event, on the JCP - what it is and what our election to the executive committee means. Ben and Martin's post gives a little more background on the subject.

Another LMAX LJC member Mike will also be giving a lightning talk, on Project Coin.

Now all I have to do is write it...

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The London Java Community elected to the JCP SE/EE Executive Committee

As an associate member of the London Java Community (LJC), I'm very pleased with the news that we won an Open seat on the Java SE/EE executive committee. The results show that we got an astonishing 47.5% of the vote - if an MP got voted in with that percentage the newspapers would probably be using the word "landslide".

It's quite exciting to be one of the two user groups involved. We hope to balance some of the larger corporate organisations, we're the voice of real life Java developers who use the language every day, for enterprise development or open source projects.

You can argue Java is dying, but the community is not. And I think we're exactly the people to guide its future.

PS (Warning: gratuitous plug incoming) If you're at all Java-curious and you like drinking and attempting to be social, join us this Tuesday for our monthly Developer Sessions at the Porterhouse in Covent Garden.