Opinion

My thoughts on a particular topic. May or may not be helpful to others

Improving Speaker Diversity

Last month at Devoxx I was in a session discussing what we can do to encourage more diversity in our speakers (specifically, although not limited to, increasing the number of women speakers). I’m going to outline the things I remember being discussed, although as usual we did not find the answer to the problem, only … Read more

The Handover

Yesterday I walked into the kitchen to see how lunch was going and my boyfriend handed me a knife, a part-chopped hard boiled egg and said "finish this, I need to have a shower". As you do. Apparently there were two things that needed doing - "this" needed finishing, and I needed to keep an eye on the fish.

Fine.

Read more

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.

Read more

Developers hate support, don’t they?

I’m at the end of my first official week doing support for 10gen. My major achievements are: Learning how to work the coffee machine in the Dublin office. It’s taken me a week to get it, but now I can understand the machine’s needs. Even if my coffee did taste a bit of cleaning fluid … Read more

It Depends

Don't you hate it when you ask a perfectly good question, and someone comes back with the answer "it depends"?

It's so frustrating to think that in a world of ones and zeros, people can't give absolute answers and you can't rely on "best practice".

Read more

Wrap up of 2012

Fortunately for me, the guys at JAXenter chased me for a summary of 2012 and my predictions for 2013 - I say "fortunately" because otherwise I never would have got around to doing it, and that would be another year slipping away silently into the abyss.

Read more