When Women Were Software

As a mathematician, Grace Murray Hopper was advocating the elimination of the work of programmers altogether, proposing instead a concept of fully automatic programming

A documentary titled The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers, tells a story women who developed America’s first electronic computer to automate ballistic computations during World War II. In the film, the six programmers share their stories about their hard work alongside over two hundred other women, both civilian and military, who were doing the computations before the machine came to replace them. Why, despite the massive contribution, the programmers were not introduced to the public when ENIAC was released to the public in 1946? This week, I look at the historical paradox where women were celebrated during the war as breaking into the ”male” territories of science, technology and engineering, yet at the same time, no-one heard much about their contribution in the early days of computer science. Like to help this blog going? Tell your friends about it, like and share the post. Check out the full blog post here: https://bit.ly/XXXX

How to escape the interview horror: talking good old expertise and teamwork

It’s best to forget that you’re in an interview (in a good way): simply focus on helping the interviewers to see that you’re smart and can get things done

It is as hard for the employer to find a developer, as it is for a developer to find a job. Yet, don’t worry about any other candidates they might be looking at, since most of them wouldn’t be able to program for their life. If you can successfully write a loop that goes from 1 to 10 in every language on your resume, can do simple arithmetic without a calculator, and can use recursion to solve a real problem, you're already ahead of the pack. This week, we talk about more curious things: the minds of people who interview you. What are they looking for, and how do they make sure what they find in you and other candidates is what they need? It comes down to two things - checking that you’re smart and get things done. That’s why any interview conversation usually breaks down into two themes - technical skill and teamwork. Like to help this blog going? Tell your friends about it, like and share the post. Check out the full blog post here:

Will Open Source Actually Beat Silicon Valley Start-Ups?

Open source could even do better than the proprietary model, since the inspection and debugging of it is not limited by the capacities of the team that the company hires to do the project

Essentially, there are two ways of producing software. One is the ”Silicon Valley” way, where you start up as an entrepreneur in your garage, reach out to venture capitalists (VCs) who then invest into your idea, and later scale, if you’re successful - like Facebook. The second is a community way, where numerous members inspect, modify and enhance the applications that have openly available code bases. They gradually improve and add on features as the project goes along, like Linux.

How to get your first software developer job

People who are interviewing you have to listen to many, many other candidates - it is as hard for the employer to find a developer, as it is for a developer to find a job

You need to find a job to get software development experience, and you need the experience to find a job. A Catch 22? Well, not exactly. For one thing, development as a profession changes so much overtime that anyone who works here ends up learning, unlearning and re-learning things. And for another, coding culture differs from company to company, and it is going to take months for anyone, regardless of their experience to start knocking out valuable, production-ready code. This is why your chances of getting a job are not as bad as you might think. All you need to show them is that you have an open mind and easy to work with. As for specific skills, these will skyrocket once you’re positioned in a company where you’d be spending 8 hours a day coding, surrounded by experienced colleagues.

Why you hate software engineer unions for all the wrong reasons

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Software development field looks like a level playing field for those who are starting out. There are many new exciting things to learn. Employers are readily lining up in front of your door with bright job offers. But one thing we learn soon is that the industry is regulated by the big business players. They are, alas, catering for their own needs rather than the worries of software engineers who do the work. This calls for a new set of regulations between programmers and those who hire them. You don’t have to call it a “union” if you hate associating yourself with the industrial workers, crowded outside of the factory walls. Today I look at why anyone can win from these regulations, including you. Ideas, thoughts or objections? Do you already have a tech union membership experiences? I’d like to hear your opinions - post a comment here, and please like and share this to keep the blog going.

Top free task management apps software developers love to hate

Working as software developers, we are torn between so many different options for productivity tools. Some of them come as a default option from work (that we hate), some we love to use for personal stuff. But the problem with using many different tools is that it’s too hard to keep track of so many things in so many different places. So the easy answer is, choose one (!) tool and stick to it. But which one to choose then? Here I look at four tools which are hot this year.

All you need to survive your next React project

The key feature of React is composition of components. Components written by different people “should” work well together

It’s a bit annoying with searching the internet - every time you look for a framework or a library which is a little bit trendy, Google simply brings up posts by its advocates. They will tell you a lot of nice things about it. The same problem with React, a popular Javascript library - you will hardly learn what’s the problem with it, even if you enter “when not to use React” into the search engine. Yet, it’s simple, and written plainly in reactjs.org Design Principles: ”The key feature of React is composition of components. Components written by different people should work well together”. “Should”, right?

How to become a software developer for free in 2020

The problem that many people encounter when they decide to switch to software development is that they unknowingly make things harder for themselves. They jump into too many frameworks or learn programming languages without any particular system, going into the dense stuff way too early. In this piece you’ll find how to approach the new discipline without getting completely demoralised.

Why Elon Musk’s Neuralink isn't as bad as you think

Figure 1. Neuralink: undergoing brain surgery for every upgrade is going to be slightly trickier than getting a new model of iPhone

Think of the computer sitting on your desk in front of you. You fire it up, you launch your email software, you use its interface to create an email to your boss saying you’re at home sick. Well, you’re not at home sick, in fact, but sipping your bubble tea in a nearby cafe, busy catching up on your favourite tech blogs. Doesn’t matter. Yet think about the relationship you have with the machine at this moment. At every moment of sending that email you are perfectly aware who you are, and by looking at the computer interface you can tell whether the machine is receiving your cues when you type the text in. You can tell that you manifest your behaviour by clicking the “send” button on that email client, and that’s where your action ends, and machine action begins. In a way, there is a certain established pipeline of intention coming from your brain, to your physical movements that gets translated by the interface into the machine commands. These commands then convert into electrical signals, and so on, all the way to the electric signals generated by synapses in the brain of your boss. She’s inevitably getting upset to hear about you being sick and perhaps a little annoyed about the project deadline being missed today.

How to invent software engineering

Margaret Hamilton at Apollo 11 mission control room, 1969: Okay, I think it’s time I start calling this “software” engineering — Margaret Hamilton at Apollo 11 mission control room, 1969: *Okay, I think it’s time I start calling this “software” engineering*

Margaret Hamilton did not simply help put the man to the Moon. She had also invented the concept that would go along to create a major paradigm shift in ideas that people have about computers. She was the first person to make a difference between hardware and software. How do you come up with an idea of such scale and influence? - I was asking myself while watching through the video clip shared on Google’s blog a year ago. In the video, set in Mojave desert, California, we see a giant portrait of Hamilton. It is made out of mirrors that catch the moon light when darkness falls over the desert, illuminating all at once. The graphic qualities of the portrait aside, you can look at it and marvel at the tribute that earthlings pay to the legendary Apollo flight software designer, a team lead who made it possible to set human feet onto the Moon surface.