connections, elegance, and science
This summer, I was honored to give my first keynote address to the Open Source Bridge conference. It was my first F/OSS conference, and a wonderful place to start: full of interesting people, excellent talks, and good conversations, and a place where I felt like I might belong. Stumptown Syndicate is the organization that runs [ ]
I decided to leave what had been a promising career in organic chemistry about a year ago. Deciding to leave my program, and then to leave the field entirely, was one of the hardest decisions I have made. I had more resources than many in my position: savings and financial support, enough work experience to [ ]
My final report is up on my MediaWiki progress reports page! I ll have a more thoughtful reflection post up in the next week or two, but if you want a peek at what I ve done, head on over and check it out.
When I started my internship with the WMF this summer, it was clear that I would need to be able to learn quickly and effectively for most of the summer. My mentor had recently been to Hacker School, where she d encountered the idea of engineering learning styles. She wanted to know how I learned so [ ]
For the last part of my internship, I m adding a search function to the Java Wiki Bot Framework. Unfortunately, the Java ecosystem has had other ideas. JWBF uses Maven, a common build automator and dependency manager, and I ve had a difficult time getting it working on my own system. (I wrote about the things I [ ]
I ve been looking at web API client libraries in a lot of languages for my OPW internship project: Python, Perl, Ruby, and most recently, Java. Fortunately for me, the Java Wiki Bot Framework (JWBF) is the clear leader in the available libraries, so it was the only one on my list to evaluate. That evaluation [ ]
Since I ve reached the part of my internship where I need to evaluate a Ruby web API client library and had never written Ruby, I went looking for places to learn! Some of these are books, some are websites, some are web tutorials. All are online and free. If you re new to Ruby, give these [ ]
When I decided to start working in tech, I knew that someday I d find my place in the informal women-in-tech backchannel warning system. It seems that I ve already reached a place where I can practice two kinds of post-conference networking: the standard mild awkwardness of Hello! Remember those interests we share? I think you are [ ]
I was honored to give the final keynote at last week s Open Source Bridge 2014. My talk was titled Why are these people following me? : Leadership for the introverted, uncertain, and astonished . It is the story of how I learned and claimed my leadership skills because leading and conveying authenticity are both learnable skills. This talk [ ]
I am not back from WikiConference USA 2014, but I am settled in here to work and decompress for a few days. I attended the conference to give an intro-level talk and workshop based on my own work getting up to speed with the MediaWiki API, and to meet more of the larger Wikimedia community. [ ]