Women in Coding Article

"For girls, you cannot be what you cannot see," says Reshma Saujani...

I think this is tough, because it has to be hard to measure in less than a 10 year cycle. I wouldn't think you'd see results, or even a trend, until a new cycle of students makes it to college and the career pool. There are some sharp...extremely sharp...developers, who happen to be women, on my team, and I talk to more of them in the new grad and intern college screenings every year. Anecdotal of course. I don't keep analytics. And there is usually a strong showing both in the Python classes I teach - although coworkers might send their female offspring more often given it's a safe environment and we're predominantly tech oriented - and the Hour of Code I mentor (and there, it might be that it's semi-mandatory participation, so everyone attends).   I'm hoping by the time my daughter makes it to the career pool STEM has corrected itself (with a lot of effort from proponents and mentors) in terms of women in tech.

http://www.inc.com/jeremy-goldman/why-its-getting-harder-not-easier-to-find-women-with-computer-science-degrees.html

What I Look for in a Junior Developer

Bill Gathen's article is spot on as far as I'm concerned. Those soft skills and the ability to ask questions and pay attention to detail are incredibly important. In several interviews I've been in (being interviewed, not giving the interview, and I include talking to new managers when I move between teams) I've told them I'm someone who doesn't drop a thread - that my consistency and ability to pick something up and still be motivated and feel a sense of ownership sets me apart from others. It doesn't just apply to development. Thinking creatively about your job and how to do it better and more efficiently and why it's being done at all - that should never go away, no matter how miserable the job is (and I've been a bulk mailer and cleaning services employee in my life, including the part that involves scrubbing other people's toilets). From a dev perspective, the one thing I'd disagree with is that I expect you to be able to talk about the tech. That enthusiasm you have should extend right down to the research you did for the opening I have. Yes, I don't care if it's PHP and you're looking for a .NET job, but I really hope that if you want a career in development you can talk the talk about what personally excites you and then...then...make the connections between your comp sci education/experience and my project (I'm picturing my daughter from her elementary years when the teacher made her link her hands together with two OK signs and say "connections").

"The ones I consider most important are: enthusiasm, attention to detail, a hunger for learning, and thirst to contribute."

Quotes

I was interviewing an intern candidate today and had her write a very simple method to print a passed in string 100 times.  Fortunately, unlike the last candidate I interviewed, she didn't print the string 101 times.  However, because we interview across a variety of internship spaces, including testing, I asked her how she'd test her method and what sort of values she had to watch for being passed that might be a problem.  She talked about regex for a while and making sure that if the value was a name, it was limited to upper and lower case letters, and that if it was an address, she'd allow numbers.  Then I asked, "What if I pass in a null?" hoping she'd discuss catching it and talk about value types and reference types on parameters.  She wrote down null next to her string parameter on the method, stared at her writing for a while and then replied, "Well...it would print null one-hundred times."  She looked up at me, and a dawning realization crossed her face that she'd given perhaps the stupidest answer she'd ever given to a programming question.  Rather than panic, she took her pen and added two sets of quotes to make it "null" and then provided a much better answer.

Snarky Reboot

Snrky.com has rebooted! You can probably see the picture/link on the right of this blog, but in case it's too small, the art is brand new.  The site is temporarily moving to five posts a week while it reposts three of the originals each week and posts two new cartoons as well.  There are even some new frames that will be showing up.  It finally looks like something that could be put on the side of a coffee cup or on a wall.