Sarah Allen's Weblog

finding my voice

Almost four years ago, I started writing a series about why I keep a weblog. One key reason on my list is that this weblog has helped me find my voice. When I started blogging, I thought my blog would be full of technical tips and practical insights from my love of coding. As it turns out, I had a lot of other things to say.

A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon sifting thru my postings to create category-based archives (now available at the top-right of the homepage). As regular readers of my blog and I have discovered, this weblog is about software interface design and development, with occasional posts influenced by my identity as a woman in male-dominated field and a number of posts about my work at Laszlo with RIAs (aka AJAX applications). Visualization, language and learning are directly related to interface design, from my perspective, and they show my particular influences.

The delightful thing about a weblog is that we can define our own rules that determine what is or is not appropriate. For me, every post need not fit into an overall theme, the themes emerge. I found a number of posts that I felt worth archiving that didn't fit into a category:

* dinosaurs and memory
* What's that bug?
* work as play
* stage fright
* MLK's American Dream
* art walking on the beach

Maybe in a year or two, I'll have some more categories... or perhaps even more hard to categorize posts.

read more top ten reasons for a web log

just do it

"Everyone is scared to get up there and lay it on the line. I've learned that from men who let me in on their secret, that they are just as scared as anyone, but are expected to JUST DO IT. I think women are often given permission to be scared of things like public speaking and BACK AWAY from opportunities, instead of move towards them." -- Halley's comment on misbehaving.net

A few years ago, I met Anita Borg at the 1999 top 25 women of the web awards. We struck up a conversation at the bar and after introductions and a bit of small talk she said to me: "you should publish." I got the sense that she meant, you, as in every woman in technology, and of course, me in particular. When I asked her what I had to write about, she looked intently serious and a bit exasperated when she replied, "whatever you are working on." She didn't need to tell me that's what the men write about. She didn't need to ask: what makes you believe that your work and your thoughts are any less significant than the latest technical article or paper that you have read?

Fast forward to five years later and I haven't published an article or paper. I could argue that in between family and work that I don't have the time. I really don't. However, that's not the whole story. In truth, I'd like to write something that is more than a few paragraphs. Writing English is not like writing code. It's harder (at least for me). There's no compiler. You can't run it afterwards to see if makes sense and feels right. It's a different thing entirely.

One of the reasons I keep a web log is for writing practice.

"In 2 years of following the blog phenomenon closely, I can safely say I've seen all the criticisms before. They're almost always written by someone who hasn't sat at my keyboard. Many times they turn things that have long been considered virtues in other contexts directly on their head. A writer a-borning is always urged to face the blank sheet of paper, each day, every day, without fail. Fill it. The better part of writing then becomes deciding what not to include. For blog critics, filling the page is a vice. The budding writer is also urged to find her inner voice, to speak from the heart, because the only writing that truly matters, that will be remembered, is the writing that comes from a distinct point of view. For blog critics, writing from your point of view is considered egotism. I even saw someone quit weblogging because he felt there was something wrong with writing statements that were not immediately challenged, an interesting social phenomenon born perhaps of chat rooms and newsgroups.

"I see these potshots and I'm flabbergasted. We're to bury ourselves? We're to wait until we have something Important(tm) to say before speaking? Until our design is an award-winner?

"I say, Go to hell. I mean it. Maybe this form means nothing to you. Well, fine, because I am not writing for you. I am writing for me. I am writing for what I get out of the process of thinking about a political issue or a scientific discovery and explaining it to my readers. I am writing for the responses I get from my readers. I am writing for the interplay with the larger community of webloggers.

"I'm doing nothing different than writers have done for millennia. I just have better tools. Fan-fucking-tastic better tools." -- a weblogger's manifestito

(this quote from a now obsolete web page was resurrected thru the magic of the wayback machine)

read more top ten reasons for a web log

marking the passage of time

In real life, there is nothing like a small child to help you remember the passage of time. Ever since Thanksgiving, I have heard the daily refrain "I wish Christmas was tomorrow." Finally it is. Between then and now, time has passed both quickly and slowly. Grown-up activities seem to whiz by, while the moments of glue and colors, flour and sugar, paper and scissors stretch into forever.

People always said that internet time moved quickly. A few months on the net was like a year of normal time. The pace of software development increased with smaller, more frequent releases. Innovation became disposable. "That's so last week," was a standard tongue in cheek response.

In other ways, it seemed that time didn't pass at all. When I first started regularly browsing the web in 1995, it felt like an ever-present representation of NOW. Unlike paper publications, whose back issues collect on library shelves and coffee tables, a web site shows what's on the server at the moment. Unless the publiser tooks archival steps, yesterday's news no longer existed.

The folks at the Internet Archive are working to ensure that we can still find yesterdays' news. This unique endeavor strives to compensate for unusal nature of the digital web. We can resurrect the past through the magic of the wayback machine, but it doesn't change our experience of the web.

Weblogs capture the passage of time. Fundamentally different from traditional website publishing, every entry has a date and time, and achiving is automatic. The experience changes for both the reader and the publisher. Its a small place in my grown up life of software development and internet time where I can recapture the feeling of scissors and construction paper, glitter and glue. As I write an entry, time can stand still for days. My desktop is strewn with web pages, useful references and distractions. I collect and discard links. I read and I think. I string together ideas as paragraphs in a web form. It is one of those unexpected reasons to keep a web log.

read more top ten reasons for a web log

language is the vehicle of thought

"Thought and language are intimately associated. The expression of a thought is not merely a postscript to the process of thinking the thought in the first place. It's not as if our thoughts exist and grow in some pure, ethereal "thoughtworld", devoid of any manifestation, until such time as we choose to pluck one out of the mist and condense it into base words. No! The act of expressing a thought is part and parcel of the thinking itself. Language is the vehicle of thought." (Chris Crawford)

I have always felt that the ways that we communicate affect how we think. When I was in high school I spoke 3 languages (English, Spanish and German) and had studied a bit of Latin and French. I choose which college I wanted to go to because I was impressed that they taught 13 foreign languages. I was intrigued by the observation that some languages have multiple words for something that another language covers in a single word. It wasn't till much later that I realized that I probably wanted to study cognitive science, rather than spoken language fluency.

In the meantime I majored in computer science. It was practical, yet interesting. (It balanced my impractical other-major of visual art.) I added C++, Pascal and assembly language to my collection. One way of thinking about programming is that it is the act of naming things. In writing classes and methods, we define nouns and verbs. Writing code is the perpetual evolution of a specific language, customized for describing the task at hand.

I agree with Chris Crawford that communication develops thought. The passage above is from his book You Should Learn to Program. I already know how to program, but enjoyed his first chapter. It reminded me of why I like to keep a web log. Writing about a topic causes me to think more clearly about it. I realize that I have more questions and I make connections in my mind. Thought doesn't just happen in your head.

"A clearer view of human intelligence and cognitive development emerges if human-class intelligence is recognized as inherently a socially distributed phenomenon." (Daniel Bullock)

read more top ten reasons for a web log

reverse search engine

In keeping a web log, I've noticed that good information and interesting people find me. Christian Walker called this phenomenon a reverse search engine.

I find that the more I write about topics that interest me, the less I need to to surf the web via key word searches. I still love google, but more frequently I find interesting sites through technorati and trackback.

Interesting sites I've found:
- Usable Design Media
- Cogworks
- Peter Lindberg

People really do make the best librarians.

read more top ten reasons for a web log

giving back

Before I considered writing a blog of my own, I found myself enjoying other people's blogs. I found information that I wouldn't have otherwise read. In the haze of internet commercialization, it seems odd to talk about giving back to the community, but this altruistic inclination was the #3 reason that I started this blog.

The internet has a wonderful history of people freely sharing their creations. As a backdrop to the venture-capital-driven internet boom, there were always organizations and individuals who contributed to shared community wisdom and practical software. From slashdot to ask-a-linguist, there are large and small communities that exists purely to provide information to like-minded souls.

It wanted to do more than simply lurk, but become a participating citizen this strange community of bloggers. I enjoy my small presence in an obscure corner of the blogosphere.

read more top ten reasons for a web log

gender issues

Whenever I read about someone doing interesting work or a paper someone has written, I like to look them up on the web. It's neat to find other papers they've written or see projects they have worked on or just get a better sense of who they are.

Most times when I look up someone, I find his web site, but I don't find hers. Just last week I read an interesting paper, which appears to be written by 3 men and a woman -- all three men had websites, but I couldn't find the fourth author's website. What's up with that?

Most of the men I know don't have websites, and I read many sites cleared authored by women, yet this subjectively observed phenomenon persists, and it bugs me. I never thought of my not having a website as a gender issue. Was I the pot observing a host of other black kettles?

This perceived gender disparity was the #2 reason I created this blog. I don't write about gender issues much, because I don't think about them much. However, I cannot immerse myself in this thriving technical ecosystem without occasionally noticing that I'm the only woman in the room. I'm thrilled that there are so many other technical women out there. I hope that I will see a day when there as a many women as there are men who are involved in this fun and exciting work (and play).

read more top ten reasons for a web log

participatory geekiness

#1 reason that I created this weblog was to experiment with new technology. Okay, in March 2003 weblogs were hardly new tech, but they were for me. The blog was also not the central them of the site, but just one of many such experiments.

Sometimes you need to participate in something to understand it. At the time I was thinking more about learning Perl than the social experiment of blogging, but I'm open to learning unexpected lessons.

It is good to have a place to play. There's a lot I can do right here on my own desktop, but it changes how I create stuff when there's an audience. Even when its an audience of three, as it was in the early days, just going through the extra effort of making it work for someone else changes the experience. There is also no substitute for participation in understanding the nuances of a medium.

A blog is a comfortable sidebar for my experiment of the moment. The only comparable forum is the cube-side demo -- grabbing a colleague for an impromptu "hey check this out" -- which acheives a similar camraderie, but lacks the temporal independence and low impact of a blog entry.

read more top ten reasons for a web log

top ten reasons for a web log

For a while I've been thinking about why I enjoy blogging. The reasons I created this weblog remain, but I've discovered more and different reasons over time. My approach has changed substantially since my second posting posed the question: Are blogs the vanity press of the Internet?

Since I've read and enjoyed many blogger top ten lists, I plan to write this list as a series of posts. As I write them, I'll link them back from here for future reference. In chronological order:

#1: participatory geekiness
#2: gender issues
#3: giving back
#4: reverse search engine
#5: thinking practice: language is the vehicle of thought
#6: marking the passage of time
#7: writing practice: just do it
#8: finding my voice: just do it