By Sarah | January 1, 2011
In the past few years there has been significant changes in mobile development. More than half of the world population now has a mobile phone — more people than have access to personal computers. Mobile phones have compute power that exceeds that of personal computers when I started programming and smartphones are gaining [...]
By Sarah | December 29, 2010
Abhishek Parolkar writes that flawlessness is not about perfection, its about how complete can you become after accepting reality. He offers this amazing video that illustrates this idea:
It reminds me of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks where he tells stories from his clinical practice about people with [...]
By Sarah | November 26, 2010
This holiday I learned how to play backward Stratego — a variant of the old strategy game. We used a set which has wizards, elves and dragons, but I’m sure it would be just as fun with a standard set. I expected it to be frustrating, but it was surprisingly fun.
Setup
Set [...]
By Sarah | November 18, 2010
The overall economy still sucks — I read that this is not just the US, but a global problem. Meanwhile, in my little corner of the world, I run into people everyday who are frustrated that they can’t find good Rails engineers to hire. I’ve written that companies need to hire people who [...]
By Sarah | November 16, 2010
After my last post, I had a twitter conversation with @dhh about his talk and my reflections on it. I’m still not sure he understands that his talk wasn’t “weird-cool” like his example of _why, nor do I think it was an example of “weird-angry” that the Ruby community would disdain. Instead it [...]
By Sarah | November 15, 2010
It was refreshing to hear a white man talk about diversity last week in a keynote address given by Dave Thomas at RubyConf 2010. Just one part of his keynote focused on diversity, specifically on gender diversity. This is was in stark contrast to the second day’s keynote by David Hansson (aka dhh), [...]
By Sarah | November 13, 2010
At RubyConf this year, we hosted a Kids Track. One of the activities was to make web adventure games.
If you want to make a Pie game, go to the pie-bakery. If you have questions about creating games with pie or suggestions for improvements, you can sign up to this google group and post questions [...]
By Sarah | November 6, 2010
Thanks to the support of the RubyConf organizers and a core group of dedicated engineers we are putting on a parallel track at RubyConf with activities for kids. The kids signup already went out on the conference list, but I’m posting more details for everyone here and in case some parents missed the initial call [...]
By Sarah | October 31, 2010
Last week I participated in a Workshop on Mobile Software Engineering as part of the MobiCASE conference. I had agreed to be an organizer last summer upon the request Martin Griss. I was intrigued by the topic, but didn’t have a clear vision of what might come of the workshop. I applaud Martin’s facilitating an [...]
By Sarah | October 16, 2010
An observation on bug fixing by new programmer @silverspin7987