I stopped for a couple of days in NYC on my way to Amsterdam for the Dutch Mobile Conference and decided to stay in Chelsea, which I had never really explored before this. I shared a cab from the airport with some locals who told me about the Chelsea Highline — used to be [...]
I am a woman. I was born this way. I strongly identify with my gender.
I am also a programmer. I started programming when I was 12. Arguably, I was girl then, not yet a woman.
I love writing code. I love problem solving and the shape of ideas. I love it when [...]
They say women are disempowered in our society.
On April 9, 2013, we celebrated the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
This day marks how far in 2013 women must work to earn what men earned in 2012.
That is APRIL 9th, over three months into the year.
Women in the United States are paid on average 77 cents for [...]
I love this new interactive art experience weave silk created by Yuri Vishnevsky. Simple controls and lovely default choices cause curves to flow from your mouse like wisps of smoke.
By Sarah | April 30, 2013
When people talk to me about the challenges of hiring women engineers, I often tell them that a good start is to make sure that they interview at least one woman when they hire for a new position. I believe that homogeneous hiring is more a symptom of a recruiting problem, than bias in [...]
By Sarah | March 15, 2013
At SXSW, I joined Laura Sydell (@Sydell) for NPR interview: controlling your computer with a wave of your hand. The Leap Motion controller detects the motion of all five fingers as you comfortably wave them in the air above the device — you can even use both hands! Currently available for pre-order for $79.88, this device is [...]
By Sarah | February 14, 2013
I love sofware development. I think it’s like making magic, like I used to read about in fantasy books, but for real things… It’s even funny to call it real, since it’s just a series of ephemeral pulses of electricity that make it seem like shapes appear on screens or vibrations that seem like [...]
By Sarah | December 27, 2012
John Brand remarks that “ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were probably the first real “commercial” examples of data visualization” (via @DashingD3js).
He references a historical visualization that was new to me. In 1858, Florence Nightengale’s visualization of cause of death in the Crimean War told a compelling story of the how the real enemies were [...]
By Sarah | December 15, 2012
I initially pursued gender diversity initiatives in tech because I love to create software, but sometimes felt alienated in new groups which were all or mostly men; however, I have grown to believe that the lack of diversity in our industry is not a women’s issue, and that gender parity is not diversity.
Relative to the [...]
By Sarah | October 23, 2012
I installed the “roasted marshmallows” version of R (2.15.1) from www.r-project.org, which went smoothly on my MacBookPro running Lion. I was happy to find its REPL ran easily on the command line in Terminal.
R is a free implementation of a dialect of the S language, the statistics and graphics environment for which John Chambers won [...]