Shambling Towards Perfection

Lately I've seen a lot of new/aspiring developers talk about difficulties learning git . I was confused at first, because there are approximately a zillion git tutorials out there. But then I started really looking at what people were saying AND what all those tutorials contain. The problem is most tutorials start out with "here are a ton of git commands to memorize", and this is not where people are having problems. People are having problems with "what is git, why should I learn it, and what does it look like to use it in a real-life project?", and those questions are largely not answered in all those millions of tutorials. So at the risk of redundancy, I'm going to attempt to address these questions in Yet Another Article About Git. First, I want to make it clear that if you want to be a programmer, any kind of programmer, you need to know git. You just DO. This is the short version of the answer to "why should I learn it?".  The medium length a...

I started this book waaaay back in the good ol' days, BC. Before Coronavirus. And then the pandemic struck and blew up my placid dev existence. On Friday, March 13, 2020 at 4pm NMSU finally decided to allow us those of us who wanted or needed to, to work from home. I took the weekend plus 2 days to get my home office set up; I had a feeling this was going to go on longer than any of us thought at the time. That decision has paid off in spades as I was able to get a pretty sweet dedicated workspace set up, with a corner desk, my 2 personal monitors, my work monitor, my work tower, a printer/storage cabinet, and a new laser printer. Oh, and a nice office chair and one of those carpet protectors. Current me is very grateful to past me for having that forethought...  Anyway, I officially started working from home March 18. By that time NMSU was no longer "allowing" us to work from home by choice, but instead sending everyone possible home. In less than a week we had to move n...

I had originally planned to read a book about form usability this month, but one of my goals for the year was to try out usability testing. Last month's book, Steve Krug's  Don't Make Me Think , convinced me to try, and we needed to go live this month with some Very Important, Highly Visible features on our internal portal that everyone in the entire department needs to use. Don't Make Me Think 's promises of immediate, valuable feedback on usability problems from doing usability testing convinced me that NOW was the time, hence the switch to Steve Krug's other book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy , which focuses on doing informal, cheap, and easy usability testing, and suggests what to try first when trying to fix the issues that are inevitably discovered during testing. It was an easy, fast read, so I was able to finish the book in time to use its advice to guide our very first usability tests AND fix most of the issues we discovered during testing before goin...

Obligatory Shakespeare reference: What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. Software engineer, software developer, programmer, programmer analyst, systems analyst, code monkey... I always find it frustrating that there are so many different job titles for more or less the same thing. And that's not even getting into specialties (and sub-specialties!) like web, embedded systems, mobile, front-end, back-end etc. etc. If pressed I would say I consider myself a software engineer because of the sheer amount of studying I've done/am doing including that whole 4.0 on a masters degree thing, plus the wide variety of tasks I'm both capable of and currently responsible for (despite the school of thought that says nobody can be called "engineer" unless they've taken a professional engineer exam; the exam in question was discontinued due to lack of interest, so... ). Anyway that's what I put on my LinkedIn. But NMSU ...

A giant banana car is in town , and it came to visit us at NMDA! Some of my co-workers saw the car at a local fastfood joint and asked the driver to come on by. And he did! The whole department, from the Secretary of Agriculture himself on down, filed out to see the sights and chat with the driver and creator, Steve Braithwaite. The car was created out of a truck, he told us. He travels all over the US in this amazing vehicle. You can read more about it on his website , Facebook , or Twitter .

This is one of those things that I never gave a second thought to. Growing up in New Mexico, there were more tech jobs in government than in any other industry. White Sands Missile Range, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, not to mention state, county, and city jobs. My dad plus many of my friends' parents worked in tech for the feds. While there are more and more tech companies moving in, government is still a major player in the area and probably always will be. But that was just my experience. In many areas the tech industry itself is much more prominent, and of course those jobs are the ones that get all the press. You rarely see articles about working as a software developer at the IRS, or something like that. It's always Google or Amazon, a start-up, etc. To many people, being a software developer is synonymous with working in the tech industry. So when Jenny Chan, who founded the Women in Web Dev community, contacted me to ask if I'd do an interview fo...

One of my goals for this year is to read a book per month that's related to my work. I've already finished the book for January, mainly because I had started it last year, but hey, it counts! Anyhow, the book is Don't Make Me Think  by Steve Krug . While it is a little dated with respect to mobile UX at this point (this 3rd edition was published in 2014), it was a very useful read with lots of specific, actionable advice. So much so that I had to give up on trying to bookmark every useful thing and just created a long list of ideas and items to discuss with my fellow devs instead. I highly recommend this book if you, like me, are a dev who is responsible for user interfaces without having (almost) any formal training on UI or UX. In other words, most devs from a traditional CS background... Argh. But anyhow, it really is a great resource for simple, specific ways to improve your user interfaces. We're definitely going to redesign our navigation based on the great...

It's a new year and I have all kinds of stuff I want to get done. In the hopes of achieving some of it, I'm making a list of specific, quantifiable goals: Finish rewriting apps at work. Try doing actual usability testing on at least 2 apps in order to determine if it's worth our while for future development. Complete UX/design training curriculum at work. Read at least one professional development type book per month. Finish 2 major e-textiles/wearable electronics projects by the end of the year. Finish up the nativity figurines I made in pottery class before Christmas. Finish 3 mixed media 3D printed/acrylic paintings by the end of the year. Things I'm already doing but want to keep doing include: Kick ass at work. (No false modesty here) Practice Spanish at least 6 days a week. Mentor CS students and women trying to break into tech/software development. Ideally I'd like to get more than this done, but life is busy and I'm trying to keep it ...