Shambling Towards Perfection

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 ...

A few days ago in one of the online programming groups I'm in someone was asking for help with a regex. I recommended using a non-capturing group, since she had specific things she needed to return at the end. Usually when I use regexes I'm just checking for a match or not, so I've rarely bothered with capturing or not capturing, so I decided to read up a bit. Found this excellent resource , which I shall have to remember in future, and started browsing around it looking at the wealth of info on all aspects of regexes, when a thought occurred to me. Did we learn about this stuff in Automata, Languages, and Computability (AKA the mother of all theory classes in the CS masters degree, most of which I have forgotten)? Is that part of CS regular expressions, or strictly a programming language implementation regex thing? Where is the line for that, anyway? I started Googling, and turned up several excellent answers on the CS Stack Exchange, which I really ought to browse more...

I'm apparently incapable of keeping this thing up-to-date. One of these days, however, I will actually finish recording how the Death Star came to fruition. In the meantime, have a video of the finished product.

Once we finished cutting out our triangles, we started painting them. We brushed on acrylic paint instead of using spray paint, as it seemed logistically easier. Finding a place on campus to spray paint 75 triangles and finding enough time when it wasn't windy would have been a pain. It took much less time to paint than cut, so we were done with all the triangles within 2 weeks. After we had enough triangles painted, we started gluing them together into panels. The geodesic dome pattern we used has a single pentagon at the top, then a ring of 5 hexagons, then a ring of 5 pentagons, then a ring of 5 half hexagons (to make a flat bottom). This makes for a total of 11 panels plus 5 half panels. We used wood glue for this step. This turned out to be a good choice, as the wood glue starts setting up pretty quickly, so once we got the triangles properly positioned they didn't slip around too much. We did use binder clips on the glued edges to hold them together as they dried, j...