All posts by nadyne

women

on being a role model

Alison Gianotto wrote a great post after she was invited to speak at a Linux conference, and assigned the topic of women in technology.  Since that’s not a topic that she’s interested in talking about, and she has lots of things that she would like to speak about at a Linux conference, she gave some other ideas.  They passed.

The whole post is awesome.  These two paragraphs match my philosophy about speaking at tech conferences:

My position is that the best way for me to be a role model for women (and men) in technology isn’t to give talks about being a woman in technology, but to kick ass and take names at being a technologist, and to give great presentations on technology topics. This is my way of showing men and women in technology that women are as capable and badass as the bros.

It’s the same reason I always agree to speak at conferences even when I know I’m a token. I frequently spend my own money to fly out to speak at conferences that can’t afford to fly me out or cover my hotel, and I do this because it’s important for men and women to get used to seeing women at the podium, demonstrating their skills as an authority in technology. If we can get a few more women on that stage, maybe we won’t feel like such a rarity anymore, and the perceptions of us in technology will shift.

At MacIT 2014, she gave a great talk about security.  She knows her stuff, and she knows how to talk about it in such a way that other people will get it too.  I’m so glad she was one of our speakers, and I’m glad that her talk was a topic that she’s an expert in and that she’s passionate about.

Apple, Nadyne, user experience

I’m speaking at AltConf, and I need your help

I got great news today.  I’ll be speaking at AltConf.  I haven’t yet decided on how I’m going to approach this one.  Rest assured that you will walk away with a better understanding of how you can create a deep understanding of users to make your application a better one.

I have a request of you, dear audience.  One of the ideas that I have kicking around is using quotes that seem pretty set against user research from Steve Jobs and other Apple execs.  Jobs referenced the apocryphal Henry Ford horses quote quite a lot.  I know that there are others, though.  What other Apple anti-research quotes do you know of?

Nadyne

“a statistical analysis of Bob Ross”

Dear FiveThirtyEight: I love you.  You are the only ones doing awesome analyses such as looking at the 381 paintings done by PBS painter Bob Ross and analyzing his work.  You gain such insights as:

About 18 percent of his paintings feature a cabin. Given that Ross painted a cabin, there’s a 35 percent chance that it’s on a lake, and a 40 percent chance there’s snow on the ground.

This might be the most readable article about conditional probability.  My math degree feels much less lonely tonight.

Apple

“Memories of Steve”

Don Melton, one of the original developers of Safari, has shared some of his memories of Steve Jobs.  It starts with this observation:

Anyone at Apple or Pixar — both large organizations — will tell you that Steve knowing your name was an honor. But also occasionally a terrifying responsibility. That was the bargain.

MacIT

“what your conference proposal is missing”

Great advice from Sarah Mei about how to approach writing conference proposals, including this:

If you relentlessly focus on answering “Why?”, your proposal will get more interest, more attendees, and better reviews.

I especially like that she takes a real example and breaks down ways to improve it.  If you’re thinking about what you’ll submit to MacIT 2015, reading this will help you get into a frame of mind to create a great proposal.

VMworld

VMworld call for papers is now open

The VMworld 2014 call for papers is now open!  The deadline is May 2.  More details are here.

Mac admins, I’d love to see some presentations about effectively virtualizing Mac environments.  There’s lots of Mac users at VMworld.  It’s time to show great examples of Mac virtualization beyond the desktop.

MacIT, MWSF

MacIT 2014 presentations

1 Comment

I’ve been way too busy to write up a post about how awesome MacIT 2014 was this year.  For now, I’ll post public links to presentations that I’ve found:

For those of you who attended MacIT 2014, all of the presentations should be available on the website.

There were plenty of tweets during the week, including lots of pictures (many of which are pictures of slides).  The hashtags #macit2014 and #macitconf were the ones that I found the most useful.

Edited 2014-04-06, 21:12: added “Essential Security & Risk Fundamentals”.
Edited 2014-04-07, 10:10: added “Building Better Users”.
Edited 2014-04-10, 14:09: added link to github repo for Facebook’s IT tools.

  1. This is an Evernote shared notebook. As of 2014-04-07, Clif’s presentation is about halfway down in the notebook, past all of the stuff about iBooks. ↩
MacIT, MWSF

on the eve of MacIT

On the eve of MacIT, I give you this wisdom from @sadserver …

If you watch a movie of your life backwards, it’s about a sysadmin who regains youth/happiness as they forget more and more about computers

If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go have a little existential crisis now.  If you’re at MWSF or MacIT, we can cry into our beers together.

women

Maria Klawe on impostor syndrome

Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, talks about impostor syndrome in Impostoritis: A Lifelong, but Treatable, Condition.  I like this paragraph the best:

Now I wake up most days with a voice on the left side of my head telling me what an incredible failure I am. But the voice on the right side tells me that I can change the world—and I try to pay more attention to it. My life goal in changing the world is to make the culture of science and engineering supportive of everyone with interest, ability, and willingness to work hard, independent of race, gender, sexual orientation, other interests, or anything else. For that to happen, we need more women, people of color, poets, artists, ballroom dancers, and football players to enter, succeed, and persist in all areas of science and engineering.

I like that she discusses not just entering the field, but succeeding and persisting in it.  We’re still losing so many people after 10 years in the field.  It’s got to stop.