Here’s another reason that I’m happy working at VMware: today’s a holiday.
I’m used to the list of holidays being: New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving (+ day after), Christmas. That gave me nearly six months between paid holidays. But VMware is nicer than that, and so we get Presidents Day off.
Yay unexpected three-day weekend!
I’ve been thinking a lot about software engineering for women lately. In that earlier blog post, I referenced Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, a long research report that hits home for me since I am a software engineer with a degree in mathematics.
I’ve also been reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein. I’m not finished yet, but so far, it’s a walk through a lot of research about our culture and how we raise our little girls, as seen through the lens of Orenstein raising her own little girl. In one passage, she references Packaging Girlhood by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown1, and says this about female identity for girls:
She can be “for the boys” — dress for them, perform sexually for them, play the supportive friend or girlfriend. Or she can be “one of the boys,” an outspoken, feisty girl who hangs with the guys and doesn’t take shit. The latter starts out as the kindergarten girl who is “independent and can think for herself.” … The trouble is, Brown and Lamb say, being “one of the boys” is as constricting as the other option, in part because it discourages friendship with other girls: a girl who is “one of the boys” separates herself from her female peers, puts them down, is ashamed or scornful of anything associated with femininity.
Reading that, I recognise my own childhood. I was one of the boys, and I’ve never been particularly good at forming friendships with women. Today, most of my friends are male. I’ve always written that off to being an engineer. Most of my professional relationships are with men, and professional relationships occasionally become friendships. But it’s not as though there aren’t other women around. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to assume that it’s simply that I’m an engineer.
These are the five words/phrases that I’m entirely sick of right now, and that I’m seeing too much in the tech press and in my Twitter list.
I checked out Macworld Expo this year. I’ve gone every year since 20061, and I’ve always had a great time. But, speaking as someone who only got to check out the Expo and not the Conference, I just didn’t find Macworld to be a great event. I was predisposed to loving it, and I couldn’t this year. Based on some of the other articles I’ve read and conversations that I’ve had with others who attended this year, I think it’s an upstairs/downstairs issue.
Looking at the session list for the Conference portion of Macworld, it was awesome. The Conference is broken into several tracks. The Users Conference has fantastic sessions. There were 6 Mac tracks and 2 iOS tracks. The Mac part includes sessions, both beginner and advanced, across productivity, photography, and business. The MacIT track is my favourite, but then I’m a geek. That part of Macworld 2011 looked like it was just as great as it’s always been.
The Conference is, both literally and figuratively, upstairs. This year, it was held on the second and third floors of Moscone West. By all accounts, it was spacious and comfortable. There was plenty of seating for the all-important hallway discussions. Contrast that to the downstairs of the Expo.
The Expo is totally different now that Apple has left the building. There are fewer companies represented there. While some people have been joking for several years that the Expo had just been about iPod/iPhone cases, there were still lots of Mac developers there. Even better, the booths were usually staffed by their technical team, so spending time in their booth was very productive. As someone from an application team working in a booth myself, I really appreciated the opportunity to talk to the users of my applications, get feedback from them, and help them out with problems. As a Mac user myself, I loved being able to talk to the developers of some of my favourite applications. Sometimes this was giving them feedback, sometimes it was to request a feature, and sometimes it was simply to tell them that I love their apps.
With Apple being gone and many of the big players deciding to sit this one out, it left room for a lot of small players. And a lot of these small players were in iOS development and accessories. It was weird to see Thinkpads and Vaios on the show floor. I’m an iPhone and iPad user too, but it’s still called Macworld. I wanted much more Mac and much less iOS.
There were lots of tiny booths. This meant that it was a good opportunity to meet some of the smaller vendors (albeit with the caveat that many of them were iOS vendors that I wasn’t as interested in), but it created a traffic jam in the aisles. Moving through the aisles was bloody well nearly impossible. Since the vast majority of booths were very small booths, no-one other than the booth workers could actually be in the booth. To stop and see what was going on in a booth required that you stop in the aisle, which blocked everyone else from moving past. This was even worse in the teensy four-sided kiosks that took up one corner of the show floor. There were things in there that I wanted to check out, but the teeming crowds in that section made it too much of a hassle to go in and talk to developers.
Adding to the problems on the show floor was that there wasn’t anywhere to hang out with friends for those of us who were only downstairs. A large part of Macworld, for me, is the networking aspect of it — that so-called hallway track. At previous Macworlds, I got to see lots of my existing Macworld friends and make more of them. This year, there were only a handful of tables at the back of the hall, which were generally taken up by people eating. With the aisles full, there was no place to move to the side and talk. The lobby only had a few chairs near the coffee cart. There was no place to hang out, and no place to stand within a booth. As a result, I lost most of the serendipity of meeting someone new. I also didn’t run into old friends unless I had arranged something ahead of time, which further cut the networking aspect of it.
This year as someone who only got to spend time on the Expo floor, Macworld just felt like a non-event to me. I know that part of it is that I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I have in the past2, but I also think that part of it is how the show evolved this year.
There’s a disconnect between the Expo and the Conference. The Conference upstairs still is Macworld. Having some iOS tracks in there makes sense, but the focus is on the Mac. The Expo downstairs isn’t Macworld any longer. The Expo is Appleworld — and I’m only calling it Appleworld because iOSworld sounds pretty lame. There were still a few Mac developers on the floor, but even most of those were often showing off their latest iOS applications in addition to their Mac offerings. The rest is all about iOS.
I can see why most of the Mac developers chose not to get floor space this year3 With an Expo that has become increasingly focused on iOS in previous years, taking part in the Expo is a big cost that has a questionable payoff. There’s the cost associated with the booth: renting the floor space on the show floor, as well as putting together the booth. These things are Not Cheap, especially for a big professional booth. More importantly, there’s the cost to the engineering team. As I mentioned above, most developers sent members of their technical team. As a result, those developers lost a week of productivity. This is worthwhile if there’s a benefit to the developer as well as to the community. But without a critical mass of Mac users who are interested in discussing Mac software, there’s a much smaller benefit to the development team, not to mention only a small benefit to the Mac community.
I think that the disconnect between the Conference and the Expo has to be addressed. I’m not sure what the best way is to accomplish this. I hope that it can be done.
I think it’s safe to say that I put iTunes through its paces more than most people do. As of this writing, I have more than 27,000 tracks in iTunes. That’s not a complete representation of my music collection. I’ve got another 40 or so CDs that I’ve acquired in the past month which will get ripped, and I’m in the process of re-ripping my existing CD collection to ensure that everything’s in ALAC. I mostly like iTunes, but there are some things that I wish would change.
Once I have listened to an episode of a podcast on my iPhone, I’d like to be able to update that podcast to get the next podcast in the queue. I feel this pain most acutely on the weekends, when I’ve run out of podcasts on my iPhone but I can’t update since I sync my iPhone with my work Mac. I know that there are apps like Podcaster, but they require that I only listen to podcasts on my iPhone.
Related to the previous point, the only reason that I sync my iPhone to my work Mac is podcasts. I have some podcasts that I like listening to on my Mac while I’m working, such as the All Songs Considered live concert podcast. I shouldn’t have to think about where I’m going to listen to a podcast and decide which of my Macs/iPhones/iPods will be with me when I am going to be there.
Since I have a massive iTunes library, there’s a lot for auto-complete to draw from. But auto-complete also gets in the way.
This is most noticeable when capitalisation between what it’s trying to auto-complete and what I’m actually typing differ. Once I get past the point where iTunes gives up on auto-complete because my new entry isn’t in its database, it keeps the capitalisation that it already had. For example, I was entering the band name ALO today. I typed A, and it came up with Al Franken. Then I typed L, so it kept Mr Franken, but changed my upper-case L to a lower-case l. And then I typed O, but it still had the lower-case l there. In other words, I entered that information, don’t lose it.
Another potential improvement for auto-complete would be to match the composers field with the artist field. If I’m in the composers field and start to type the first letter of the artist’s name, don’t give me the first entry that matches that alphabetically. Give me that artist; if I keep on typing more, then maybe the song’s composer isn’t the artist. But it usually is, so save me a little bit of typing.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m going through my CD collection. Since I’ve been using digital music for years and years, my music is in a variety of formats. As I re-rip my discs, I delete the old version. I’d love to be able to select the old version and tell iTunes that I’m updating this album, and thus keep its tags and metadata. I know that I can do this if I’ve kept all of its tags the same as what’s in the CDDB, but I correct the tags on my files when there’s incorrect or incomplete information in them. I don’t want to lose the metadata because the CDDB is wrong.
Today, the composers field is just treated as a single text-entry box. But modern music usually has multiple composers. I’d like them to implement some kind of delineator (slash or semicolon would work well). Then I could have auto-complete work on the individual composers of a song, instead of the whole list of composers of a song. For example, Michael Stipe’s sister Lynda has writing credits on a song on Fables of the Reconstruction, so I’d love to be able to type “Bill Berry; Peter Buck; Mike Mills; Lynda Stipe; Michael Stipe” for that song and save myself a little bit of typing since everyone but Ms Stipe is a composer on another song in my library.
I love the comments field. It makes my geeky little heart sing with joy. I’d love to keep more information in the comments field, but it’s hard to do so because I can’t use a carriage return to provide visual separation. I don’t want to write a novel in the comments field. For example, I have a smart playlist for “covers”, which looks through the comments field for that string. I also use the comment field for live songs, to note when and where they were recorded. Without a carriage return, a song which has both of these pieces of information is messy. It’s keeping me from using the comments field for other smart playlists, too.
What improvements would you like to see in iTunes?
This is totally cool: you can now access your virtual machine or your Mac from your iPad via TeamViewer.
In short: create an account on TeamViewer, install an app on your Mac, install an app on your iPad/iPhone, and then enter your username/password. More instructions and screenshots are available on the Team Fusion blog post above.
I wondered if this would happen. VMware’s review cycle is the calendar year. I joined on November 8. This means that I’ve been here for long enough to get reviewed. Given that how little time I’ve actually worked here as a result of the vacations I took in November and December, I’m not sure what I’ll write for a self-assessment. Here are some of my highlights so far:
On the off-chance that you Mac users haven’t yet purchased Fusion (what’s keeping you?!), we’re offering a Macworld special. Through Saturday, there’s a 20% discount on Fusion. Through March 15, there’s a $30 rebate. Combine the two by Saturday, and the final price for Fusion is $33.99.
I came across Jean Hsu’s blog post about her experiences as a female software engineer. All I can say is: yes, yes, a million times over, yes!
I had been programming for years. My parents bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000 when I was in grade school, and my dad and I learned BASIC on it together.1 My parents didn’t make any comments about girls and computers, and they always encouraged me to do whatever I could. I didn’t run into condescension until I took my first real CS course in high school. At that point, I could program circles around most of my classmates, so I didn’t let it bother me.
When college time came around, like Hsu, I didn’t consider CS. I was planning on a dual major in biology and English, both classes in which I’d done well in high school. I took a CS course during my freshman year to fulfill a requirement, and I was taking the standard Calculus course for the same reason. Hsu says this about changing majors:
It was a sort of revelation for me–I was pretty good at most subjects, but here was the thing I could stand to work on (and enjoy) for 10 hours straight, forgetting to eat and losing track of time into the wee hours of the night.
My biology homework didn’t keep me up at night, and my English homework certainly didn’t, but my CS homework did. I had the same thing happen to me later during my CS degree. I was enjoying my math classes, and was well on my way to a math minor. But then the head of the department collared me in the hallway one day and asked why I wasn’t majoring in math. He dragged me back to his office and showed me that it would only take an extra semester for me to get the second degree. I did it, and I loved every second of those courses.
Hsu also points out how bloody condescending some men, who are our fellow geeks, can be. Knowing the deep innards of *nix isn’t appealing to me. I can still bash together2 some sed and awk, but it doesn’t excite me. Software engineering is exciting to me because there are hard problems to solve, and I can solve them through logic. Knowing the fine details of a given language (or OS, or vi, or whatever else a given geek want to rathole on) doesn’t make you a better software engineer than I am. It’s a big field, and there’s plenty of room for both a type of deep love for C hacking as there is for my particular software engineering skillset.
Sadly, as you might expect, the comments thread on Hsu’s blog post is rather obnoxious, and just as condescending as Hsu was pointing out from some of her CS counterparts. It starts off with someone who is spouting some nonsense about what evolution “proves”, having no idea that this theory has long since been debunked.
Hsu’s anecdotes about being a woman in software engineering, and my own experiences, match up neatly with much of the research that’s been done about the gender disparity across engineering and mathematics. The most recent report, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, “demonstrates the effects of societal beliefs and the learning environment on girls’ achievements and interest in science and math”3. Relatedly, xkcd has a great comic about how it works.
Oh, and a note to my parents: Thanks for getting that TS1000, and for giving me the right environment so that I could get where I am today.
I noticed a piece on CNN about tracking down my online haters. Jeff Pearlman, the author of this piece and a writer for Sports Illustrated, decided to go meet a couple of the people who slung insults at him.
Pearlman acknowledges that “insults come with the turf”. He says that this happens when you write about sports for a living. It’s just as true for those of us in technology, and I daresay that it’s not just sportswriters and geeks who have experienced this. A friend who is a pediatrician once shared with me some of the comments that he deletes from his blog, and they’re no nicer than the ones that I’ve deleted from mine.
Pearlman quotes another sportswriter, a New York Times columnist, who says this:
People believe no one’s listening; they think we’re not people, they think there are these giant monoliths controlling thought. Then when they realize someone is listening, they rediscover their manners.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve experienced this. I’ve been sworn at, I’ve been told that I should be sexually assaulted, I’ve been told that I have no ethics. And then the person behind the comments meets me in person, and suddenly they realise that I’m actually human too. And, of course, this happens towards companies as well. How many times have you heard someone say something along the lines of, “everyone who works at [somewhere] is an idiot”?
One of my favourite experiences at Macworld Expo came while working in the Microsoft booth. Rick Schaut, who is one of the nicest and smartest guys on Earth, was working in the booth that day too. Someone came into the booth with a bone to pick about Word:Mac. The guy swore and said that we’re all “jack-booted morons”. Rick sat down with him, let the guy vent for a couple of minutes, and then walked him through all of the technical decisions that led to the thing that the guy didn’t like. The conversation lasted for about a half-hour. At the end, the guy apologised for what he said, and said that while he didn’t like the outcome, he understood how we got there.
I think that the reasons behind the insults are twofold. The first is, as the NYT columnist notes above, conveniently forgetting that there’s other people in this world too. The second is an assumption that there must be sinister motives behind something that you don’t like. When you hide behind a keyboard and a veil of anonymity, it’s easier to spew vitriol that you would never say face-to-face.
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