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Computer Programming

Supergirly

Jennie Lamere Solo Codes a Spoiler Blocker for Twitter in 10 Hours, Wins Prizes and Our Hearts

by Susana Polo | 2:48 pm, May 8th, 2013

A browser extension or other feature that can blank out or choose not to display tweets that contain certain words is not a new invention. It’s already a basic feature on many Twitter desktop applications and browser extensions to alter Twitter’s native site abound. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to know your stuff in order to make one from scratch, which is how seventeen-year-old Jennie Lamere won the Boston Hackathon last month.

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This Exists... Because of A Lady

Natalie Gordon Programmed her Own Web-Based Start Up Business… While Pregnant

by Susana Polo | 11:46 am, January 8th, 2013

So here’s the exception to a number of tired old adages about women in the workplace. The baby registry webiste BabyList was put together by veteran programmer Natalie Gordon during her pregnancy. Then, with the help of a designer, she launched the website just two weeks before her son was born. As some one who has launched a website while decidedly not-pregnant, and even then was only in charge of content, not anything on the backend… lets just say that’s pretty freaking impressive.

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The Future Is Now!

ESPN Hosts Hacking Competition for Women [Now Hear How This Makes Sense]

by Susana Polo | 11:44 am, November 13th, 2012

ESPN, coding, and women aren’t three things you’d expect to see in connection to each other, unless, perhaps, it was a statement about how the cultures of the first two aren’t generally known for involving a lot of the latter, at least in participatory roles. And then there’s the notorious rivalry on screen and stage of “Jocks vs. Geeks.”

But this weekend two hundred people, most of them women, came together at Stanford University for espnW’s first Hack Day, a competition to see who could code the best mobile app for sports fans, regardless of their gender.

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It's Technical

The Origin of Easter Eggs — The Digital Ones

by Jamie Frevele | 12:55 pm, April 8th, 2012

It should come as no surprise that the concept of a digital or virtual “Easter egg,” or a hidden link, message, feature, etc. embedded into a form of media, has a geeky history. Not just geeky, but vintage geeky — as in 1979 Atari geeky. Do I have your attention? And no, there are no Easter eggs before the jump. I’m not technically-inclined enough to work that kind of sorcery.

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Make It So

To Shrink the Gender Gap In Its Engineering Department, Etsy Teams Up With Hacker School

by Jamie Frevele | 2:00 pm, April 6th, 2012

While the vast majority of Etsy visitors are women (according to a 2010 company survey), its vice president of engineering, Marc Hedlund has acknowledged that the company’s own tech department is not as diverse as it should be. In fact, in a department of about 100, there are only 11 female engineers, none of whom are in management positions. But Hedlund isn’t going to let this slide, and in order to remedy the gender disparity, a new scholarship and sponsorship program through Hacker School has been announced to encourage more women to pursue engineering postions, not only at Etsy, but across the country. And that’s what we like to call “initiative”!

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A Series of Fallopian Tubes

Presenting PyLadies Python Programmers

by Jill Pantozzi | 4:17 pm, February 17th, 2012

The L.A. Weekly blog recently did a profile on the PyLadies. “Who are the PyLadies,” you ask? A group of talented, interesting women we’re surprised we hadn’t heard of before and are happy to tell you about now. 

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Imagine What You'll Know Tomorrow

That Experiment Involving Monkeys Writing Shakespeare Was Almost Successful (Kind Of)

by Jamie Frevele | 12:30 pm, September 26th, 2011

If you have never heard of the infinite monkey theorem, here is a crash course: if an infinite amount of monkeys are given an infinite amount of time and typewriters, they will eventually type an entire written work, such as something by William Shakespeare. Someone actually ran this experiment and came up with approximately 99.99 percent of the Bard’s poem, “A Lover’s Complaint.” There is a catch, however — the monkeys were only virtual. I’m calling shenanigans. I will only accept an infinite amount of actual monkeys, thankyouverymuch. But let’s take a look at what happened with the virtual monkeys, shall we?

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To Boldly Go

The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of Women in the Computer Programming Business

by Alanna Bennett | 11:30 am, August 15th, 2011

We talked a while ago about the fact that women were way more involved in the early days of coding than we commonly hear about these days. In reality, in the early days of computing women flocked to the career; it was even marketed to them in Cosmopolitan and throughout the mid-sixties as “women’s work.” This was for a variety of reasons, as were the possibilities behind why women left the field in droves over the following decades, and for their return now. Follow the jump for the statistics, from Fog Creek Software, behind these trends.

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