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@adviceforcaitlin
"The wrong kind of guy to fall in love with is the guy who will let go of the steering wheel as a joke. A guy who finds it amusing to make you uncomfortable—which is more common than you’d think—is someone you want to avoid."
Anna Kendrick (via suedescripture)
Learn javascript.
The goal is to understand your true self before launching an action plan. Deep realizations about yourself don’t come all in one sitting. Be your own ethnographer for a month. One of the people that I admire most in the world is Jane Goodall. Imagine Jane sitting in the forest, looking at those chimpanzees with compassion and curiosity. Take on her kind tone and attitude while observing yourself. Be gentle and curious but never judgmental. This is very hard for us to do because we’re always talking shit to ourselves. Take a notebook and notice every time you get excited about something. It doesn’t have to be a big moment or work related… Just write it down each time—no judgments. What happens over the course of the month is you start seeing some patterns. It gives you a peek into your authenticity and things that energize you. When your whole body lights up with joy, it’s really trying hard to tell you something—it’s saying, “hey, this is important, please pay attention.” […] You need to spend time understanding who you truly are before you forge a path. If you’re making plans based on other people’s perception of you or the perception of yourself that you want to project based on some external force, you’ll always end up in the wrong place.
Advice to those just starting out on a creative path from Sharon Ann Lee, one of the most brilliant people I know – a fine addition to our ongoing archive of life-advice.
Complement with how to find your purpose and do what you love.
(via explore-blog)
Caitlin, effort and attention are finite.
Learn what drains them and how to recharge them for you.
You’re really good at making the world better (or at least the part of the world that is your city). But make sure that you are still an important part of it - if you burn out then your part of making the world better may be put in danger.
If there is something that requires help and you are…
right back atcha
Caitlin, I suggest you start source control repositories on pretty much everything you work on. I also suggest you commit often enough to give yourself a good idea of how much time you spent on a project when you go back through the logs. Other benefits include being able to revert to stable states and see abandoned feature branches you may wish to revive.
Caitlin, I spend a lot of time on the internet. Much of this time is spent on Facebook and Twitter, and some of that time is spent maintaining Facebook and Twitter accounts on behalf of organisations.
A thing that I have learned in my time of posting things to Facebook and Twitter, and reading things that other people have posted to Facebook and Twitter, is that automatic cross-posts from one site to the other are super annoying and ineffective.
Facebook and Twitter work in quite different ways, and the audiences you aim to reach with them are often different. Obviously Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, while Facebook posts are not. If you cross-post a Facebook post to a Twitter account, you will often get text that could have been shortened to fit the Twitter limit linking to the Facebook post instead of existing solely on Twitter. Obviously this is annoying and means people who look through your Twitter feed will see a whole lot of broken-off sentences. Additionally, if your Facebook post is a link to an external site with some text in it, the corresponding Twitter post will cut off your text and have only one fb.me link, which will link to the external site rather than your Facebook page - meaning that you can't actually read the rest of the text from the tweet.
On the other side, automatic posts from Twitter to Facebook are shorter than they need to be, get lower Edge Rankings, and don't take advantage of native image upload and linking capabilities if they're posted via an app.
The value an organisation generally seeks with a social media account is a cost-free or low-cost publishing and advertising platform for the things it does. When considered as a one-way platform, it does make sense to reduce the amount of labour involved to publish by linking accounts. However, the more important part of maintaining either type of account is replying to questions, passing on feedback, and having room to be responsive to people who engage with your thing (whatever it is).
Oh, and probably don't link a regularly updated Tumblr to a Twitter either. The first part of reblogged text rarely makes sense out of context, and you end up with a whole lot of tweets saying 'PHOTO: omg the feels tmblr.co/'. It is annoying and unprofessional. If you are posting things you want to propagate to several different social media, take the extra thirty seconds to actually post it to them in a way that makes sense for the medium.
Caitlin, make time for yourself.
How to tie your shoelaces.
Caitlin, don't try to apply imperatives of fiction to your own life.
Like me, you love a well-crafted story, and you love to craft them too. But don't fall into the trap of following a certain path in life because of how beautiful a story it would make.
For a start, narrative fiction relies on conflict and pain. If a story follows a peaceful and happy person throughout their peaceful and happy life, it will be a boring story - even though it could be a wonderful life to live. A story needs to create conflict, to have tragic misunderstandings between characters, to have characters making stupid decisions. These things are necessary for a good story, but they are counter-productive to a good life.
Secondly, you are a lady, and the majority of stories you read involving ladies are written by men. Many of them don't involve women having any more complicated drives or characters than are strictly necessary to their utility to the male characters. Love story narratives of female characters very often involve her giving up some kind of personal interest because of a romance that is meant to be.
To be frank, and rather political, romance narratives are a significant tool of women's oppression. If you don't like a guy but he likes you and keeps hitting on you, popular culture romance narratives tell him that you'll eventually give in and you'll be meant to be. Let me tell you right here, Caitlin, that that is some bullshit. Your life is not a ninety-minute film that needs a conclusion to the main character's romance sub-plot. Your life keeps on going after the camera tilts up to the curtains. Don't let this stupid trope oblige you to entertain some douche who thinks he is in a romantic comedy.
There are a lot of similar narratives that will have engrained themselves in your head. For a lot of them, following their forms will act against your interests.
You don't need the help of literary clichés to lead an interesting life. Be realistic. Communicate openly and honestly with people. Look at all of your options and choose them based on their merits. Your life is too short and unique to waste on rehashing someone else's story.
Caitlin, define yourself by creation over consumption.
You are strange, wonderful, and unique. This isn't because of the music you listen to, or the clothes that you wear, or the things that you buy. Those things will never make you exceptional.
People who define themselves only by what they consume are invariably boring. Be interesting. Contribute to the world, and define yourself on your own terms.
Caitlin, do your assignments right now. Getting into the habit of doing things-that-are-beneficial-for-you-to-do-right-now-but-you-could-probably-put-off right now is very important.
The lovely lady dev Kelly has passed on to me, for you, this advice from the lovely lady dev Ruth Ablett about being a lady dev:
I've always been interested in how things tick, but was a bit discouraged from doing so in favour of other "more feminine" hobbies by friends/siblings growing up. Once I figured out that doing what I liked was more important than listening to silly people, I started doing BASIC programming (I started by modifying Nibbles) and then got my first website with GeoCities in 1995. I taught myself HTML and JavaScript and dabbled in CGI. By 2000 I was working as a freelancer (while still in high school) and making a good amount of coin on the side. I didn't have a lot of theoretical knowledge, but I did know how to make websites that people would pay money for.
I started studying Computer Science at the University of Calgary in 2000. I initially had no real idea what I was going to do, but I knew I had a knack for figuring things out and enjoying the satisfaction of solving problems. The first two years were very difficult for me, as I am very application-oriented. I can't just do an assignment handed down from a prof to help me learn things, or to rote-memorise things. I struggled a lot, and this was not helped by certain members of my first- and second-year classes telling me a) I was clearly only there to get attention - being a woman in CS b) I clearly shouldn't be in CS because I didn't know x, y, and z about Linux/Fortran/C.... I scraped by with barely-passing grades. I thought about dropping out many times. It was really disheartening... it was a roller-coaster of being proud of solving the last problem while feeling intimidated by the next one. On top of all that, I had no idea what lay on the other side except for cube farm dev work or IT.
However, once I hit third-year, which was when I started applying the knowledge I'd gained during those first two years, I went from Cs to As pretty much overnight. I took database design, managing software dev teams, web systems, human-computer interaction, and many others. I ended up doing an undergrad research course in fourth-year and wrote a transactional object database. I got the only A+ in that course. I also took a web-systems course known by the CS students as "the meat grinder". I got one of 2 As. My professors (in the last year especially) were outstanding and they inspired me to really excel by showing me what career options were available. Not just cube farm work!
I moved to Japan to do the JET programme, taught English for a year (while fixing computers and wiping viruses for my students' parents :P) I returned to Canada and did my MSc at Calgary, got hired as a TA for the 'meat grinder' and for an object-oriented analysis/design course. I spent a summer at Hokkaido University on a robotics research internship. I was asked to teach the 'meat grinder', which I redeveloped from scratch. I got rave reviews as an instructor by my students.
In 2008 I moved to New Zealand. I worked with a small firm doing custom software, and my partner and I started a consulting firm. I'm currently trying my hand at Android and wrangling two daughters.
After all that novel, what advice would I give? Find someone who can tell you what's there after you graduate in your area(s) of interest. Don't be discouraged by people who tell you you don't belong in CS. Look at your strengths (you may not know what they are yet in regards to CS/IT) and try to find things you intuitively like. Don't pay attention to how much money you can make, but a balance between earning as much as you need to live on, and really enjoying what you're doing.
A lot of the courses you take in the first couple of years focus on individual, trivial development projects. This may give the impression that programming is an activity that doesn't involve creativity nor interaction with others. This is false. In real life, software development involves teams of people working together. Software development allows you to collaborate with others, constantly challenge yourself, and learn about many different business models (since pretty much all businesses use some form of software these days). Personally, I find software development to be an amazing form of creative expression from many perspectives.
Caitlin, when you are sad, be interested in things.
You are eighteen now, and you are at university. I'm very proud of you, and you seem to be fairly good at being interested in things already. It's an important skill to cultivate for a variety of reasons.
One of these reasons is related to sadness. You will be sad sometimes in your life, and when these times come you may - as I did - think that the appropriate way to deal with it is to think about it a lot.
Let me tell you now that that does not work. The sad feeds on your attention. If you are sad due to something that can be fixed, fix it. If you are sad because of something that you can do nothing about, there is no point dwelling on it. You will only make yourself feel worse.
The best way to destroy the sad that I have found is to be interested in things. Things do not care about mistakes committed by or against you. They do not take sides. They are just things, and each of them is infinitely complex and infinitely detailed. People have dedicated their lives to understanding and creating tiny aspects of things around you - fluid dynamics, the economy, your computer, plastic, flour. How do these things work?
It is always good to learn about things, and being interested in them is a very useful way to break sadness.
Advice from Jason Kottke at Webstock via my lovely colleague Matt. Do things!
Advice from Mike Monteiro: you have more power than you think, and you have more responsibility than you think. Advice from me: read Design is a Job (he wrote it and it is good)
Caitlin, the 'real world' is a myth.
The society we live in is strange and complex. Nobody really knows how all of it works - people tend to specialise in one field and learn exactly how one part of it works. You'll never learn everything there is to learn about everything. You'll probably never even learn exactly what it is that there is to learn. But the value of university is usually building a theoretical framework upon which to ground your learnings. It's OK if you don't leave with all the solid skills you need to go directly into a lucrative job. You should leave with a mind primed to figure out which skills you need to pick up and how to learn them in your field of choice.
People think of things based upon the parts of the world they know. They aren't wrong, but nobody is really completely right either.
Learn all you can, even if it doesn't seem to have an obvious application in the world you know.
