Girl's Guide to Being A Tech Sorceress

Tech blogging by women for women https://girlsguidetotechsorcery.wordpress.com/

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"So how do we do that?": High-level Software Design

“So how do we do that?”: High-level Software Design

*dusts off blog* Whoa, it’s been a while. Let’s get straight back into it! This week at work, I’ve been dipping my toes into a new area of development: software design. As a junior developer, my work so far has been implementing and testing things that other people have designed for me, so stepping out into this much more open kind of task has been a little daunting! But, I’ve done it: I’ve…

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Selenium and Web Test Automation

Selenium and Web Test Automation

For the last month or so (barring a week in the middle wherein I was struck down by plague – hence the sad lack of a blog post), I’ve been working with a tool called Selenium. Selenium is a web automation tool – that is to say, a thing that lets you write code to automate interaction with a website. It’s a useful thing for testing (which, as I’ve mentioned before, is an important part of…

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Let's Talk About Repetitive Strain

Let’s Talk About Repetitive Strain

Wrists. Important body part, wrists. They’re quite easy to damage, it seems, and not just in dramatic ways, like my little brother’s latest skiing accident. You can damage your wrists just by sitting at home and using a computer – like you’re probably doing right now.

We don’t really talk about RSI – at least, that I’ve noticed yet. Oh, sure, whenever you start a new desk job, they’ll give you a…

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Knowing Stuff, Together and Alone

Knowing Stuff, Together and Alone

Everybody knows about something.

Recently I’ve been feeling something that I’m sure is a relatively common feeling among the recently graduated: the slow realisation that I can know more about something than another person. Having spent the last eighteen years of my life in full-time education, I’ve spent a lot of time learning things from other people, so the idea that other people, particularly…

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Tech Jobs: Quality Assurance & Development For Test

Tech Jobs: Quality Assurance & Development For Test

One of the things that makes applying for tech jobs hard is the sheer variety in what the phrase “tech job” can mean. Computer Science graduates get told “you can do anything with CompSci!”, but the problem with “you can do anything” is that it doesn’t really tell you what “anything”s are available to choose from.

Girl’s Guide’s Tech Jobs series aims to shed some light on the matter, showing you…

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Software Testing (aka It's a Pain But We Do It For a Reason)

Software Testing (aka It’s a Pain But We Do It For a Reason)

How do you know if a program works?

Well, if you’re in academic computer science, the answer might be “you prove it, mathematically, with fun stuff like loop invariants”. And if you’re Past Me, specifically the version of me that was programming at university, the answer is “run it and see if the compiler shouts at you”. When it comes to practical and commercial applications, though, neither of…

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Tech Jobs: Software Consultancy

Tech Jobs: Software Consultancy

One of the things that makes applying for tech jobs hard is the sheer variety in what the phrase “tech job” can mean. Computer Science graduates get told “you can do anything with CompSci!”, but the problem with “you can do anything” is that it doesn’t really tell you what “anything”s are available to choose from.

Girl’s Guide’s Tech Jobs series aims to shed some light on the matter, showing you…

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Pen & Paper: Programmer's Best Friend

As a software engineer, I use all kinds of tools to get my job done. Aside from the actual language I'm programming in, there's the IDE I'm writing in and, often integrated into it, the debugger I'...

Just because programming is about computers doesn't mean pen & paper has to go out the window.

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Technical Interviews: A Recent Graduate's Perspective

Job interviews - nobody likes them. But they are somewhat a necessity. I'm in the fortunate position of not having had too many of them (and, all being well, I won't have to have any more for a goo...

Some thoughts on job interviews for technical positions, from the POV of a recent graduate. Check out the comments as well as the main post for some interesting discussion!

[techsorceress]

A First Look At: Google Inbox

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent me an invite to try out Google's new email app, Inbox. It's an alternative way of accessing your Gmail account, with some interesting (and shiny-looking)...

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A High-Speed Introduction to Concurrency

One of the lovely things about computers these days is the way they're not limited to only doing one thing at a time - they're marvelous multitaskers. Or at least, they are if you program them righ...

Computers doing more than one thing at once is super important - here's a quick guide to some common pitfalls.

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Simple, Cool Things: NFC Tags

Have you got excited about NFC tags yet? No? Well, I have, so I'm going to tell you all about them. NFC tags are small stickers (or keyrings, or cards, or anything you can fit a tiny NFC chip in), ...

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Maintainable Code: A Recent Graduate's Perspective

Maintainable Code: A Recent Graduate’s Perspective

“You’re going to spend more time maintaining code than you will writing it from scratch.”

So I was told, within the first few weeks of starting work as a software engineer. For context, my colleague was explaining why he’d suggested a couple of minor changes to the code I’d just written, and he’d just reviewed. The logic is this: if a large proportion of your coding time is going to be looking…

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Pixar and Computer Graphics

Last night, I rewatched 1998 children's film A Bug's Life, and had a great deal of fun spotting the features of 90s computer graphics and the places the field's improved since. Today's post, as a r...

Pixar made leaps and bounds in computer animation in the 80s - here's a quick look at some of their tech demo short films.

[techsorceress]

Getting in to Programming: Some Thoughts

There has been a lot of effort to get more people programming over the last couple of years, between Computing At Schools' (now successful!) push to get computer science onto the school curriculum,...

Have you been thinking of learning to code? Here are some tips on where to start!

[techsorceress]

Ladies Who Code: Web App Security with Marielle Volz

Yesterday evening, I braved the unknown and ventured out to a Ladies Who Code London meetup. The event was one of their Speaker Series talks, by Marielle Volz, who works for the WikiMedia Foundatio...

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Stylish Web Dev with Bootstrap

A little while ago, I posted about ASP.NET, and linked to a handy tutorial for getting started making a website using it. As I said then, my previous web development experience can be summed up as ...

Made a website that needs to be prettier? Bootstrap may be the quick and easy solution!