CRL Blog

Next up in “developer book club” theme is The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney. Not necessary something that will be relevant for all developers but it has helped me understand myself both personally and professionally so thought I would include it.

You may have heard of Ellen Pao, at least as “that women who sued the VC company” or “The CEO that censored reddit”. I had heard of these stories and followed her on Twitter before I got the book. Listening to all these things that happened, you wouldn’t actually believe it all happened to one person.

As mentioned in my recent blog post, I have decided to: #1: read more #2: blog about it! So here we go with the first book: Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.

On Thursday 7th December, Ladies of Code Glasgow celebrated Christmas with our tradition (2 years makes a tradition, right?) of mulled wine and coding.

A few weeks ago I mentioned on Twitter I am making an effort to read more and I was looking for some techy book recommendations. I am not great at reading fiction books unless on holiday when I can totally switch off and enjoy a good thriller or murder mystery, finishing the book in a few days. In “real life”, I only manage to get a wee bits of time here and there to read and this doesn’t really work with fiction.

On November 2nd I packed my overnight bag (my favourite flowery Cath Kidtson, of course) and headed to London for the UK Umbraco festival. Here is a wee recap of a very busy couple of days.

Recently I have been attending Code Craft, a local meetup in Glasgow where people talk about… well, code craftmanship, of course!

I thought I would explain how I created a wee sample app to learn the restrictions of the API and have a play with the LIFX bulb.

I mentioned back in May that I had been nominated for the We Are The City rising star award. Well… I won! There are 100 rising stars over 20 categories, mainly industries that are male dominated, including tech.

On Saturday 8th July, myself and fellow Umbricians interested in IOT decided to spend our Saturday together learning Alexa skill development.

At Umbraco Codegarden I gave a talk “Controlling content for the connected world” and ran an open circle session on IOT. The feedback from this has been great and people seem interested in getting started with IOT projects, and integrating with their existing Umbraco CMS knowledge.

I can’t really believe I am writing this, but I am one of Umbraco’s MVPs 2017!

Back in November I wrote a blog post Diary of an anxious developer about my struggles with confidence and anxiety as a developer. In this post I discussed how I managed to do my first attempt at public speaking and also contributed my first pull request to an open source project.

Exciting news! I have been nominated for a rising star award by We Are The City :) The awards are focused at building and supporting the female pipeline in industry, which is something I am always up for promoting. Anyone who knows me knows how important improving the numbers of women in my industry is to me, so anything I can do to be a part of this makes me super happy!

On 15th March I headed through to Edinburgh to attend the Apps for Good event. Apps for Good is a global organisation that encourages young people to learn technology skills to bring good to the world. This was exciting as it was the first Scottish event!

I am super delighted to have been nominated for The Drum's 50 under 30 list on women in digital. The ladies on the list are absolutely smashing it in their specialist subject so to be on this list is awesome! I am representing for us developers as I see to be the only coder on the list.

So, anyone that knows me will tell you I am a worrier and have major confidence issues. I have a real fear of leaving myself open to criticism, this can be an intimidating industry sometimes. Previously I have tried to avoid public speaking, letting other people see my code and putting myself in new social situations. In the last week I have done pretty much all scary things in one go!

I attended Umbraco Codegarden 2016 in Odense, Denmark. Although I have been using Umbraco for nearly 3 years now, I was a  newbie to Codegarden so didn’t really know what to expect.

The computing science and software engineering industry can be intimidating at times and let’s face it, a bit of a boys club. After 5 years of university and 5 years in the industry, I have some insights that will hopefully be useful to people just starting out or even just myself on a particularly confidence-low day!

Thanks for reading my first blog post on my new site... Like any "hello world" moment, I am just exploring what can be done before doing anything interesting!