Design Like a Lady. Code Like a Geek. » geeks

Women in Science Fair

Lindsay — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:54:18 +0000

This week I presented at Cheltenham Elementary School’s Women in Science Fair as the first ever “computer” participant in the fair’s history. I decided to teach the children the basic design principles – C.R.A.P. – though I had to rearrange the letters – P.A.R.C – to take into consideration my K-5th grade audience. So we learned about Proximity, Alignment, Repetition and Contrast by assembling a poster about Toy City.

To prepare for the fair, I used stencils, spray paint and markers to create an interactive poster board. In the center, I put the pieces of information for the Toy City website on velcro so the children could move the information around and see the results spatially on the board.

The day began with the Kindergarteners who, we all agreed, were too young to grasp the “science” part of the fair. They did understand the mission given to them by their teachers: Get at least 6 sign-offs from the different tables indicating you visited. It probably wasn’t until the 3rd graders that the students really started to grasp the concepts of layout and design. I think this is a big take-away for anyone else out there keen on teaching design to younger children.

The typical conversation with each student went this way. After approaching, I would say:

Lindsay: Hi there, do you like to play with computers?

Student: YES!

Lindsay: What do you like to do on computers?

Student: Play gaa-a-ames!

Lindsay: Oh what kind of games?

Student: [INSERT SOME GAME I DON'T KNOW]

Lindsay: Well do you want to play a game today?

Student: Yes!

Lindsay: We’re going to design a website! Have you ever done that?

Student:

Lindsay: Well let’s design a website for ToyCity, the BEST Playground & Toy store in Philadelphia. Before we begin, lets organize the information into groups (prompt them to organize all the pieces on the table. pieces that were similar were also in the same color).

The groups of information were: Name of the Store, Taglines, Products & Availability. I walked them through each one, pointing out principles of alignment and repetition. I found Contrast was almost negligible in this exercise.

I think the highlight of the morning was the one 4th grader who, when asked what he likes to do most on the computer, answered enthusiastically, “Search facts on Wikipedia!” And when I asked him if he wanted to design a website, he cooed extra excitedly “I’ve always wanted to do that!” Unfortunately, his teacher chirped for all her students less than 20 seconds into the exercise.

Here’s the full slideshow of photos:

Welcome to the WildWest: When Women Take on Tech Because They Want To

Lindsay — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:03:05 +0000

A day does not go by when I don’t hear about an event from the numerous “we support women in technology” groups: Girls in Tech, Women 2.0, Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner and Shes Geeky. All of these groups have merit, and all have a target audience, from software developers to marketing analysts. I’ve certainly benefited from these organizations, participating in Women 2.0′s Business Plan Competition back in 2008, attending a plethora of Girls in Tech events about journalism, business development, and so forth, and going to the Shes Geeky conference at the beginning of this year down in the Peninsula. I’ve been lucky to meet some amazing women which include intense athletes, creative and insightful product managers, and even friends that help me out with reservations to Chez Panisse!

A portion of the dialogue that is pervasive in these types of groups is dedicated to asking the question to ad nauseum “Why are there not enough women in technology?” The women that are in tech are quick to point out that most conferences are dominated by men, mostly white, and that few of these conferences feature any women speakers at all. Day in, and day out, the conversation and complaints flood my twitter stream and my RSS feed to so much annoyance that I’m almost tempted to start spending my free time speaking at conferences (which I’ve done), or organizing a survey to better understand why women in tech do not attend conferences or try to speak at them on their own volition. Just to make the noise go away. It’s not that I don’t believe there are valid concerns, it’s that I find the conversation is tired, and somewhat generational.

In the pop culture of the online world, it seems that women in technology fall into three roles which I can relate to Save by the Bell characters. The Kelly Kapowskis use their sex appeal to attract the tech geek guy to pay attention to them without knowing a lick of what they’re talking about. The Lisa Turtles are the peppy chicks that “overcompensate by pushing their ‘geekery’ on everyone” (quote), displaying a mastery of social media but not of the separation of the application and presentation layers (you dig?). And, the Jesse Spanos are quite qualified women of tech, who also sound like feminists ranting everyday that women are somehow being purposefully left out of the tech equation.

I don’t buy into it. And neither does my friend Amy Ziari.

Last August Amy approached me at a Girls in Tech event (we thank you for that GIT!), tired as well of the same old conversation, with an idea to create a video series featuring women in technology who talk about what they are interested in. Not to prove to anyone that we’re competent, or that we’re “geeky just like you!”, but to let our audience draw their own conclusions. We didn’t want to be Kelly, Lisa or Jesse, we wanted to be ourselves, comfortable with our role in the industry, with our peers (male, female, black, white, hispanic or asian), and what we find interesting.

In mid September we teamed up with Camille Ricketts of Venture Beat to put together the pilot episode of the WildWest show. We hoped to put together more episodes, but time passed, and now I’m leaving soon to take off on an excellent adventure (I’ve alluded to this trip, but have yet to post details). So enjoy this first episode, where we interview Joey Mucha from Sprout and talk about some of our biggest tech snafus! Also, visit the website – www.wildwestshow.tv - to learn more.

Credits to Amy for doing all the video editing!

City of Dream’s SF1900: The Non-Tech Event of the Year

Lindsay — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:17:07 +0000

Andrea and Christina at SF1900 2008

I imagine that most of the people that come across my blog are more likely to be part of the San Francisco tech scene than they are part of the, well, non-tech scene. If you’re following the current debate over whether you should love San Francisco or leave San Francisco, than you may have come across Mat Honan’s blog post “Are You Going to San Francisco”. In his article, he makes a point to tell everyone to Make Real Friends:

“This only applies to people working in the Internet and technology sectors, but you may be amazed to discover that most people in the city work in fields that have nothing to do with the Internet. It’s fantastic to have friends in the industry. You’ll have shared interests and they’ll always get your meme-of-the-day jokes. But if most of your friends work in the same field you do, that’s a little boring, right? Try to branch out. This is a city of people from all over the world, doing all sorts of interesting things. Get to know them. ”

So here’s your chance: City of Dream’s 5th Annual – SF1900 – A Night at the Barbary Coast. I can expound the virtues of City of Dreams, but I have already done that previously. It’s a great organization, and I admire everyone of the members and friends I’ve met through my roommate and the organization. But for those of you not familiar with City of Dreams, this event is the best way to get an introduction! Not only can you fraternize with people outside of the (tech) industry, you’re going to find better male-to-female ratios than your average tech event (quit complaining!), and you can gamble the night away for a good cause. If you don’t believe me just yet, take a look at last year’s photo site. Now go buy your ticket!

My Roommate and I Looking Snappy

Details

WHEN: Thursday, November 12th, 2009 7pm – 12:30am.
WHERE: The Bently Reserve (The old Federal building, 301 Battery St.)
WHAT: Annual Fundraising Gala for City of Dreams
THEME: Think San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, circa 1900.

Preview the event’s AH-mazing silent auction here!

Bad Usability Calendar 2009

Lindsay — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:13:42 +0000

I’ve had this calendar hanging in my office for the majority of this year. It has 48 “classic” design mistakes, and I find each one wildly entertaining. My favorite month is July because I like the idea of playing shoots and ladders with my days. Did you roll the die wrong today? Go back to last week!

Bad Usability Calendar 2009

Select the image to visit the source site.

San Francisco’s Random Taco Crawl Generator

Lindsay — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:32:16 +0000

For those of you close to me, you have definitely heard about a small side project I started at the end of May called the Random Taco Crawl Generator. I dreamed up this great idea of being able to query a website for a random sampling of taquerias in San Francisco while I was at the gym over memorial day weekend. The night before I had been on a Taco Crawl for my friend Kevin’s birthday. He had held a few before, but this was my first with him, and with almost 20 other people that joined in for the celebration!

While we were sitting stuffed at our 5th taqueria, one of Kevin’s friends pondered aloud “I wonder if tacocrawl.com is taken.” Everyone in ear shot with an iPhone started scouring the internet to see if the domain had been secured, and then to see if they, themselves, could secure the domain. As I watched them scramble, I wondered too, “Why don’t you just call GoDaddy? They have a horrible UI, but great phone service.” (I really am a true believer). They ignored me! I speculated, this time silently, it was because they didn’t want to listen to a girl (because guys know so much more about tech then us females, clearly).

Finally, I decided to grab GoDaddy’s phone number (on my blackberry, mind you) and give them a call. Sure enough the domain was available, they had my account number and credit card on file, and I had the domain signed, sealed, and delivered within 5 minutes. Everyone was dumbfounded for two reasons:

It didn’t occur to anyone (except for me) that you could secure a domain name by phone.
No one thought that any two-word combination was still even available in the domain space.

So while I was at the gym the following day, I was thinking about what I could do with my new domain. Around that same time I decided I wanted to start getting back into more interactive web-development (pages that do things, not just show information). For the past few years, my day job has confined me to strictly requirements and design, but no development. Even with a few of my side projects – including this website, The General History Project, and The Bead Store – I hadn’t really written an if() or while() statement, in a while.

What started as a fun challenge to see who could secure the domain www.TacoCrawl.com fastest, turned into a side project using the Yelp API. I wrote most of the logic in PHP, but sprinkled some jQuery and XML throughout the site. The basic idea is that I query Yelp for as many taquerias within a 2 mile radius of the neighborhood selected. I check to see if the data set returned to me is greater or less than the number of taquerias the user requested. Ideally, the data set is greater, so I can generate a set of random numbers, and select from the full array of taquerias randomly. If the data set is less than the number of taquerias the user requested, than I return to the user all the taquerias Yelp returned to me.

All in all, once I got back into the swing of things, I found the Yelp API to be really easy to work with, and the google group to be very helpful. I also started using this handy tool for cross-browser design – check out Browser Shots.

In the process, I got a lot of really great feedback through uservoice and email. Some people want to see the site extend to other food genres, other cities and mobile browsers. Other food genres are hard because few delicacies are small and edible repeatedly in crawl fashion the way tacos can be consumed. For other cities, I checked in my own home town, Philadelphia, and only one neighborhood Yelp lists in its API has enough taquerias to make a taco crawl possible. Finally, there’s no excuses, mobile browsing capability would be great, and so would a google map mash-up. The truth is, I want to eat tacos, not program tacos; I need a break! I want to work on other things!

Andale! Go find you some tacos!

PS: There’s an easter egg in the program. I’d like to know who finds it!

UPDATE:

SFWeekly’s Review!

NBC Bay Area Article

Shout out on SF Gate.

Working the T Shirt Table at WordCamp SF 2009

Lindsay — Sat, 30 May 2009 18:25:15 +0000

I think it is certainly appropriate that I write a blog post documenting my time working the t-shirt table at WordCamp SF 2009, considering that my blog is on WordPress, so is The General History Project and The Bead Store SF. Yes I’m a big fan! And, I don’t think I need to extol all the great features, you can find that by doing some easy searching.

I’m meeting a lot of cool people – bloggers, theme designers, and the rest. The Mission Bay Conference Center also has a gym, so I have a lot of people stopping by to ask me what WordCamp is about. It seems a lot of people know about WordPress! And others want to know about me and what I can do to help them with their website, which is also very cool.

Some of the highlights of my morning include:

Meeting the LaidOffCamp guy, Chris Hutchins. He let me talk my headoff about Turkey and traveling through the Middle East. I told him about Matador Travel, which is an awesome online travel community. The people there helped me plan my trips to Costa Rica, Greece, Turkey and Israel. I’m hoping he’ll contact me so I can put him in touch with Laura Lee; she’s a great resource for traveling in Africa.
Hearing one woman say, as I gave her the American Apparel shirt – “It’s probably some cheap shirt made in China”. It’s nice to see that some people don’t pay attention to what seems obviously a pop-culture-brand success. American Apparel’s whole pitch is that they’re the largest clothing manufacturer in the USA.
Meeting Om Malik and asking him if he ever filled that position posted on 37signals. Sounds like he did! Congrats!
Having a run in with the guys from MediaTemple. They’re a sponsor for WordCamp, and came to the table with a little sway and swagger. I asked them if they were competitors for GoDaddy, and then if they could help me secure a domain name in less than 5 minutes by phone the way I did for tacocrawl.com last Saturday night. Their response? “What kind of phone do you use? Blackberry? It looks a whole lot cooler on the iPhone!” Me? “Looks like those bloody mary’s this morning were a good idea”. Bad idea for two reasons. First, I’m the type of GoDaddy customer they want to acquire. I buy domain names like other girls go clothes shopping online. Second, it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone, these guys and my friends that were with me last week, that securing a domain name by phone is a good feature.
Seeing how truly humble Scott Beale is from Laughing Squid. I follow him on twitter, and have been reading his blog since I moved out here in fall 2005. When he came to the tshirt table, and I saw his name tag, I said something to the likes of “hey you’re that guy”. He seemed surprised that I would recognize him, which really impressed me since he has 40K followers on twitter and a significant fan base.

If any of you are reading this, come say hi!

Finding a Place for my HAMB Background Image

Lindsay — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 19:33:30 +0000

In my previous post. I wrote about HAMB SF, my idea for a neighborhood workout group in Russian Hill and Nob Hill. I showed you a couple of the website designs that I played around with, all using this basic image:

The Original HAMB SF Background Image

If you are not familiar with San Francisco, the left building is Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill and the right building is the Transamerica building downtown; I can see both of these from my apartment.

I have yet to write Part 2 of my post on HAMB SF, but you might be able to guess that the project idea is on hold for various reasons. That being said, I wanted to use this background image and some of the other photoshop collateral I created for something else. Since I don’t really use MySpace, or care to, I needed another venue where I could post a customized background. I decided on Twitter.

I removed the HAMB header and added a few clouds, as well as a notation that attributed the background to me. Here’s how the background looks alone:

My San Francisco Twitter Background

I had to change the dimensions of the file, as well as increase the depth of the hill at the bottom to adjust for different browser sizes. Of course, depending on how a viewer’s browser is adjusted, the background may look a little off.

Here’s how it looks when the sizing is just right:

My Background on Twitter

Supa Dupa Fly Flash

Lindsay — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:02:36 +0000

Without the internet on my flight back from DC this weekend, I was forced to just make something up in Flash to see if I could learn something new. Compared to the last project, I can say that my significant accomplishments and growth in this skill are astounding, but I’ll let you judge for yourself:

You know this video is as fly as these shoes I bought this weekend:

Learning Adobe Flash

Lindsay — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:08:56 +0000

I’m learning Adobe Flash this morning, and just completed my first movie following this guide.

I know you are super impressed by my amazing flash skills, but what did you do before 8 am this morning?

A Responsive and Persuasive Audio Device to Stimulate Exercise and Fitness in Children

Lindsay — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:22:07 +0000

While I’m in the business of posting videos about musical instruments for children, I wanted to post a link to the video my group created for the New Product Development class in the Fall of 2005. The course had students from the Engineering School, the School of Information, the Haas School of Business (all from UC-Berkeley) and Industrial Design students from the California College of the Arts. Here’s a link to the paper we wrote fro CHI 2006 and the poster.

The basic idea of the product is to motivate children to move and dance by varying the speed at which the music is played. The speed changes based on how quickly and energetically the child is dancing.