Impostor Syndrome Part II

I don't know about other fields , but in Engineering it is very common to feel like an impostor for many reasons. First being that engineering is literally defined as solving problems you never had using ways you've never known. Basically this means that we are constantly learning and everything you come across will most likely be new. Its easy to fall into the trap of feeling like an impostor when you faced with technical problems and you don't know where to start.
I'm writing these as much to myself as to any of you, because well I'm not exempted from the beast.

1) Be prepared to look stupid. It took me a whole day to find out that [Transaction] is a reserved keyword for sql hence should not be used for database table names. Yes, I was stupid before but now that I have learnt something it doesn't matter how I got here. You are constantly learning and its okay not to know things, no one knows everything. 

2) Don't try to do everything. Been there done that, quick advise , don't do it. It is tempting to want to do everything because of the fear of being left out,  or because it will look cool on your CV or whatever. You can only do one thing at a time, you might as well do it perfectly. 

3) Don't be a perfectionist. Can't overemphasize this enough. Use every failure as an  opportunity to learn.

4) If necessary avoid unnecessary networking events. Yap! I know this is counter to the modern conscience but nothing awakens the beast than networking events where you'll most likely have nothing to say. Its tempting to attend everything to make you feel proactive and techy but sometimes you have to learn to say no to some invitations.  

5)Take small steps at a time. There is a reason why University degrees are at least 3 years and why it took us centuries to realize that we are not at the center of the universe. Do small tasks and build confidence as you go along, after all no matter how heavy or big rocks are basically made of sand. 

6)A little competition is good but in the grand scheme of things, life is much more than that.

7) For Computer engineers /computer scientists, remember that computers are very very dumb, we have to sink down to its level to write proper instructions for it.

Above all, be proud of how far you've come and look to the future with optimism.

I am here.

You know that feeling you have when you don't feel legit, like you are just faking it and soon the world will expose just how much of a phoney you are. Sounds familiar? Well, you are not alone, the feeling is shared by so many people  that it has a name. Its called Impostor Syndrome which technically means    just feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. You might also know of its cousin called self-doubt.

Impostor syndrome is real and I know this because I have been feeling it a lot lately.(trust me , its not a happy place). It took me to question a lot of things like  why I chose engineering, will I even become an engineer? What was I even thinking? etc. Nothing I have ever accomplished seemed enough to shove it off. Not the awards I won, not the leadership positions I held. It really felt like I have been fooling everyone and  they will find out soon so I might as well stop the pretence now. 

. Research shows that women experience it more and its not just in technical fields but in all  fields. The main reason I can attribute this to is because at household level, women are not identified by their careers but by their social accomplishments i.e her husband, number of children she has, how they takes care of her family (at least where I come from) and her career comes second. In such a culture this is to be expected. Impostor Syndrome is real and could be part of the reason we don't have women higher up  the rungs. Ladies if you've ever been there, this post is for you.

If you google 'How to get over Impostor's syndrome' you'll get a lot results but for me , all that worked was 3 words. 'I am here. They are uplifting as Beyonce's 'I was here'.  Just say 'I am here and I'm here to stay!'. You are wherever you are for a reason. Whether you are studying or working or on interim , you are there for a reason, you have the drive and you are smart enough to do it. You can fool yourself but you can't fool the world especially not your employer or your admissions committee or your scholarship committee or your educators or family and sometimes even society at large. You are not impersonating anyone else, it has been you all along and there is a lot more you can do. 

Side note:If you actually really fooled all those people you should seriously consider counterfeiting for a profession ;).

Its all in your head and it has always been. While you are doubting, the rest of the world is moving forward. Long story short, you are here for a reason so stop wasting your energy doubting and go be amazing.  

Coding is a lot like writing

So, I have been spending a lot of time lately writing code. You know that stereotype of  a computer scientist locking themselves up in a dark room, in the cycle of coding, eating and sleeping. I allow you to imagine that, only a happier version. It feels like deja vu and I know why. Its not the first time that am writing. I have been writing for as long as I can remember. I have written everything from songs, to poems to articles, to novels( well most unpublished novels) and it feels exactly the same as coding for a personal project.

I remember once time in high school I decided to write a story titled 'Newton's descendant'. It was nothing serious just something I wanted to check off my list before I die. It started with a layout. The layout , the higher level plan of what the story was about; in this case it was about a competition on physics concepts and Newton's life to get someone who would pass for Newton's descendant even though he never had children. The theme paved way for my characters who were the participants.

Then came chapter one and the rest was history. Life became all about that story from then. I was either writing it or researching for it, finishing assignments fast so that I can continue with it(glad teachers never found out) or just imagining the next chapter. I literally breathed my story, I dream about it when I was not working on it, I became the characters I was writing about.  It was apparent to my friends that I had zoned out and everyone started getting curious.
I couldn't hide the fact that this story got me excited and so I allowed them to read it while I kept writing. This gave me enough feedback and ideas to make it more interesting. After 3 months of minimum social life , I finally released the final version of the story with about 300 pages. Everyone liked it, even one friend who rarely reads anything that is not compulsory.  I still remember that feeling, that was when I started writing seriously.

I'm experiencing the same feeling I was feeling some years ago, the excitement, the seclusion, the pre release,
the positive feedback. It only proves one thing, coding is a lot like writing, only that coding requires both imagination and technical ability while imagination suffices writing. The two have a lot in common, endurance, imagination and 100% dedication. When making an app or any project you have to put 100% dedication, otherwise it becomes one of those I wish I had the time to do x, y and z. Am glad I realised that early enough.So even though I never got to publish that story am glad it taught me much of what I'm practising today.

Curious on the project I have been working on ? Head over to http://happinessapps.challengepost.com/submissions/31115-footsteps . If it amazes you, click the vote button too! Thanks in advance!

In the spirit of giving.

Its the that time of the year when giving is encouraged . In that spirit I have made  my first official contribution to open source - ANDRE(Android Resizer). I have been developing for android, and  resizing individual images has been a mission. So with java I have made a program that resizes as many images as you want for android drawables specifications. I came along Fred but for some reason didn't serve the purpose. 

If you are developing for android and are facing the same problem feel free to try it.

Check it out from here. Right click on ANDRE.jar and save link as.

In other news, I have written something about Artificial intelligence on a collaborative blog here. Please do check it out and leave your comments. Once again Happy holidays!

Hour of code in Tanzania.

75,277, 536 have tried the hour of code so far this year. I tried it too. Infact I took the seat of a Computer Science teacher. Considering that Tanzanian syllabus doesn't include CS in lower levels below University. Through projekt inspire I took the initiative to teach a couple of high schoolers some basics of programming. I taught them a bit of python to get them started. I aimed to get girls but I got none(there's still time for that  .:)) In three days we were to make programs that simulate a doctor, marks grader and ATM machine, proving the fact that computer science can do anything.

[What you missed out on] Hack.summit()

Hack.summit() happened last week from 1st to 4th December. You may be wondering hack.summit() ,as the nerdy suggests it is a conference for programmers. No, I didn't travel to another conference, this one was done the programmer's way, virtually. The first of its kind, and quite a success I must point. Normal conferences require a lot of effort and expenses to organise but this simply required internet access therefore it was easier for everyone to participate.   I was among the 50,000 attendees who grabbed this opportunity and listened to some speakers that caught my interest. Here is a little summary.

The Organisers:
The chief organiser of this summit was Ed Roman who is the co-founder of hackhands, a company that provides programmers with real time help online, which brought him to start hack.summit(), as might you guess, to help programmers be more productive as well help non profits orgnisations such as Black Girls Code and code.org through donations. The productivity gap between the good programmers and the bad ones is way too huge. Great idea it is. There were more than 20 speakers , big names in the programming world , some wrote programming languages, others created the Google Glass, each one of them is worth your time. Ed Roman shared some productivity tips and books( adding to my to read list), mostly common sense which is usually lost once you start coding.

Scott hanselman:
You don't exactly think free when you think Microsoft; a Microsoft engineer surprised with how much Microsoft is contributing to open source through azure.net  and other free products like asp.net.
I quote , "I will make Microsoft free until they fire me". The motive being to give as much choices to developers as possible. His presentation also included the amazingness of Visual Studio as well as tips on productivity emphasizing using the appropriate technology for the right job.

Floyd Marinescu:
Floyd is the CEO of InfoQ: an online news website for developers as well QCon: a conference for developers as well. He talked about culture and happiness considering that he runs his teams virtually. A lot of teams run virtually including ibm and wordpress  proving that virtual teams do work if there is the right culture in the team, which can be consciously built. They suceed by metrics, daily stand ups, dashboards, yammer social network , weekly video meetings and an annual face to face summit. He gave  examples of core values that are crucial and should be emphasized, these include transparency, service, accountability and delegation of responsibilities rather than tasks. He also gave advice for tech enterprenuers starting out to learn the business side and not to avoid failure.

John Skeet:
John Skeet is an interesting character. He is the number one answerer on stack overflow. All programmers owe him, a lot, precisely he has answered over 30,500 questions on stackoverflow.He has written a book on C#, can recite all digits of pi backwards and his code doesn't need git revisions. Its no surprise that he is an engineer at Google. He gave his presentation with a sock puppet  which made it even more interesting. He identifies the root causes of errors is having 10 fingers. Hard to believe but its sort of true, having 10 fingers forced us to use the decimal numbering system, while the computer still understands binary. Its the cause of misunderstanding between users, developers and architects. Users don't consider the needs of others, developers need to understand both architects and users, and architects face the decimal - binary challenge. He gave a lot of examples where this comes to play including formatting errors, discrete v continuous numbers, different date and time systems and to a small extent , relativity (Yes, Einstein's theory of relativity affects you). His advice included to keep it simple and only use stack overflow when necessary( He doesn't answer documentation questions on stack overflow).

Tom Chi:
The summit also included Tom Chi, the creator of Google Glass. He joined the GoogleX team from Yahoo and this is the team behind Google Self driving car, project loon, Contact lenses for sugar detection along side the Google Glass, accomplished in 2 years (speaking of innovation). Tom gave useful hints for successful innovation, tips he gathered from the making of the Google Glass. He pointed out how important it is to differentiate between guess and direct experience, how  I got a couple of innovation goes from research to development and how to master these processes well. He also talked about how making something 10% better everyday results into miracles in the long run. We got some questions answered like why it was created,  the future of Google Glass which is augmented reality and so much more and if the Google Glasses are really harmful to the eyes. He assured us even though he wasn't wearing his at the moment, there are not harmful as thought to be.

Janet Weiner:
Janet Weiner is a facebook engineer who has had 10 patents, she specialises in Big Data, specifically how facebook is being used to generate elections data. They use Chorus (a program) to quantify statuses and give clear statistics of people's inclination towards elections. It makes a lot of sense considering Facebook has become a source of everything. She attributes its success to the facebook culture, there quote I would like to requote, "Move fast and build things", "Done is better than perfect, Release the iterate", "Orville Wright didn't have a pilot's license". In short find your passion and build things.

Hadi Partovi:
This past week (8th to 12 December) was Computer Science Education week. Children were encouraged to try the hour of code. The man behind this is Hadi Partovi, the founder of Code.org. I also participated in this campaign(new blogpost coming) as I agree with his mission, to raise of awareness of computer science to young folks, why? Well computer science opens opportunities irrespective of background. His story is rather inspiring, a story of an Iran immigrant to the US who made it to Harvard, Microsoft and tech startups, all through computer science. Why then is Computer Science not as compulsory as Math? The Hour of Code has had much success, last year it had a reach of about 50 million, this year it aims reach 100 million. It has clearly been successful considering all major companies including Apple, Microsoft and Google are endorsing it as well as  President Obama. The tutorials use javascript because it runs everywhere. He talked about unconscious bias, a rather sensitive and important issue in hiring as well as advised startup founders to let go of not only underperformers but also mediocre employees.

Scott chacon:
Speaking of open source, lets talk about the guy who founded Github, Scott Chacon. It was interesting to learn that Github started from a Ruby meeting and the first 'office' was a coffee shop and that it runs without managers. Scott talked about Open Source, its history, why companies endorse it and its future. Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler which was then open sourced, others joined such as the linux kernel and open source became the norm with few exceptions. Companies like Google , Facebook among others encourage open source because they use it, Github itself uses Git, some companies survive entirely by Open Source, they also use it to attract and find the best developers and also because open source products allow working across fields. He gave a few pointers to start contributing to open source, here and starting with your favourite products. As much as open source is fun, don't forget to license it appropriately, only lawyers will benefit.

Jennifer Pahlka:
Government Innovation. Not exactly the right combination of words, most of us think our governments are not innovative enough,but they are. Jennifer Pahlka is the Founder and Executive Director of Code for America and is the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the government. Government plays a huge role in technology including generating weather data, honolulu.gov and so forth. She emphasized on how important user experience research is important for innovative technology as well as the downsides of the waterfall method in design.


Hack.Summit() was filled with all sorts of high profile people in the programming world including Tim Oreilly(the fonder of OReilly media), Ryan Rubinski(founder of codeacademy) among others. It was definitely worth the time.  Well, the title of this post is what you missed out on but you didn't miss much because you can still watch the videos at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Smi8vrRC0U&list=PLerTgBTG9TVxwl2VonZ--LGiu9ZBGbsQ8&spfreload=10
 If you are thinking of achievable new years resolution Hack pledge might be a good place to start at. Until next time, keep hacking.

What's with women in tech.

Seriously though, are they that special? All around the world you find women heading a revolution to get even more women in tech leadership positions. They  have all sorts of conferences and programs to mentor their juniors. They even have code camps  just for them. Technology is male oriented field you may think, women should just go do what they do best, play with barbie dolls, raise families and so forth. And thats where we go wrong. A little ride through history reveals something else.  


Ada Lovelace.(English mathematician)
 Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer. She wrote notes on Charles Babbage's engine which is synonymous to saying she wrote the first algorithm to be carried by a machine. 

Grace Hopper.(American computer  scientist)
Every women in tech revolution knows about Grace Hopper. She knew all about women in tech applications. She was a curious one, she dismantled 7 alarm clocks when she was 7. She was the third programmer of the Harvard Mark I. She coined the term "bug" that no programmer is unfamiliar with. She died with awards from 30 different universities and of course the Grace Hopper conference.

Hedy Lamar(Austrian actress)
She invented a device that led to the development of bluetooth and wifi, which for some reason was ignored for the next 40 years. Long story short we owe her big time. 


Human computers.(American mathematicians)
During world war II ,a computer was not machine but a profession. Mostly women with degrees in Math did it because as you might guess, they were good at it. They solved equations to produce tables that were used by gunnery officers to produce machines . Wen the ENIAC computer was made , women from this group were the first ones to programme it. 

Lise Meitner:(an Austrian physicist) 
Lise was on the team that discovered nuclear fission. Clearly she was a good physicsit even though the Nobel prize committee skipped her due to negative personal opinions. Well , even so we still have the element Meitnerium named after her. 



Henrietta Swan Leavitt(American astronomer)
Without Henrietta's contribution we wouldn't be able to determine the distance of distant galaxies from us. She discovered the relationship between the luminosity and period of Cepheid variable stars. If you've come across Hubble's law that states that the universe is expanding then you should also know that it wouldn't materialise without Henrietta's contribution.


Jocelyn Bell Burnell:( Irish Astrophysicist)
Jocelyn discovered the first radio pulsars. Even though her thesis adviser took credit for it, We'll still applaud for her contribution to astrophysics. 


Emmy Noether(German mathematician)
Newton once wrote , "If I have seen further, it is from sitting on the shoulders of giants." Well, Emmy was one of the giants that Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener stood on. She made groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Her theorem has been able to explain the connection between symmetry and conservation law. 


Martha Cortson:(American inventor)
Martha simply took off where her husband left off. She then came up with signal flares that are used in the military today. When her husband she finished off his work on signal flares, acquired patents for it and even started a company out of it. And that was in the 1870's , before women empowerment was spoken of. 



So what's this buzz around women in tech? Well, we invented technology, technology defines our future and we can't leave half of the world's population from it. We are as good in technology as our male counterparts, We have to suffer from society's bias against us so if a revolution is needed to turn things around, let it be! Long before men declared tech their field, we invented it.