On parenting and the flu season

Somehow the quote "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans" keeps coming to my mind this weekend. Well, you either know from personal experience or may have heard many times, life changes after having kids.

When you are a fulfilled childless person, following the progression of how your friends, cousins and coworkers suddenly transition from being awesome to pretty boring after they have kids, you know what I am talking about. I had been witnessing this for many years. I followed my friends transition from fun and social, to fixated on baby diets, baby ballet lessons and going to bed with their kids at 8 pm. Suddenly my Facebook feed changed from beachfront weekend gateways, pictures of skiing, hiking and wild water rafting, to endless stream of babies. I judged at the time, yes, I did. "Your babies might seem cute to you, your immediate family and few friends, but others get irritated after the your 100th share of your baby's cuddly posture and cute outfit over the same weekend" had been on my mind for a long time.

Before even planning to get pregnant, I made a deal with my husband and my trusted girlfriend Anna, to let me know if I start turning into one of those people and become annoying on social media. So far neither of them have warned me, possibly because he posts just as many cuddly baby statuses and she is too kind to give me the reality check. I console myself with the thought that at social gatherings I still prefer topics of general geekiness over baby clothes and diet.

The changes to life of parents happen suddenly, they sneak on to you and unleash at full force. Suddenly having a dinner with friends at a nice restaurant doesn't appeal since you can foresee, how are going to be forced to spend most of the time asking your baby not to throw his food at other people, and convincing your toddler not to hit her baby brother. Later, you give in and turn on Peppa Pig (have your really not heard about it?) on your cell phone to try having an adult conversation, while you can feel the judging glances of other dinners burning your back, for egoistically exposing your children to screen time.

Sometimes, you shake yourself and decide to have a fresh start starting Monday. You commit to serious plans of participating in that professional event Thursday evening, having people over for dinner Friday, and working out out over the weekend. And then life with kids happens.

Things get especially bad during the flu season. Kids get the flu from daycares, schools than pass to one another and winter months sometimes seem like an infinite loop of snots in the chase of spring. It gets especially challenging when you have two careers, no backup childcare and have to juggle between two full time work schedules staying home with seek kids and not sleeping the nights. This guarantees to keep you overwhelmed at work for missing days and important meetings and with frustrated your spouse since he couldn't stay home that Tuesday which was so important for you.

Nevertheless, as any loving parent will agree that kids are so worth it all. My two fussy, contagious munchkins are the lights of my life and I wouldn't trade spending my evenings with them for anything.

Love,
Overwhelmed working parent.

Create Windows apps in 30 seconds

It's been many years since I read the Sams Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours book by by Jesse Liberty and Rogers Cadenhead, and those 24 hours used to seem like an ethernity!

Today's hack is not about writing awesome code in 30 seconds but rather about simplifying your life working on Windows PC with convenient utilities. During my leave my team at work migrated from Google Talk to Slack for instant messaging and group discussions. Slack is awesome and has a multitude of fans, yet they ignored writing a Windows 10 application (but developed old school desktop application, don't ask me why).

Alright, are you ready? All you need is Windows operating system and Chrome browser. Now please launch Chrome. Click on the Hamburger menu (3 dots) select "More tools" and "Add to desktop":

Chrome will ask you for a confirmation, be sure to select the option "Open as window":

All Done. Now I have added "apps" for Slack, Google News and Google Finance. You can also select to add these to your Taskbar and Windows menu.

Each of these apps run in their separate windows and create a separate process in Task Manager. Now I will have Slack app on my Desktop every time I boot the computer and not forget to launch it.

You can use the same tactics for your everyday tools, such as email, news, weather. They will be haunting your from your desktop so you won't forget to launch them. And if you really want to have them running by the time you log in create a job from your Task Scheduler.

Silicon Valley and the taboo of dress pants

Last week I had a speaking engagement at the ABI.Silicon Valley chapter launch event for women in tech. The event was going to be memorable and exciting since it was the launch, and myself and other 4 awesome women in tech Jessica Mong, Deepti Gupta, Lulu Li and Steph Tung were the organizers as well as local chapter leaders.

So, I was debating what to wear, and realized that the choices were between wearing a dress or jeans and semi-casual shirt and blazer. I took another look at my wardrobe and realized that I own no dress pants. I had got rid of all suits after they set in my wardrobe without being worn for 5 years, in fact I think I wore a suit last time for a job interview in Michigan in 2008. It turns out dress pants were gone as well.

This made me realize that there is a sort of a taboo on the dress pants as well as suits in Silicon Valley. Just look at these industry leaders delivering their big keynotes and their jeans!

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg  keynote address at F8 conference 2016

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings's keynote address at the 2016 CES conference 

Apple CEO Tim Cook at WWDC keynote 2016

The morale of the day: if you want to make it to a top executive in Silicon Valley one day, don't wear dress pants on the speaking engagements.

Turning off the radio to hear your own thoughts..

Let's face it, often time we use our time in the car to switch off the mind from everything but the road and whatever is playing on the radio, or CD/MP3, or your phone connected via bluetooth. Yet, there are times: before important meetings, when thinking on complicated problems, before presentations when you need to focus your mind and use the little commitment free time in the car to sit in silence and think, or sometimes a thought comes and you need to turn off the radio to hear it.

Rant about dreams and persuasion

Recently I have had an opportunity to revisit some of my dreams from the past, those I have had and kept sacred for a while, those I abandoned at their infancy, those that are on the rise today. Suddenly a realization came that for a while no new dreams have appeared - besides the normal, the expected for this stage of life (travel the world, make sure kids are happy and successful). Looking back I see some shattered dreams for changing the world, reestablishing life and priorities, radically changing everything that have been left to relinquish and die somewhere there in the dusty corners of my past.

So this is a small piece of rant for you, dear reader, dare to change your life, to reestablish yourself and pursue your wildest dreams while you have the option and the ability to do that. The day will come and life will take it's toll with the obligations, routines and dependencies making it no longer feasible and eventually impossible.

I am still keeping my checklist of dreams, bucket list of projects but the few big ones I dearly missed today are to late to attempt. LIVE your life and TAKE chance on that wild dream of yours, I dare you!

Cheers.

Why are there so few women at tech conferences? What can we do about it?

These days there is an inspiring variety of tech organizations, tech conferences and events hosted for women. Bay Area being a hub of technology hosts great many of those events, participating in which leaves you inspired at sheer number of women involved and actives. This paints a very rosy picture, and after being exposed to a reputable developer conference, meetup or tech group, you might come to a shock, realizing how severely women are underrepresented. Sometimes having a 5% presence, often being limited to presence of 'eye candy' help desk or several speakers to create the illusion of diversity.

One of my favorite events I got to attend last year was Grace Hopper Celebration conference, gathering of 12 thousand people in Houston celebrating women and their achievements in technology, and paving the road for the next generation of women technologists to be more ambitious and successful. One of the recent inspiring events I attended was Women Techmakers gathering at Google, celebrating International Women's day. They hosted a panel of women founders, who came up with very successful startup ideas, had a few sessions by different educational channels targeted for women. There were boots were you could mingle and learn from all these inspiring women about their organizations, sign up, volunteer and participate. I left the event at a very high note, planning to join one of the organizations. Most of these organizations targeted at women in tech are great, but after a while of listening to different names you start to fuse them into one and (so offense intended of any of these organizations) realizing that they are all sound similar and essentially pursue the same goal, e.g. GirlDevelopIt!, WomenWhoCode, Femengineer, She++, etc. They all try to increase awareness that there are very few women in tech and provide resources for women to start or progress in their tech careers.

Just this week there are 2 tech leadership conferences happening in Bay Area for women in tech.

We (women in tech), leave those events feeling warm and fuzzy inside, with great hopes and plans for women in technology changing the future. It is not until you attend a highly reputable conference like Build by Microsoft, AWS by Amazon, or startup/founders meetup, that you realize there are NO WOMEN there! Google and Facebook have been cautiously trying to increase the participation of women through groups like Systers and special discounts for underrepresented groups (Participation of Google I/O rose from 8% in 2014 to 20% in 2015). I was disappointed to see that Microsoft hasn't done anything in this regard, although they say they have tried. I took few pictures of the crowd to share with female coworkers, shared with a challenging hashtag #spotAWoman.

There was a women in leadership session at Build, attended by all the ~30 women present at the conference, from the thousands of attendees. I go to ask the panel this very question "why are there so few women at this conference?". The answer was not satisfying "there are very few women engineers coming through pipeline, you see the same representation here". This is not accurate, there are 20%+ women entering the workforce in technology, if you look at the diversity numbers published by most tech companies (Google, Netflix, Microsoft) that number is far greater than 5%. Percent of every other minority in tech far greater then represented at the conferences. Let's face it, most reputable software conferences are mostly attended by White male population.

***

So what can you do to change this?

As an individual contributor - you need to raise this question to your management and to HR department at your company. Ask for the conference attendance budget to plan for more women speak and attend those events.

As a manager or director - encourage everyone on your team, especially women and racial minorities, to submit talk proposals and attend events/conferences.

As a event/conference organizer - talk to different women's groups to increase awareness of your event, and encourage women to join.

Finally as a woman in tech, step outside of your comfort zone. Don't wait for your management to offer you attending Grace Hopper Conference for the n-th year in the row, go ahead and tell them you need to go to JavaOne or Build or something else. Every organization has a limited budget for conference attendance, and unless you are a VIP engineer (e.g. authored books, have published widely used open source software..), you will have to pick one maybe a couple to attend every year, since you need to be developing/working rest of the time. Do your diligence and step out of your comfort zone, choose a non-women centered event and persuade your company to sponsor your attendance.

Build 2016 HoloLens

The long anticipated day came where I had to be at the Moscone center on April 1 at 7:30 in the morning for the start of my Hololense presentation. On my way to the conference center I discovered that hotel decided to lock me out (sent me a bill as if I had checked out already) and I had to spend 15 minutes at the front desk explaining that I needed a new key. By the time I got to the Moscone center there was a huge crowd waiting at the front entrance and security wasn't letting anybody in. I needed to inform the security guards that I was a part of the very special crowd to go upstairs and be part of the most popular event of the conference.

By the time I got up, it was around 7:50 am, the event had already started and apparently my spot was given away to somebody on the waitlist. Maybe it was my being one of the very few women invited (if not the only one), or my persistence, or looking very pregnant and sad, but they decided to let me in. The deal was that I don't get a computer to write the code since all the seats were taken, but a pair of Hololens for all the fun.

Taken at HoloLens photo booth

So after all the frustration of the morning I was let to this huge room, setup in a coliseum shape, with the presenters at the center, and rows of desks and couches around it. One member of the staff was demoing how to code, while the other was talking the crowd through the steps. I didn't miss much since I had done the prework and familiarized myself with Unity. The staff was extremely nice and let me sit on their couch.

After the initial introductions and short talk we got to try the Hololens, every participant got to have the duration of the session one. We started by learning how to control the Hololens, and how to send voice commands, use Cortana. I felt that the fit over my glasses was rather uncomfortable and decided to keep the glasses off for the duration of the session, however I was told they fit fine over a pair of skinny classes.

First we built and deployed an object, basically you can take any 3D object in .3ds or other formats and convert it to "Hololensable". Then we learned how and were to mount the objects through Hololens. The part that started to become more fun was the team aspect of the task. Teams of 6-7 people were formed where we would setup and move our object called 'energy source' and had to collaborate.

With minimal code changes since everything was setup, which mostly involved copy and paste, and use of high level commands like Physics.Move() we added some cool avatars. Our avatars then were programmed to shoot each other, which is always exciting :) Well, to make things more awesome, as the final step of the demo, we added an external enemy, who we were fighting against as a group. Added a 'hole' in the ground where the external avatars were coming and we got to shoot everyone while dodging the bullets!

What was great about the setup was that there was one staff member appointed to help with coding experience and answer any questions for each 2 participants of the demo. This helped get some real questions I was concerned about answered. For example DirectX developers don't need Unity, they can continue doing their coding in C++.

Overall, the experience didn't disappoint my expectations, I left inspired to work on Hololens Netflix app one day and maybe write my own apps in spare time. The price tag of $3000 still seems rather steep for buying the prototype for personal use, and they won't start to ship for a while. But when the price goes down and I have spare time, it will be on the top of my hobby list to try. Awesome morning, thank you Microsoft and Hololens team for having the event, and especially for letting me in.