helloshauna:

Silicon Valley Entry Points for Humanities Ph.D.s: Marissa Mayer (when she was at Google)

The Human Experience BiblioTech Conference

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This woman has paved some incredible headway for women in tech everywhere.

The Million Little Barbs Of “Lighten Up”: Recently, I was asked why a woman who loves coding would ever leave the field. In short, I got tired of being told to “lighten up.”

Uncharted Reality.: First question in the interview. 

*facepalm* 

I can’t even.  *double facepalm*

PDXIII: The Pirate Bay & the flying torrents  

A lot of people have reported on the notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay’s plans to “put servers in space,” but very few have gone into real detail.  This entry from the pirates themselves is fascinating for several reasons: 

1. It points out that they wouldn’t be trying to put the whole system into space, just the “front servers” which route traffic.  As they point out, you don’t need a lot of hardware to do that — you could do it with something incredibly light. 
2. A lot of the reporting was wrong.  Many of the stories claimed that The Pirate Bay was planning to put servers *in orbit.*  This doesn’t describe an orbital system; the drones wouldn’t be high enough to be in space, and it doesn’t sound like they’re orbiting.  Remember, “a few kilometers” isn’t enough to get you into space.  The summit of Everest is 28,000 feet above sea level, more than 11 kilometers, and you still have a long way up to go from the tip of Everest to actually be in space.  
3. If it ever happens, it could be an opportunity for Matt Waite’s Drone Journalism — his drones could take photos of the pirate drones. 
4. It’s a whole new way to violate laws!  Flying drones over populated areas isn’t legal, and depending on how they do it, they may also violate laws about using spectrum.  

Hack the Future is a program for kids age 11 to 18 to learn to program in a hands-on way. 

hasablog:

GitHub stickers! Awesome gift :]

prostheticknowledge:

Mondrian of Life 

Monkeon tests the idea of applying the mathematical rules of Conway’s Game of Life within matrices of Mondrian paintings:

Conway’s Game of Life is one of the first computer games. It is a mathematical ‘game’ in which you create patterns in a grid and according to the following rules, you can watch the pattern evolve.

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

You can play an on-line version here if you can be arsed to faff around with java settings.

“But how would those rules work with the De Stijl paintings of Piet Mondrian”, I hear no one ask. Well, that’s what I’ve created below.
Just roll your mouse over a painting for it to play out, and click the painting to reset it to its original form.

You can check out the rest of the iterations at Monkeon’s site here
(Above are only six iterations)

Likes & Launch: Why I'm learning to program

likesandlaunch:

Today I stared my first day of Code Academy here in Chicago. It’s a 12 week program meant to teach computer science fundamentals, web applications, Ruby on Rails and introduce you to agile. I’m excited as we have great instructors and some of the top Rails talent in Chicago serving as mentors….

Welcome to the tribe!

The API in layman's terms

itskillsacademy:

Using how you drive a car as an analogy.

This is a GREAT short post on APIs — if you don’t know what they are you should read it.  API stands for Application Programming Interface.  Many sites (like the New York Times and NPR) as well as services (Twitter, Facebook) have APIs that are designed to let you take content from those sites and put it on your site, or take content from elsewhere and publish it through that platform (in the case of Twitter and FB).  You can make GREAT beginner apps just pulling and displaying New York Times stuff in an innovative and useful way (example: here’s a mobile page with all the latest NYT movie reviews…BOOM, new mobile web app that actually works).  

Wow.  So Google will now have its own programming language.  I wonder what will become of AppEngine?

matmiltd:

Via Scoop.it - New Digital Media

A few days after Google was caught registering a bunch of Dart-related domain names, and the inevitable storm of speculation, it has now emerged that Dart is a new programming language for “structured web programming.”
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Morgan Missen: Where are all the women in tech? On Tumblr!

mrgn:

Tracy Chou, Google and Facebook Intern turned Software Engineer at Quora

Caroline McCarthy, CNET writer turned Googler

Aubrey Sabala, Googler turned Consumer Marketing at Facebook

Melissa Miranda, Co-Founder of Journly

Lauren Leto, Co-Founder, Texts From Last Night and…