Last Thursday and Friday, I had the opportunity to participate in the Alexa Challenge. This hackathon at the HCSC Blue Innovation Lab focused on ways that Alexa could help Blue Cross customers use their insurance.1
Writing an Alexa App in 8 Hours
How your Dudebros are Losing You Money: The Microcosmic Impact of Inclusion on your Bottom Line
I once talked about why your selection process gives advantages to some applicants based on ethnicity and gender. That post assumes that readers want to have a diverse workplace, but today I’d like to take a step back and look at why it’s important so that you have more ammo to talk about this with your managers, clients, and colleagues.
Dear Corporations: Read this before you sponsor Pride
Dear Corporate Marketing People,
I get it. The Pride parade has a massive audience. Getting your name in front of that many people can boost your customer base and your recruiting efforts. Sponsor away.
But please do not cannibalize your company’s Diversity and Inclusion budget to do it, Because what you are doing is not allyship to the queer community.
Continue reading “Dear Corporations: Read this before you sponsor Pride”
Matt Polito on Why Cucumber is Still Relevant
This afternoon at Windy City Rails, Matt Polito of HashRocket gave a talk called “Why Cucumber is Still Relevant.” For those who haven’t used it, Cucumber is a gem used in conjunction with writing tests in a rails application that provides a domain-specific language for describing and documenting what the application is supposed to do.
He brought up this article by Martin Fowler, which poses a question:
Will DSLs allow business people to write software rules without involving programmers?
He ends up answering this in the negative, but instead identifies the value of making software business-readable rather than business-writable.
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How Being an Athlete Prepared Me for Programming
The view of the prototypical programmer as a nerdy, non-athletic type is, becoming, thankfully, a thing of the past. Nevertheless, one still finds members of the tech community who regard the ex-athlete programmer with curiosity. For a person to both play a sport and program computers, they must master completely different skill sets, right?
Hardly. In fact, some of the most important lessons I learned as an athlete have been fundamental to my improvement as a programmer.
And if you were never an athlete, this might be even more important for you to read than if you were an athlete: it’s like a cheat sheet that you can use to approach programming with an athlete’s mind without ever having to get sweaty yourself :).
Continue reading “How Being an Athlete Prepared Me for Programming”
