Last Post of the Year!

Happy New Year!  I hope it's been as interesting and fulfilling for you as it has for me.  Last year, I posted a summary of how the year went, so I thought I would do the same this year.  I've already posted about the books I've read this year, but here's a bit more about my travels, professional milestones, and hopes and to-dos for next year!

Travel
I didn't get as far and wide as I did in 2011, but I did manage to get to:

• New York (June 30 - July 4 2012)
• DC (September 30-October 3 2012)
• Baltimore (October 3-6 2012)
• Hawaii (US Thanksgiving week 2012)
• Ontario (Toronto and Ottawa, briefly)
• a few trips back to Vancouver, of course!

On my travel wish list for 2013: Anywhere in Europe and/or possibly another return to Japan.  I get the feeling I'd like to go back about every two years, so it's about time!

Professional Life
It was another busy year with lots of projects, training and trips!  Here's a few:

• Attended this year's Grace Hopper Conference with a team I organized of 10 Windows Phone engineers who taught Windows Phone app development
• Presented as part of a panel at GHC12
• Evangelized Windows Phone app development at UW's CS Open House
• Mentored an intern for the second time
• Helped with recruiting efforts in Vancouver
• We shipped Windows Phone 7.5 for 256MB phones, the big project I worked on last year!
• We shipped Windows Phone 8!

Incidentally, I got a new Lumia 920 which I love, as well as a new Surface RT, which proved a wonderful device to have on vacation over the holidays!  I am excited to get back to work and start building new, cool things!

Blog
I didn't do as well with my blogging as I did last year, because I was so busy doing other things!  But here are the top five posts from my blog in 2012:

• Leadership Workshop: Office Politics for People Who Don't Like Office Politics
• It's coming!
• GHC12 Submission Results
• Are you ready for social networking at GHC12?
• Are We There Yet? Perspectives from Junior Women in Technology

Other
Outside of work and travel, this year I got outside more.  I played in four ultimate leagues this summer, including on Microsoft's corporate team!  I went hiking, swam in Lake Washington almost every weekend this summer, and learned to climb (top roping indoors and outdoors, as well as bouldering).  Now that we're back to winter weather, I hope to get some skiing in this spring!

Books of 2012

This is the first year I've kept a close track of my non-work-related reading for the entire year.  I've been using www.goodreads.com; I like the way you can combine your social networks (i.e. your facebook connections) with your book lists and the easy way you can track books you are currently reading, have read, and want to read.

I haven't finished everything I wanted to get to this year (but realistically this would be impossible, there are 300 books on my long list and lately I've been starting books that aren't on either that or my shortlist!).  Here's a quick list of what I did read:

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Old Man's War by John Scalzi
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann
• The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
• Zero History by William Gibson
• Women of Wonder, the Contemporary Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1970s to the 1990s edited by Pamela Sargent
• Choke Collar by Margaret Atwood
• I'm Starved for You by Margaret Atwood
• Feynman by Jim Ottaviani
• The Kingkiller Chronicle (#1 and #2) by Patrick Rothfuss
• Women of Wonder, the Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s edited by Pamela Sargent
• The Hunger Games (all three books) by Suzanne Collins
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• Reamde by Neal Stephenson

I covered a good range of short stories, science fiction, fantasy, and straight up fiction, as well as nonfiction, YA, and graphic novel.  I enjoyed just about everything, but to be honest Reamde was a bit of a disappointment.  I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment of Margaret Atwood's Positron series!

72 Hours with Surface RT

This Wednesday, on December 12, a day four months in the making, I received what is probably my most hotly anticipated Christmas present: the Surface RT.  I have spent several hours a day since then exploring it and wanted to share some of my initial thoughts.

The Hardware

 

The hardware is pretty slick.  The keyboard makes a satisfying 'click' when it snaps into the surface, just like in the commercial (the kickstand, however, is not as loud):

I wasn't really sure I would like the Touch Keyboard; I was skeptical about its thinness.  However, after about an hour with the device I began to get more comfortable with it and can now type almost as fast as I can on a real keyboard.  I am really impressed with its responsiveness.


Squee!  My shiny new surface!

As for the kickstand, it works great for putting your Surface in 'pseudo laptop' mode on a hard surface.  Even when reclining in my favorite chair and resting it on my legs, the keyboard and angle work well.  A hard surface does make it easier to type lightly on the keyboard but all in all this is a very usable position from which to type.

One other hardware/software combo that works so smoothly is the built in forward facing camera and Skype.  The calls I've made so far have had much better quality than my desktop PC and webcam combo, with less feedback and a clearer picture.  Awesome!

Software Features

I haven't had a chance to explore fully Windows 8 RT, but here are a few of the things I love:

• Microsoft Account: I love using my Microsoft account to sign in, sync music, pictures, and documents across all my devices using skydrive.  Signing in this way also syncs your settings across other Win8 devices, which makes things seamless when transitioning from one device to another.
• Xbox: Similarly, signing into the Games hub with my Xbox ID means all my achievements track across my devices.  Also, the platform for games is solid; I tried a new game called Adera (a  very entertaining game, by the way!) and found the graphic-heavy playback smooth and very performant. 
• Switching between apps: I thought the charms and gestures one can use to navigate between apps might be hard or awkward to learn, but I found myself fairly up to speed within 30 minutes of using the device.  I've learned a few tricks since then and it is only getting better!  Being able to switch between desktop mode and the Start screen with all my live tiles is so handy.
• Battery life: this device lasts me all day without charging. There are days when I forget to plug it in overnight and it is awake and ready for me in the morning.

I am leaving on vacation next week and plan to bring the Surface with me.  I'm so excited to have a great replacement for my netbook!

Ada Lovelace Day, CS Ed Week, and More!

Given my recent post on the state of math education in Canada, I have a few relevant updates that may be of interest:

CS Ed Week
Whether you're a student, educator, parent, or CS geek like me, if you haven't checked out CS Ed Week yet you should!  There's all sorts of great information, activities, and events for all sorts of people, including a #CSEdWeek Twitter conversation tomorrow at 6pm ET, some interesting articles to read, and links to cool demos.

For my small contribution I helped out at the University of Washington's CSE Open House last weekend, where we showed of Windows Phone to nearly 700 students, parents, and educators and helped them learn how to make a simple Windows Phone app.  It was really neat to introduce some of the attendees to programming and show them an immediate practical application of it, which seemed to get them pretty excited!

Ada Lovelace's Birthday
December 10th marked what would have been Ada Lovelace's 197th birthday.  If you haven't heard of her, Ada is the author of the first computer program and a well used example of women in Computer Science.  Unfortunately her detractors have mounted a campaign to discredit her, saying for various reasons that she did not in fact write that program, that she had help or made mistakes etc, etc.  You can (and should!) read more about it in this excellent article.

Earlier this year we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day, on which everyone is supposed to write about a female role model in CS.  Here's my post in case you missed it.

A pic of the video I really wanted to post!

Grace Hopper's Birthday
December is when all the cool kids are born, apparently!  December 9 was Grace Hopper's birthday, so following the theme I'll end this post with her wonderful explanation of what a nanosecond is (since my favourite video, her interview with Letterman, seems to have been removed from the internet due to copyright infringement, grumble grumble...).

New Math > Old Math?

I just saw this story air on CBC's The National tonight.  Having been away from the system for quite a few years now, I was surprised and dismayed to learn about the new math curriculum.

I experienced the math curriculum in western Canada both as a student and later as a tutor with my own business.  As a young student I always did well in math until I reached the middle school years, when I unfortunately had a less than stellar math teacher.  If I had had rock-solid basic numeracy skills (i.e. the ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide multiple digit numbers in my head with very lower error rates and without needing to write down carries etc), I could have overcome this, but being weighed down by minor errors held me back.  Luckily when I went from an A to B student in math, my parents enrolled me in Kumon (a system of math drilling and rote learning originally from Asia), where I was able to develop those solid basic math skills.  This freed up my concentration for the actual problem solving required in high school math.  My grades went back up and here I am today as an engineer.  

During my college years I had the privilege to tutor many students at various levels, from early elementary all the way up to first year university.  I saw two problems over and over throughout my time as a tutor.  First, many students lacked excellent basic math skills - and when they acquired them their grades went up significantly.  Second, the students were not encouraged to practice the theories, techniques, and problem solving skills they were learning on a day-to-day basis.  Students were sent home with perhaps five homework problems, if any.  I would always encourage my students to do every problem that had an answer (so they could check their progress/success) for every section in the text book they studied in class.  As students practiced their confidence increased, which usually negated any reluctance to do extra homework.

In my experience the curriculum that I and many of my students learned was already lacking in the necessary drills and rote learning many students need to gain great numeracy skills.  But from what I can see the new curriculum does away with this kind of learning altogether.  It focuses on multiple ways of doing basic math problems like adding two numbers with multiple digits.  It worries me that we are spending so much time on basic skills, time we could and should be spending on problems with more complex critical thinking required.  These are the kinds of problems students need to work on in order to become the great engineers, scientists, and technologists we are increasingly going to need to solve the world's problems.  And while students with a natural gift for math will probably be fine in either system, it worries me that there are many others with high potential who without the right training will be left behind, shut out from amazing careers in STEM as a result.