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!

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...).

Announcing the Launch of "Where's My Game?"!

On Tuesday this week my first Windows Phone app, "Where's My Game?", was finally published.  If you play frisbee in the Greater Seattle region, this app is for you!  Here are a few things it will help you to do:

• for a given DiscNW league and team, see when and where your next game is (handy when on the go, since the desktop websites that host the schedules are hard to use from a smartphone)
• map your game and get directions from your current location (helpful if you're lost)
• see the DiscNW Twitter feed for any last minute cancellations/field changes

I've already submitted my first update which will add this summer's Microsoft Ultimate Hat League schedule, so if you work at Microsoft and play frisbee you can see your games and locations too.  That should be available later this week or early next (I'll make another announcement when it is).

In the coming weeks I'll add:

• the ability to save your favorite teams/leagues
• more dynamically loaded team schedules (so cancellations/rescheduled games appear faster)

Long term plans include creating a web service so groups can submit their own schedules.  That's a ways off, however.  For now, I hope you enjoy the app and find it useful!

Developing for Windows Phone 7

A quick update on my latest project: developing an app for Windows Phone.  One of my other pasttimes here in Seattle is playing Ultimate Frisbee (pretty frequently, too; I might play as much as four times a week in the summer).  However, if I'm on the go and need to figure out when and where my next game is, unfortunately the existing websites containing our schedules do not work well on mobile devices.  The text is small, I usually need to log in and navigate to several different pages before finding it, and forget about an easy way to see the map.  So, I decided to make an app for my phone that will do all this for me.  Here are some screen shots:


I've just submitted my app (last night, 10:30pm!) and am waiting for it to be approved for the Marketplace.  I'm planning to write a little more here about the different challenges I encountered and how I worked around them, so stay tuned!