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A week or so back I went to check out the venue for next year’s BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, and to have a chat with the local organisers (James Anderson and Yota Dimitriadi). It was lovely to catch up with James (Yota wasn’t able to make it) and it was also really positive to discuss things like venue, lineup, and that kind of stuff. It makes it feel so much more concrete when you can picture the space. So I thought I’d do a blog post so you, dear reader, can picture the space too. I did a post-doc once on a project joint with Reading,Read More →

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Yesterday I went to Swansea and saw Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of c++ talk. I wrote pretty much my entire PhD in c++ so it’s a topic I’m fairly close to, and the talk didn’t disappoint at all. Stroustrup was talking about c++11, the new version, and now I really want to get coding again and try out some of the new features of the language. It definitely looks simpler to use (one of the refrains of the talk was make the simple things simple) and it’s got some cool new features like lambda functions which could really simplify some of what I do. Stroustrup (right)Read More →

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The sixth BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was held at the University of Nottingham, on the 4th April 2013. I can hardly believe that we’re already on number 6! The day featured talks from industry and from academia, a panel session on careers, a poster session of student work, a social, and of course lots of time for networking. The audience filing in at the start of the day The talks We had more talks than usual this year, as the original schedule featured a 1h keynote, but our speaker had to pull out due to family reasons. So Joolz & Gillian stepped in at short noticeRead More →

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The BCSWomen Android programming family fun day we held in Leeds a couple of weeks ago was a resounding success, and I’ve been spending my spare time between then and now turning the materials into a “Workshop in a box”. The idea is that anyone can take the workshop, and run it, with minimal effort; I’ve provided slides, a handout for attendees, a downloadable pack of assets (sounds and pictures that people can use in apps) and a detailed presenter’s guide which has running order, kit list, room requirements, and tips for making the day go smoothly. It also features lots of cute pictures ofRead More →

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I’m in Nottingham at the moment checking out the venue we’ve got booked for this year’s BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium. The poster contest is still open to entries – deadline this coming Friday, 15th Feb, online abstract submission here. We’ve booked enough space to have about 50 posters, I think, and there’s an extra room we can book if we need. The poster space currently looks like this: It’s a lovely big room, very near the lecture theatre (where we’ll be having the talks). I couldn’t get a good photo of the lecture theatre as there was a lecture about to start (I think it’d freakRead More →

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On Saturday, I ran an Appinventor based “family fun day” in Leeds, the idea was to do a day’s workshop getting started with AppInventor, but to do it with mixed groups. I’d run a similar workshop for BCSWomen before, and I’d run one with schoolkids, but I’d never tried to do all together with kids and grownups in the same room. So we (BCSWomen) got together with BCS West Yorkshire, and decided to run it as a joint event. We booked the HEART centre in Headingley, and 70 people signed up (we actually had to close registrations as that was the max for the room).Read More →

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Yesterday I spoke at BCS Wolverhampton, presenting a similar talk to the ones I’ve done at BCS Birmingham and EMF camp; the title and the abstract were the same, but the slides have been gradually evolving each time I give the talk. Having presented to quite a few people (about 30?) at Birmingham, and to about 120 at EMF, I thought I had the talk nailed; it takes about 45-50 minutes with time for questions, and there are often a lot of questions. But last night’s performance suggested to me that maybe this confidence in my timing was misplaced; there were so many comments andRead More →