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[I intended to write this post about a week ago, and then got distracted by all things motorcycle.]

Someone on the web suggested that a good way to mark Labor Day was to think through the first jobs you had, and what they taught you in life.  So, here goes…

My first “job” was as a paper route carrier at the ripe age of 9 1/2.  I may have needed my folks to ask special permission, since I was so young.  Each Wednesday and Saturday, one of them would drive me around to deliver my 40-80 subscriber route (varying routes over time). I got my first checking account and learned to balance my checkbook to be able to pay my district manager; I earned a life-long habit of calling folks “ma’am” and “sir” that gets me in trouble today, but got me lots of tips then; and I got my first taste of sales as I’d go door-to-door trying to convince folks to join my paper’s subscriber list so I’d earn extra money on my route or prizes from the district.  Being a young kid did not protect me from rudeness from folks who really didn’t want to talk with me.  I learned to not take it personally, as well as a certain amount of empathy for sales folks as they knock on my door now-a-days.

I had a paper route until at least 14, which was the earliest my state would grant a work permit for kids.  The local hardware store hired me on as a cashier.  I was decently good at it – kept a good attitude with customers, and liked getting customers through my line quickly.  It became my own personal competition – could I remember that scan code?  Could I hit the keys quickly on the keyboard without making any errors?  And, of course, there’s the challenge of making sure the till at the end of night all evens out.  Some of my coworkers weren’t as motivated, as one would expect in a place that pays minimum wage and hired teenagers for whom this money was spending money, not living-on money.  But I was making better money than I did on my paper route, and hey, if I was going to be there, I decided I’d rather be busy and productive.

I had a few more jobs as a teenager- fast food convinced me that I needed to make sure I found a better career.  Long hours on my feet, customers who definitely didn’t respect you, and the occasional filthy bathroom duty.  Did I mention the customers not respecting us?  I think a few went out of their way to make the nastiest messes they could in the bathroom, just to imagine us having to deal with it.  Other retail gigs were painfully interesting in the Christmas rush season (lines to where?!!!) but also put more pain in my feet and less money in my pocket than I was willing to consider dealing with long-term.

I haven’t yet decided how strongly to encourage my kids to get jobs when they’re old enough.  The jobs I did as a teen kept me from things like sports or clubs that I also see as valuable.  In hindsight, the small money I made wasn’t actually going to cover my college costs, even though my folks’ rule was that I had to save 50% of everything I made.  Thankfully, I earned scholarships to put me through, as my folks were upfront that they weren’t going to pay for school, and I don’t remember having any large stockpile set aside from my jobs.  The big highly valuable life lesson jobs gave me was a sense of what things cost.  Nothing like comparing my car payment to the number of hours I’d need to spend flipping burgers to earn it!

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Accomplishment for the night: a WordPress update from 3.5.1 to 4.1.1.  In most systems, that’s a well-planned out affair.  The combination of a ‘what the heck’ attitude this evening by me, and a push-button upgrade by WordPress means that I made a major upgrade with nothing more than an XML export without suffering any (at least thusfar noticed) undue effects.   Well done, WordPress!   No login to my hosting environment to rescue my database, no even import from the afore-mentioned XML export.  My theme came over successfully, even though I’ve hacked it up…  Again, well done!  May my development efforts handle software upgrades as successfully as you have!

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A business blog recently described a list of interview questions HR might ask you to try to get inside your head.  Some of them I’ve actually used on interviews with candidates.  I’m not an HR person, but hey, seeing if someone can describe the technical projects they’re most proud of helps me to see that they take pride in their work, as well as what they consider to be something worth bragging about.

The question I’d never asked anything near is what someone would do if they won $5 million dollars.  I’m certain: I’d be done working for anyone in particular.  I’d keep doing technical work, but I’d only do that which particularly interested me.  That’s not a very reasonable scenario for working for someone else…  there is this thing about keeping the customers happy and paying the bills that is worthy and valuable. But without the need of an ongoing paycheck, I could definitely see geeking out on open source projects, working as a technical contributor for a non-profit, etc…

I’d actually be interested were someone to ask me the $5 mil question…  their response to _my_ response would help me understand how big they think their impact on my life ought to be overall…    So, a highly useful question if it helps us each winnow the other out.

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The life of a technologist is rarely boring. If you’re a senior developer or architect, you’re expected to drop into a project situation and make sense of nebulous requirements, new and/or undetermined technology stacks, and unreasonable timelines (they’re always unreasonable – it’s a truism – partly because the requirements are nebulous, partly because you’re getting up to speed on the tech stack..) Your job is then to convince folks you know enough to get the job done, while knowing you don’t yet, and then paddle like crazy to figure out the right stuff to actually get the job done. If there’s a new technology out, you’re supposed to have an understanding and an opinion of where it fits in the ecosystem. To be effective, you have to know how to do all of the above, while keeping your conversations at the business impact level. Oh, and you have to find a way to lead folks who think they can all do things better than you. If you’re honest with yourself, for at least some areas, they can. Your job i to stitch it all together. Good luck.

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Spent Monday and Tuesday at Healthdatapalooza in DC. Key objective there was to see how the Code-a-palooza shaped up, as well as what things folks were most talking about.  Recap here is a recap of what I sent to my healthcare-focused team at work, but

Here’s the winner’s list:

1) LyfeChannel’s Smart Hero app, which gives consumers information that they can use to discuss/negotiate with their physician what they’re charging you… (LyfeChannel also won a healthfinder.gov mobile app challenge last year, so is someone interesting to pay attention to… I was also interested in their approach of going to a local IHOP to find seniors and talk with them about what the data set contained, and how they’d like to make use of it… resonates pretty strongly with how my company looks at user-centered design)
2) AccordionHealth:  had an interesting model of tracking likely side effects to help determine an overall cost. These guys combined the CMS data set with a deep data set they had from Texas, so their app only really helps folks in Texas at the moment. Very small company, two PhD students, I believe.
3) Karmadata and its myhealth.io – find a physician for your surgical procedure. For a zipcode, find a procedure, get counts of patients, procedures, and physicians. Their company provides access to healthcare data, as well as an app gallery of apps built on top of their items.

In the demos on Monday, I also heard Fred Trotter talk about the data in light of DocGraph and its new Omni solution. Fred’s blog over at DocGraph also talked about some of the other competitors who’d entered the contest.  In Fred’s presentation on Monday, he pointed out that the data had some real gaps in usefulness. I don’t think the judges appreciated the poke, though I think I agree with Fred’s statement.

Takeaway on my part: we had an interesting angle for our own Code-a-palooza entry.  Via a system processing glitch, ours didn’t get considered for the competition, but we got good feedback from someone kind enough to give us a first-level look.  I’m looking across the Code-a-palooza competitor set (winners and others) to see where we might complement their offerings.  Our solution was much more ‘help me keep up with my own record’ focused than anything I saw in the competition pool.  Think ‘Mint for Medicaid’ with a smidge of Consumer Reports as a first-cut elevator pitch..

Things folks were talking about that I thought were interesting: OpenFDA (FDA data + APIs released giving access to more than 3 million adverse drug event reports), BlueButton (common means of sharing data across systems – intended to give you access to your personal health record), Open mHealth (another means of sharing data across systems, including things like FitBits), and even a bit of SMART platform came up. SMART is interesting to me because of it’s at least on-the-surface analogies to OWF – it appears to have had a resurgence of activity of late. Also tracking something called PCORI (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute). All leading to – wow, a lot of things to explore and decide whether they’re worthy to track further.

Take a look at this NPR article for more news of HealthDataPalooza. The Kojo Nnamdi Show was also broadcasting from the conference on Tuesday the 3rd – you can listen in or read the transcripts from its site. Looks like the live chat held online has good info too…

One more healthcare world announcement of note that got mentioned at HealthDataPalooza as an aside: iOS X includes HealthKit platform, which is a means to bring together your quantified self fitness / other health data. Interestingly, they’re partnered with Epic. Uh, though this Forbes article points out that others have done that before (Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault)..

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This Saturday, my rugby team, Severn River Rugby, heads to the Nationals quarter and semifinals. This is the 2nd time I’m headed to the premiere contest for my division, and the third time in four years for my team overall. Last year, we lost in the final game, bringing home the silver medal. We don’t like second.

The games this weekend are in Pittsburgh, so we’ve been coordinating car pools and hotels. If we win both games, we’ll be headed to Wisconsin for the final game, needing air tickets, hotels, and car rentals. Although software wonks make a reasonable living, most of my team fits more in the student / waitress / otherwise breaking into their career category. Can’t win without us all there – can you help by contributing to our IndieGogo campaign? Every bit helps!  We’ve also worked a stand at the Ravens stadium, are holding guest bar tending nights in Annapolis (Dock Street, May 14th, and likely Stan & Joe’s the following week), and are selling T-shirts to our fans. Orioles raffle coming, too!

We are a 501(3)(c).  We’re also recruiting team members to join us for the summer sevens and fall seasons – come play with a winning team who knows to have fun!   Watch the contribution box over to the right, or head directly to our IndieGogo campaign.  Great perks, befitting a rugby team and its fans!

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In 2010, I went to OSCON. GREAT conference, very few women. For the GREAT, I wanted to go back. To help grow the set of women speakers, I needed to go back.

In 2011, I proposed a topic: W3C widgets and OpenAjax. (Don’t look them up..) Technical topic, in which I had great interest at the time, and which showed promise for a R&D effort. No dice.

In 2012, I proposed a topic: OWF, GOSS(?), FOSS?!.. The idea was to go to the biggest open-source conference, talking about a forthcoming open-source project out of one of the country’s less open government agencies. Not accepted.

In 2013, I decided to get a bit smarter. 3 proposals went in to better my odds. One on the now open-source OWF and how it got there (hey, who doesn’t want the in’s on what’s going on in a previously government-internal project?), one giving a tutorial on OWF itself, and one on how we were intending to extend the use of or patterns of use of OSGi to provide dynamic client modules. All good, in-depth geek topics. Not accepted. Geek in-depth just wasn’t getting me in.

By this point, I was more than a bit discouraged. However, discouragement != giving up. The end goals were still of value – I just needed to figure out how to be more viable as a presenter.

Cut to the chase: 2014, I _finally_ got the success. Decided to look at my topics from the catch-your-eye perspective. One topic compared open source communities to sharks – both need to keep moving to survive. Promised many Jaws and Nemo references. Technical topic, audience appealing-spin. One topic made folks aware of government’s efforts in the open-source world, with the intent of encouraging participation. Drier topic, but hits OSCON’s sweet spots. Last topic, and of course the ringer that got accepted, was the crazy what the heck idea – daughter’s Furby is annoying, where would annoying be useful – hey, hooking it up to a build system turns annoying bad into annoying good. Meaning, wanting to fix something quick to shut off the thing is a great use of an otherwise inane annoyance. Not only was the topic, “Arduino + Furby Broken Build Notification – Oh, You’ll Want to Fix it Quick!” accepted, it’s scheduled for the Main Stage (“There are some talks that are just too interesting to limit the audience. Join us in the Main Stage for a collection of jaw dropping talks across all topics”). That it’s scheduled as the last session of the full conference is both an honor (wow, closing out the conference) and a humbling note – folks start petering out by the last day…

Takeaway: marketing appeal matters.

Now to write a kick-tail presentation. By the way, we’ll preflight Furby + software with my company’s Women In Computing Day in June. The kids (young women from 9-14) won’t be seeing a Furby hooked up to a Jenkins server, but we’ll make use of Furby and its audio protocol to help show them robotics in action…

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Following up on my last post, figured I’d try talk #2, 8 secrets of success. My secret: when 8 secrets can be boiled into 3 minutes, the biggest secret is that you’ve got a great schmoozer on your hands. Skip it in terms of the material itself, though I did like his slide deck and consistent use of the spiky hair guy. That was a good use of presentation technique – keep the audience interested mostly by talking fast and using a visual cue in new ways on each slide.

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Just got a new Twitter follower. Wasn’t someone I knew, so I went out to check out who they were. CEO of a tech company who has a large number of folks who they follow. My suspicion is that this guy noticing my Twitter feed was due more to me following someone else that they follow than anything else, but might be related to OWF or to rugby or to open-source or to who knows what else. Twitter is slightly nondiscriminate.

So, this guy’s tweet feed. Typical executive feed: links to articles they find interesting, which, actually, is far more useful than to me as a Twitter follower than some of the folks who mostly use it to hold visible conversations. Seeing a ‘thanks!’ tweet or ‘I thought the same!’ isn’t enough to make me go check out the full thread to see if there was something useful there. Seeing an interesting article cross-referenced: usually more useful.

2nd tweet down the list:
These High-Tech Underwear Keep Your Farts From Smelling | Co.Exist | ideas + impact http://buff.ly/16u2aON #finally

This poor guy, who I’ve never met / will likely never meet, will forever be linked in my brain as the guy who advertised to the world that he’s interested in underwear that covers up his farts… And THAT’s why you need to be careful what you link to. And now I’m sorely tempted to link to it, just to pass along that ‘hee hee’ moment to someone else.

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Today I’ve:
– presented half-working stuff at a retrospective and then spent the rest of the day moving it forward
– figured out that one reason my widget wasn’t working was because it was being served as http, rather than https, which caused mixed-content headaches
– configured Apache to deal with https. Worked much more nicely on Linux than it did on Windows. Meaning, I was completely hosed on Windows.
– got PHP working with PDO and MySQL. No, PHP 5.3 does NOT automatically work with PDO. Though yum install nicely gets things working, once you figure out the right set
– compiled node and npm on our Linux instance, as it sure seemed nicer to pull what we need from Git directly to the box with a known build environment, rather than build it and push it up via ftp. Note: compiling node requires things like gcc and make – haven’t seen those since C++ in college. Glad everything just worked, once the right path revealed.
– reviewed a briefing deck for a meeting tomorrow… unclear what these guys are asking for, but they’ve definitely got a pitch in mind
– signed timesheets, updated mine
– talked through demo possibilities with another team

More stuff, too, including futzing with git feature branches, investigating how to create separate user accounts on the ec2 instance so that a git clone wouldn’t expose my password in history, and a few other things I’m sure I’ve forgotten…

And I thought I’d only spend 10 hours “managing” this project.. Uh, maybe that’s right. Except that most everything above is _doing_ rather than managing. That said, a healthy mix keeps me happy. Better bounds on the work day would make me even happier. Too bad I don’t give up until a problem’s solved.