Resources for Middle School Girls to Learn Programming

While we were at the Junior Achievement Girls Dream Fair a few months ago, a middle school girl came up to our booth. She went carefully through a sheet of questions, writing down my answers word for word. “Anything else you’re curious about?” I asked when she was done. After a pause, she asked, “Is […]

The Culture Cycle: A Model for Understanding Company Culture

As a recent college graduate, it’s been exciting to apply things I learned in school to real-world scenarios. Not all of those topics have been totally relevant, but a few have definitely stuck with me. One is called the Culture Cycle, which is used to model the evolution of cultural norms and practices within social […]

Coding Bootcamps Have a Fundamental Problem

One of the aspects of my role at Atomic Object involves hiring new employees. Throughout this process, I’ve come in contact with a lot of graduates from coding bootcamps across the United States. To date, none of these graduates have been a good fit for Atomic. This fact has led me to start formulating a […]

A Moral Justification for Diversity In Tech – Why “Good for Business” Isn’t Good Enough

This past weekend, a memo by a Google employee criticizing the company’s diversity goals and practices was leaked to the media. The memo presents sexist and thoroughly debunked views about women, and the ensuing conversation about diversity has been both heated and informative. I have found, however, that there’s something mostly missing from this conversation: a […]

Ask these Questions when Applying Machine Learning to People

The field of machine learning matured with applications like spam filtering, targeted advertising, self-driving cars, and weather predictions. As machine learning techniques are increasingly used to make predictions about people, there are a few machine learning ethics questions we need to be asking ourselves.

Developing Accessible Software: Better Navigation with Skip Links

We’ve talked about how to start following the principles of accessibility. Now we’re going to dig into the nuts and bolts with a real-life example of one of the simplest ways to save time and tedium for users working with assistive technologies. Today, we’re talking about skip links.

Designing Accessible Software – Breaking Down WCAG 2.0

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) offer a short list of focal areas for website design that can also be applied to software design in general. Here, I’ll break down the four categories of guidelines in WCAG 2.0 and offer some suggestions on how to plan for and evaluate them when designing software.

Building Accessible Software – a Primer

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a computer user with a disability. You might have impaired vision or hearing, or limited motor control. How do you go about using your computer? How would the way that you use technology be affected if you didn’t see your laptop screen, or didn’t hear notification sounds?

Why FIRST Robotics is My New Favorite Sport

There are five seconds left on the clock, and the Blue Alliance is down by two points. Machine 3536 picks up a ball and speeds toward the opponent’s castle. This is the Blue team’s only hope of surviving the battle. The clock winds down, and the final shot is fired. The crowd is silent. The […]

Volunteering at Hour of Code

On December 10th, 2015, Jeanette and I joined Estabrook Elementary School’s Hour of Code event as coaches. Our job was to encourage and guide students through what was, for many of them, their first formal introduction to computer science. For us, it was an introduction to people who, in 20 years’ time, might work with us. […]

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Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

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