I am running for the House of Representatives in the Massachusetts 06 District! From the outside, Congress might look like a wild change from being a Senior Staff Engineer writing healthcare...| Beth Andres-Beck
Imposter syndrome is often presented as a personal failing. A lack of confidence, our wrong-headed beliefs not matching the reality of how competent we are, or worst of a flaw of our gender. Just...| Beth Andres-Beck
I have been finding it challenging to put my thoughts about code reviews into a linear format. I've realized that it is because code reviews are a part of the broader and context-specific work of...| Beth Andres-Beck
Thinking about why aesthetic feedback on code is so valuable led me to the question of why the feedback techniques we have for procedural code don't work well for Architecture. There have been many...| Beth Andres-Beck
Student loan forgiveness demonstrates why participating in primary elections is fantastic. This wasn't Biden's priority and it didn't come from his base. If it hadn't been for the primary, this...| Beth Andres-Beck
Wired magazine published an article about why Musk’s Plan to Reveal The Twitter Algorithm Won’t Solve Anything. Several of my non-programmer friends were interested in this, and we started...| Beth Andres-Beck
As many colleges move online, I realize I have a somewhat-unique experience: I shameless ripped off the pedagogy from my small liberal arts professors and have spent the last decade+ applying it at...| Beth Andres-Beck
When using Rails routing I came across an odd bug: a URL query parameter was breaking the route. A URL query parameter without a period? Everything works fine. A URL query parameter with a period?...| Beth Andres-Beck
Two and a half years ago I joined LTSE, with the goal of changing the incentives companies face to prioritize short-term profits over everything else. In May, the SEC approved the creation of the...| Beth Andres-Beck
When building transformative experiences for our users, we begin by identifying the emotion that motivates their engagement. We then imagine how we want them to feel when we have provided for...| Beth Andres-Beck
I was having a conversation with some people about languages to use to teach programmers. I am not a teacher and it has been my impression that language choice matters a lot less than pedagogy...| Beth Andres-Beck
Someone I worked with had asked for recommendations when I noted the speaking lineup of a conference he was attending was exclusively men, and I figured I'd share the letter I came up with in case...| Beth Andres-Beck
I am dyslexic, and these are my experiences. They certainly won’t be universal, especially as there isn’t just one form of dyslexia [0]. To identify my strain of dyslexia, I read quite quickly...| Beth Andres-Beck
Someone somewhere, of course, was mocking Gender Studies majors for taking an easy course because they couldn't hack liberal arts. I made the point that the Gender Studies classes I took were...| Beth Andres-Beck
Evolution isn't about "good" or "bad". It is simply a word for a specific emergent process. It describes all the things that happened that led to the current state of affairs. Sometimes they...| Beth Andres-Beck
My Usenix talk this year uses various books I've drawn on for inspiration as backgrounds for my slides. The goal of this was to share some of the broader world beyond what we usually look to as...| Beth Andres-Beck
I'm doing a workshop on putting together computers in two hours, and rather than do hand outs I figured I'd toss the links up on my blog. When buying components for a computer, I usually read: ...| Beth Andres-Beck
The difference between Architecture and Code blurs quickly when refactoring becomes sufficiently common, so the distinction made between various pattern languages never seemed especially helpful to...| Beth Andres-Beck
A summary from YodasEvilTwin on Slashdot: "The internet is dominated by sexist men, which discourages women from getting involved in related fields." I add a bunch more caveats, references...| Beth Andres-Beck
Scott McCloud, in Understanding Comics, uses a simple image to explain how people employ assumptions when reading comics: I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example,...| Beth Andres-Beck
First, there is the question of “what is a Service?” W3C defines a web service as: “a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.”[1]...| Beth Andres-Beck
Now that Google has broken integrated Google Reader with Google+, I was looking for a replacement that would let me use my daily reading of feeds the way I always had: as a way to share long-form...| Beth Andres-Beck
“Economics is basically about incentives and interaction — or, as Schelling put it, micromotives and macrobehavior. You try to think about what people will do in certain circumstances, and you try...| Beth Andres-Beck
In a recent CMake project I was setting up, I wanted users to be able to choose one of several possible libraries at project generation, to make performance comparisons easy on multiple platforms. ...| Beth Andres-Beck
For those of you that write code, what term do you prefer? Programmer? Engineer? Developer? Something else? Dharmesh Shah asked this question Twitter yesterday, and I did a quick compilation...| Beth Andres-Beck
Metaphor has a pernicious effect. It encourages people to take anecdotes as proof, effective rhetoric as useful advice and to accept only ideas which fit their preconceptions. Metaphors are better...| Beth Andres-Beck
Quantum Computers are transistor computers, except all at once. All things are true, false and unknown, until they are observed. Answers are only opinions, but infinite opinions approach...| Beth Andres-Beck
The sorts of things that are likely to pop up here. This list is as much a reminder to me as it is a teaser for things to come: 1. Discussion of and updates on my independent projects 1.a. A...| Beth Andres-Beck
A rebellion is brewing. Ideas like post-commit reviews or even a return to cowboy coding are gaining traction over the unpleasant & unproductive experience that is the bug-hunt code review. This...| Beth Andres-Beck