BLEU

Wow! It’s been two weeks since I started my Web Development Bootcamp at DevAcademy Aotearoa and I feel like I’m getting into the new routine with it’s new joys, challenges and learnings.

I thought that I’d keep you in the loop with my studies and life with a blog post every now and then. Thanks for being here.

First things first, how cute is my lil blog site? I made this! It’s the first webpage I’ve ever made and I really like it, bugs and all. Up the top left you’ll find two links. The EDA Blog link takes you to my schoolwork, which you can read if you really want to, but you may find this a little technical and dry. The best way to find blog posts written just for you is by using the Personal Blog link. :-)

Key takeaways since I started:

1. Being accountable to myself for my time management, learning and mental wellbeing has been more natural than I thought. I thrive on structure, but being flexible about my start times and ignoring my ‘start on the hour’ mentality has given me the freedom to go my own pace and has allowed me to slow down when necessary, or get into it when I have that energy.
2. Practicing self-compassion when I get stuck and building that into my day has been super helpful. It allows me to practice self-care/self-soothing strategies when I’m feeling stuck or upset. In the past, my mentality was more like ‘push through, finish it, then rest and recover’. Now, my mentality has shifted to ‘if you are stuck, take a break, move your body and get back into it in a bit’ which has been really conducive to healthy productivity.
3. Technically, I’ve also been learning heaps. Did you know there’s this awesome software called Git? Git is like this really clever software-dog that is always taking your updated files to the right place, and if other people update those files you can ask Git to fetch them for you! Git allows many developers to work on the same files without overwriting other people’s work, and also stores all your old versions of files so that you can see what was changed over time! It’s very cool. I want to call my next dog Git. I will read this post in a year and cringe that I included that.

Who in the WWW is she?

Did you know that the first computer program was created by a woman? Wow! Let’s meet her.

Ada Lovelace

Lady Ada Lovelace is considered the first computer programmer in history. An early 1800s mathematician with a penchant for ‘poetical science’, Lady Lovelace was also considered to be a computer science visionary.

Her mathematical and conceptual notes regarding a project called the Analytical Machine (devised by mathematician Charles Babbage in the early 1840s) include a hugely complex algorithm that describes how the machine would perform a calculation. This document is known as the first computer program!

Unfortunately, the Analytical Machine never reached functional status, and Ada died in 1852, only nine years after her notes were published, at the age of 36.

Something I loved learning about Ada Lovelace is how she connects the arts and mathematics. She compares the potential power of computation to silk-weaving and predicts that computers could create “pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. To quote Betty Toole, a Lovelace academic: “her understanding of mathematics was laced with imagination, and described in metaphors.”

Lovelace is the Frida Kahlo of computer science in my book . There’s so much more to Ada Lovelace’s story than I can condense into a few short paragraphs, so here is some further reading to get you started.

Random Link!

Click above to be taken to something that has inspired, interested, entertained or vexed me this week.

Thanks for reading!

I'll be posting every week in my EDA blog, and every now and then here.

Please give me feedback because it helps me learn and grow. I want the good, the bad and the buggy!

Kindest,

Bleu