May 2012
36 posts
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Link Love: Designer Tools
Design is a quick, collaborative and iterative process. Today, we are sharing some of our favorite tools of the trade, the apps and websites we use everyday to make our workflow a little bit easier. We believe that these apps will help you communicate better, work faster and add some oomph to your design!
App
Skitch
Gone are the days of printing out designs and marking them up with red...
WatchWe’ve featured a # of female entrepreneurs/makers and I thought it was time to give a little Skillcrush luv to the guys! Also, it helps that this guy, @edscanlan, happens to be my cousin ;) Look forward to seeing what they do in their next phase of growth.
Link Love: Online Games and Gamification
Points, badges, quests, oh my! We have officially entered a new era where the world is being turned into one big game.
News, fitness, eating, debate, conservation, networking, and cocktailing have all been gamified. Gamification is an attempt to take reward models from games and apply them to real-life actions.
Games use “game mechanics” to keep players engaged. Game mechanics are rules and...
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Our Skillcrush: Alicianne Rand
Alicianne is the Marketing Director of NewsCred, a technology platform that connects publishers and brands with the world’s best journalism. Alicianne is responsible for all of NewsCred’s marketing activities – from brand strategy and identity to partnerships, PR and marketing.
Prior to this, she worked at Wolff Olins, a brand consultancy, as a Senior Account Manager leading brand...
rails girls berlin: Interview with Lena Herrmann →
railsgirlsberlin:
Lena Herrmann is a woman, a mother, a feminist, a political activist and an agile developer. She is also a coach at Rails Girls Berlin, and in her free time she is also helping some of the participants of the previous workshop to build their own blogging platform. I’m not sure where she…
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“Even if things are difficult for you, it doesn’t mean its not for you. It...”
– Jocelyn Goldfein, encouraging women to stick with Math and Science even if they find them to be hard at first, via Washington Post
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Facebook’s Jocelyn Goldfein on the false mythology of computer science via The Washington Post
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Ask Ada: Should I learn PHP or Ruby?
Wherein computer maven Ada Lovelace answers all your tech questions!
Dear Ada,
I want to learn to program and am trying to figure out where to start. I was wondering, would it be more useful to learn PHP, or Ruby on Rails, or are both skill sets necessary to become a successful developer?
Yours, To-PHP-or-Ruby
Dear TPHPOR,
Picking a language to code in is always a tough one, but...
WatchPresident of Harvey Mudd Dr. Maria Klawe talks about why women are not going into the computing sciences and what’s at risk if that doesn’t change.
Watch Why More Women Aren’t Computer Scientists, Engineers on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
“I’m going to give you a piece of advice when you’re trying to learn...”
– Zed Shaw in Please Don’t Become Anything, Especially Not A Programmer
To Learn to Code, or Not? That is the Question.
There is a big argument/discussion/debate going on over at Hacker News about whether the masses should learn to code. We obviously stand in the “bring it on” camp—the more you know about the digital world around you, the better off you will be. We wanted to give a big shout-out to Erik Hinton, writing as Esmooov on github, who wrote a fabulous post in defense of pursuing the path to universal...
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The Magic of Lilypad Arduino
Or How to Sew Your Way Into the Computing Sciences
A Lilypad Arduino powered tic-tac-toe board. Via Rainycatz
When I tell people that one of my personal goals is to bring more women into tech, and that I plan to do so by making tech learning fun and accessible, a lot of people - usually men - worry that what I am doing is patronizing. They worry that I am peddling a “dumbed down” version of...
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“The survey, published by U.S. division of the British tech recruitment group...”
– Meghan Casserly in How Women In Tech Are Losing From Top To Bottom, Forbes, May 14, 2012
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Happy Mother's Day!
Flowers are fleeting, but knowledge is forever. In lieu of sending out bouquets this year, give the gift of digital knowledge to your mom. We, at Skillcrush, think that every day is a good day to learn something new. And, Mother’s Day is a great day to share this knowledge with others! We’ve created a super-simple way for you to send an e-card, along with some sweet tech terms, to your mom to...
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“Vanessa used Nokogiri to take data from Backpage.com and transferred it into a...”
– From When Women Code, They Change the World, via My Tech Letter
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WatchIn honor of Maurice Sendak…a creative giant. RIP.
“I don’t write for children…I write, and someone says, ‘that’s for children.’ I didn’t set out to make children happy.”
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““They called me the other day and said they just wanted to check...”
– Jennifer 8. Lee on GoDaddy’s sexist Superbowl ads via In tech, some bemoan the rise of ‘brogrammer’ culture, Doug Gross, CNN, May 7, 2012
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Skillcrush’s Adda Birnir speaks with Gina...
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“I sat, staring out the window at the world, a life-sized blender mixing graffiti...”
– why on the Ruby programming language.
Still one of the best software programming manuals ever written: why’s (Poignant) guide to Ruby.
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“Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, and don’t...”
– Sage advice from an unexpected place:
Turning 60: The Twelve Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned So Far, Tony Schwartz, May 1, 2012, via the Harvard Business Review
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“FOR years, the problem has been referred to, tongue in cheek, as the...”
– An Imbalance; Casting a Wider Net to Attract Computing Women
By Katie Hafner, The New York Times, May 22, 2003 