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Ada Lovelace involves from the site 1. Write about a woman in science, technology, engineering or maths whose achievements you admire. 2. Publish your story online. 3. Visit our directory of stories and either join up or log in. 4. Add your story to our collection. Tell your friends!

Not 0. Debate whether a famous woman in tech has chops or not.

I'll start, Leah Busque and Paula Long. FTW.

Schlep Blindness 15 years ago

this article has a lot of truth to it, but one thing I will always disagree with PG about is that ignorance is a good thing. perhaps ignorance may produce a better local maximum than limited knowledge, but as a hacker I believe the true optimum lies at maximum knowledge.

-track down an example app to hack around with. this was the single biggest thing that got me from the hurdle from a Hello World app to a production full featured thing

-learn objective-c yes there is no way around it! try rewriting your favorite python or C example to get your head around some of the translation

-stackoverflow is your friend

-it's easier to get started working without Interface builder, so you can do that just to learn a thing or two with a sample app but then do the same thing using IB; it will be quicker and cleaner in the end. this may be the hardest thing to start to wrap your mind around as it involves lots of clicking and less hacking

-design is everything. if you really want a quality app it's key to go from the bare bones to something a designer put skill into. once you get the hang of IB this can be a quick and amazing makeover. find a good designer to collaborate with.

What I did was make a simple app highlighting each skill I wanted to learn (Tables, Pickers, etc.).

Realize that a lot more time than you think will go into submitting to the store, provisioning, and getting your ducks in order there. Don't leave one hour to do this the first time. Also don't asume because it was easy the first time it will be the next. XCode gets very confused with multiple provisioning profiles sometimes. Things expire. etc.

I read the O'Reilly iOS book and Tapworthy along the way. And an Objective-C book or two; but I don't remember which.

alas I thought your comment was serious. it's awesome that you have had the opportunity to find it a non-issue and unfortunate that you have decided to.

http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Mar... is a pretty good academic references, with plenty of examples of parents who actually do do this (teach sons and not daughters), hard research, and practical solutions. luckily it actually isn't that hard to start on the path to fix for those who bother to find it an issue (CMU and MIT among them).

for sure! and I try to understand the non-native speaker issue, I live in Switzerland, and am a native English speaker who tries my hand at German sometimes to mixed results. it's hard and easy to make mistakes.

I've been having a lot of fun with the Codea app, props to the founder and thanks again for pointing out the sale

my high school american studies teacher would recommend stating "I firmly believe in the right of jury nullification" to get out of jury duty–he was of the opinion that jurors who voiced their awareness of this right were almost never selected. I'd be curious to know if this was actually true

I hadn't heard of the spinoff; thanks. I worked at both Lucent Bell Labs (pre-Alcatel) and BBN (pre-Raytheon). I definitely keep track of BBN, it's an amazing company and I hope it continues to have it's own identity under Raytheon. Lucent Bell Labs was already dying when I was there back in 2003–but even then had some great active projects and Unix gods still around. So yea, perhaps the real "Bell Labs" is now AT&T Labs or perhaps Bell Labs is really dead.

partially a joke and partially just hopeful, yes. to explain myself, Google seems to have attempted to appease investors by focusing on their core money making products, while still maintaining their commitment to innovation with spinoffs like this. so it's the best of both worlds for Google and for us in this case. now if we could only find Google Code Search, Google Labs, and the old design of Google Reader somewhere in there too....

I've used SimpleGeo since I met Joe Stump at Foo Camp. I was talking about my early stage iPhone app, Kliq which needed reverse geo coding and a few other basic location features. He suggested SimpleGeo and I got started quickly–though each of the features I used I was ready to rebuild on my own when the time came, rather than pay the as-then rather large monthly fee were I to be so lucky to have so many users.

It's been bumpy, even with relying on them scantly–I had hoped the feature set would grow and mature to take even more work off of my hands. Instead–several times the API changed from under me without warning or backwards compatibility and my alpha app simply broke. Once, embarrassingly in an investor presentation, another time it took a personal tweet to the founders to get things re-sorted out.

I'm sad that for so much money, such a great team, excellent visual design, hot shot investors etc. they didn't take off. I wonder if they just didn't hit on the right business model–for me it seemed I am something of a YCombinator gamble for them: they want my startup Kliq to be reliant on their services such that I can't or don't want to rebuild at scale (wasn't the case), price such that they take money from me Kliq now, as small developer team with little time to build cookie features not core to my app (they didn't charge us a monthly fee until the very very end, while we probably would have paid $5-$20 a month right away and up to $50 with more features), and price such that they "exit" with Kliq if we do end up scaling. Then they just need some success stories and they would have been too. Some ideas as a now former "customer".

So I’m more optimistic; the basic conflict human vs. vacuum may yet be won as private companies rightly take interest in the final frontier-c.f. SpaceX and their amazing ambitions. Also, if the powers that be are listening: sign me up for the first trip to Mars.

I was at an Akamai presentation the other day in which the salesperson claimed "100% reliability" of their services "not 99%, not 99.9% but 100%".