So last Friday I headed over to one of the public library’s branches. The branch manager is a pretty great guy and had scheduled four users, with varying levels of technology comfort and old-OPAC familiarity, for me to work with. (Which is doubly awesome. One, he knows his patrons and did a better job than I could in picking people; and two, participant recruitment is the only part of the process that I am actively afraid of. I am unwilling to walk up to somebody and bother them. I find it really unnerving when people do that to me.) It was a good situation: he was grateful that I was testing with his patrons, and I was grateful that he did the worst part for me. :)

Because of snow (no joke), two of the participants didn’t show up; we found a third, though, and I think the public library user population was reasonably well-represented. We had a homeschooled teen (middling tech familiarity, high OPAC familiarity), a security guard (low tech familiarity, high OPAC familiarity), and a stay at home mom (low tech familiarity, low OPAC familiarity). I had previously tested my test on my husband, so, although it wasn’t recorded for the rest of the committee to watch, I had seen a high tech familiarity, low OPAC familiarity user in action, as well.

I ran the tests a lot like Steve Krug suggests, in Rocket Surgery Made Easy. I did not, however, have a room full of people listening in real time, so I modified his scripts and checklists heavily. As I said, I recorded the sessions, because I wanted the rest of the committee to have the opportunity to see users in action, without librarian assistance. It was a good chance to finally learn how to use Camtasia (and I am never going back to Captivate, ugh). I’m even a fairly competent Camtasia user, now, since, once I had the recordings, I had to combine multiple recordings into one stream (Camtasia crashed part of the way into a test), hide people’s addresses (possibly using an image from GitHub), and mute the part where I read my PIN out loud.

On that note, I learned several things about usability testing, doing these tests.

1. Don’t just bring a mouse; also bring a mouse pad.
2. Bring the dongle that connects the stupid laptop’s USB to stupid Ethernet cables, or you’ll be stuck on stupid slow library wifi. (Which might have more closely approximated the user experience in the wild, but was frustrating during the test and on the videos.)
3. Consider rephrasing the “occupation” question. None of the users seemed bothered by it, but I felt sort of bad.
4. Have a test account – This would have saved me time with video editing and also helped protect everyone’s privacy, including my own. (Something my committee colleagues know, now: my account is delinquent due to an old $0.25 fine. Something they don’t know: my other account is blocked, due to >$10 in fines. Glad I had two, or I couldn’t have done the “Place a hold” part of the test at all.)
5. Be willing to stop the user when you aren’t learning anything new. Related: when they seem frustrated, be willing to drop tasks. This is part of my ongoing assertiveness training (which people who know me really well think is unnecessary, but, actually, totally needs to happen; I’m a mess with strangers).

I think there are further things I can clean up in my version of the script, too. (If you scroll down, the blue text is the list of tasks.) For instance, the series task was a disaster, and I’m not doing that again, unless Sirsi builds in better series searching.

But now we’re kind of moving into things I learned about Sirsi Enterprise:

1. The Advanced Search is a mess. (We can’t fix this one; we’ll have to ask Sirsi.) It doesn’t carry in the parameters of your last non-advanced search. If you do an advanced search and hit the “back” button, it doesn’t remember what you had filled in. It’s just terrible.
2. It’s hard to get to the holdings, at least for users trained on our old catalog. (Of the two untrained users, one got there OK, and one did not.) They kept looking at the “Place Hold” and “Text This to Me” buttons, as if those would save them, when they were “supposed to” click on the title or book cover, to get to the item record. We’re going to add a button that says “See Copies” and see how that works. (I hate adding stuff to an interface. As a rule, that’s usually the wrong call. This might be one case where it isn’t.)
3. The holdings might be a little hard to interpret, even when you get to them. This is something I plan to focus on in my next usability test, if they let me do more. :)
4. We made a bad call in removing the “item type” icon, apparently. (We replaced it with text. The icon alone was really unclear; “book” was a blue book, and “journal” was a green book, just for instance.) People kept clicking on items that weren’t the type they wanted; clearly, they didn’t see the text without the icon. So, we’re going to put the icon back, with the descriptive text. I think that will work nicely.
5. The login form to Place Hold/My Account is dumb. It doesn’t remember your card number between form submissions (say you got your PIN wrong—retype all those numbers!), and if you hit “enter” before you enter your PIN, it clears the form. Dumb.
6. People’s interpretation of the facets vary wildly. Some notice them, and some don’t. Of the users who notice facets, some of them “get it,” and some don’t. Some want to use facets to broaden their search. Some want to use the drop-downs at the top of the screen to narrow their search (I mean without hitting “Search” again—it doesn’t work that way). Some don’t notice the Include/Exclude buttons, which actually apply the facets. Some hit the Include/Exclude buttons without first applying limiters. It’s all over the board.
7. The ones who “get” facets seem to expect them to be persistent between searches. That really should be an option, Sirsi!
8. The “Only Show Available” button is nearly invisible. It needs to be flush with the left-hand side of the column or something.
9. Sirsi should build in something that senses whether someone’s searching for a particular series (2/4 users included the word “series” when searching for a series, so there’s one hint) and does a better job of dealing with that. Seriously, guys, it’s 2013. As a librarian, I know not to trust the catalog when I want a book in a series; I Google for the author’s website and bring the title back to my OPAC. But that’s stupid. Patrons might not know to do that. None of us should have to do that!

*I mean, I had tested prototype pages with students working in the library, to help decide on our approach when combining major areas of the website; also, a coworker and I got student workers’ feedback on the two discovery systems we were considering. I still defend those tests on the following grounds: the students’ knowledge about “library stuff” varied from total expert to total novice. But they were informal in that we didn’t record the sessions, recruit outside the organization, or offer payment of any sort, other than, you know, doing the tests “on the clock.”

**Students don’t know where to start. OK, well, we got Summon, which (numbers suggest) has helped a lot. But if Summon fails you, then what? How does a web designer make the multitude of options clear and intuitive? … Yeah, we don’t know. And I can test other stuff—and will—but when your site can’t meet its primary goal, it makes testing the specifics a little less exciting.

Confession: I’m a little stressed about writing this book review, because I think I lack some of the grounding in feminist theory to react “correctly” to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and because reaction to the book has been so very emotional. As has reaction to the reviews of the book, for that matter. (Even my own. I cringed at some of what I saw in various places, including GoodReads.) But I have thoughts, and I’ll do what I can to share them coherently.

Like most readers, I bring my own experience and biases, and although I have stories about gender relations in the workplace, both good and bad, I also have to acknowledge that I bring a fair bit of privilege into the discussion. So does Sandberg, which seems to be where a lot of the criticism comes from. And I’m torn on that. I mean, we should do whatever we can to fight for every kind of diversity, always; a hypothetical workplace that was gender-inclusive, but in all other ways homogeneous, would still be deeply flawed. So I’ll agree with critics that there’s a lot of room for Sandberg to do a better job with other forms of inclusivity, and I think that limits the book’s audience. I agree that Lean In won’t do a lot of good for a single mother with a part-time job, but I also feel like Sandberg acknowledges that, at least implicitly. Also, no, she does not really address any other kind of -ism than sexism in any depth, but she acknowledges that, too. I think some of the criticism on these grounds is a little unfair, in that she’s writing a book from her own experience, about a fairly specific topic. For her to try to address class or race issues (for instance) in enough depth to do them justice would not fit in cleanly with the topic of “leadership for women,” and I feel like she would risk coming off as patronizing. On balance, I think she does a fair job of acknowledging her privilege, at least in the beginning of the book, and to totally pan the book for not covering every possible angle of diversity is a bit unfair. It’s worth commenting on, but not worth throwing the book out altogether.

More broadly, I think there’s room for books (and discussions) that are about gender, or race, or class, or sexual orientation, or mental health, or disability, that do not address all of the other topics in that list. I understand that there are issues of intersectionality, and I in no way mean to suggest that they are unimportant issues. But I wonder if we do a disservice to all of the various fronts on which we fight for diversity when we do not allow any discussion to cover just one aspect. This might be my lack of grounding in feminist theory showing. Perhaps the only appropriate way to discuss diversity is to discuss all kinds of diversity at once, and there truly is no space for us to cover each of these issues one at a time. But intersectionality and the combination of feminism with other movements feels to me like “advanced feminism,” the sort of thing you only get to discuss once you’ve moved past lies about gender differences (for instance, women don’t go into CS for biological reasons, and men and women are really really different) and arguments about whether or not women should be paid equally (47 US Senators say no). And I could bring out worse examples. I could be wrong, but I think there’s tremendous need for a sort of “feminism 101,” out there, that gets people started on the path to understanding these deeper issues. And I think this book does it. (Combine it with this video, and there might even be some converts.)

In its role as “feminism 101″ and also “leadership 101 for women,” Lean In hits the high points, talking about our culture’s gender biases, how they are propagated by women at least as much as by men; it covers impostor syndrome and women’s reticence (on average) to put their hat in the ring (or “to sit at the table,” is how Sandberg phrases it). It gives some good pointers for surviving our current cultural climate, re: gender, while asking us to all work toward changing that climate, as well.

Lots of it rang really true for me. For instance, “By the time they are in college, women are already thinking about the trade-offs they will make between professional and personal goals”—I have decided to be child-free, now, but I didn’t know that in college and basically wrote off academia before I’d finished undergrad; female engineering faculty have to choose between children and tenure, or they did in the early ’00s, and I wasn’t willing to write off children as a possibility. True fact. Also, as a wife who makes more than her husband, I’ve seen people get weird about that, even though neither of us minds. And the quote “But the dearth of female leaders causes one woman to be viewed as representative of her entire gender”: if you swapped out “leaders” for “engineers” or “programmers,” you’d get to the root of most of my neuroses.

And, oh man, where she talks about queen bees? The same thing applies to geek girls—it applied to me, at one point in my life, I’m ashamed to say: “Queen bees internalized the low status of women and in order to feel worthy themselves wanted only to associate with men.” (I’ve grown up a lot since then.) Thankfully, I’ve never worked under a queen bee, but I’m part of geek culture. I’ve heard a room full of guys tell a woman, “You’re really a man [with female anatomy].” They phrase it as a compliment, and she takes it that way and later goes on to repeat it, herself. I wish this were just a one-time/one-person thing, but I’ve seen it more than once. In the far-distant past, I’ve participated in similar conversations, making similar declarations about myself—and that is another post I want to write, having to do with role models and gender identity. Like Sandberg, I hope that, over time, this will become less prevalent.

I think everyone but the most advanced feminist stands to get something out of this book. No, it won’t all apply to every reader. Not everyone can be cajoled into wanting to lead, even if she can be convinced that she has the aptitude. Not everyone has the personal or financial freedom to “lean in” to her career, to the extent Sandberg suggests. As librarians, we’re surrounded by a lot more women than a Silicon Valley COO, and we have to adjust some of her advice accordingly. But I think the book has a core message and a core goal, and it’s summarized nicely by this anecdote:

Google has an unusual system where engineers nominate themselves for promotions, and the company found that men nominated themselves more quickly than women. The Google management team shared this data openly with the female employees, and women’s self-nomination rates rose significantly, reaching roughly the same rates as men’s.

She’s sharing this data openly, and she has good reason to believe that more women will self-nominate, for whatever goals they may have, as a result of reading this book. I think she’s right.

Side-note: I really want a poster that says “Done is better than perfect.”

My world is not so grey and sad as last post made it seem. And I feel like it’s worth sharing some of the good things that are going on, to give a more balanced picture.

Successes!

Most timely: I found out yesterday that I was elected as an ALA Councilor-at-Large! 2,557 people voted for me, which is hard to wrap my head around. It’s scary and humbling, even as it makes me really proud, to have so many people say they think I can do this job. If you’re one of the people who voted for me, thank you! I’ll do my best to share what Council is discussing, and I’ll ask for people’s thoughts and ideas, to take back to Council. (Excitingly, there will be three Alaskans serving on Council. I’m not sure if that’s a record or not, but it’s better representation than we get in the two houses of Congress—also 3, but out of a much larger number.)

I think it’s funny that I attended my first ever Faculty Senate meeting on the same day I learned about the Council election results. That election was unopposed, and my motives for running were significantly less pure. (“I need more university service, the tenure committee says. Hmm. Faculty Senate seems straightforward.”) I think it will be good practice for Council, and I’ll learn a lot about how my university operates. So we’ll count that in the “success” list, too.

I think I mentioned in the last post that I’ll be attending the LITA Forum. I was delighted to find out that my proposal was accepted! It will be my first “solo” national-level talk—and the first national-level talk that was entirely my own idea. (The quotation marks are just there because I am including a significant audience interaction component. The presentation part is, in fact, just me.) This is the first time I’ve said to myself “Holy crap, someone needs to talk about this,” looked around, realized nobody else was doing it, and then pitched it as a talk. Usually, I just make it a blog post. Or let the idea go altogether. So this is a big, exciting step!

And, finally, I’ll be on the Circulating Ideas podcast again, this time talking about gender in libraries as part of a panel with Kate Kosturski and Marge Loch-Wouters (and hopefully at least one other person; if you want in, comment!). I’ll link to it when it airs. I still find audio-only to be a tough format, honestly, so this will be good practice. And I think it’ll be a great discussion, my own comfort level notwithstanding. I’m calling it a success, because I believe it will be. :)

Learning!

It’s been a winter* for what, in consulting land, we called “stretch activities.” I’m moving beyond my comfort zone pretty regularly, which shows up not only in my successes, but in … I’m not sure what to call this list. “Things that either are in progress, or have ended differently than I’d hoped,” perhaps? None of them really feel like failures.

• I did my first hackathon, despite some serious concerns about being a newbie. This is still in progress, because we haven’t finished the project. I might be learning more Ruby and Rails than I’d expected, in the near future.
• I pitched the idea for, and ultimately ended up co-founding, a local organization…
• …which requires me to stand up in front of people, teaching things that I often just barely know, myself. (And since “modeling fallibility”—to borrow a term from Andromeda Yelton—is one of our core values, I’m not only stretching in doing this, but in trying to be comfortable with it. There’s a whole post in that, I think.)
• I put in my name for a panel that interested me (for ALA, actually), and although I was ultimately not accepted, the process of applying was good for me—plus, I got pretty much the nicest rejection letter ever. :)
• I also pitched a very similar presentation to the LITA Forum one, for another big conference, timed/located conveniently with travel I’ll already be doing. I don’t know how confident to be that it’ll be accepted; there are some pretty big fish in that pond. It won’t destroy me to have the proposal rejected (honestly!), but it would be pretty fantastic if it worked out.
• I’m pretty publicly taking a MOOC, despite having quit every MOOC I’ve ever tried before. I will totally get through this one, though!
• I went to our Department Heads meeting to pitch the idea of creating a marketing plan/style guide for my library, which will cost actual money—and now I am apparently running the committee? (Someone else might step up. I haven’t convened the group yet, though it was officially approved.)

I feel good about all of this. Despite clouds and greyness in some areas of my life, overall I’d have to say things are pretty sunny and bright.

* It’s still winter. It snowed today.

Boring medical stuff:

I’ve had something wrong with my left foot since at least December. (I am bad with time, but I remember limping around during a Web Team meeting, and based on who was there, I know it happened in December. I don’t know how long before that the pain actually started, except it was definitely after October, when I was diagnosed with a stress fracture in my other foot. They never hurt at the same time.) It got enough worse that I finally went to my GP, who called for x-rays and an MRI and finally referred me to a podiatrist, who was awful. He diagnosed it as a Morton’s neuroma (quite possibly correctly) and gave me a cortisone shot (eyeballed, not guided by sonogram—and I think he missed the neuroma). Around the time I got the first x-ray, my hips started hurting, presumably from hobbling around on sore feet for months on end; over a few weeks’ time, that pain spread up into my back, my right arm, and my neck. Another medical professional, who was supposed to be helping with the chronic pain (everywhere except the foot), added to the injury, totally unintentionally, by pulling the injured toe, not even a week after the cortisone shot; within days, the toe swelled frighteningly. The podiatrist found out, got mad at me(!?), and acted like a jerk, basically throwing medicine at me and saying “Don’t come back until the swelling is gone.” I was afraid to go back, even post-swelling, and I put it off for almost a month. I would freely admit this was stupid and irresponsible, but I’m not sure I can express how much diagnostic poking of a sore foot hurts. So let’s go with “cowardly,” instead of “irresponsible,” shall we? Finally, I asked my GP for a referral to a different podiatrist. And now the new, better podiatrist has put me in a boot for a month, because there’s fluid around at least one joint and “something weird with the metatarsal.” (A shadow that he’s not willing to diagnose as a fracture, or even as recent damage, at this point.)

So, early June will come, and I might get out of the boot. The fluid might have dissipated. The shadow on the toe bone (I’m no doctor; I don’t have to say “metatarsal” if I don’t want to) might have faded. But if the first podiatrist was right, I’ll still need either 5 weeks’ worth of shots or surgery. Even if he’s wrong, and all’s well at the beginning of June (unlikely, but I can hope), the boot is making the chronic pain everywhere else in my body much worse, and that’s going to take time to work itself out.

Prognosis:

Best case scenario: it’s July before I’m back to normal. More realistic scenario: late August or early September.

I was in pain during Midwinter, and that was hard. I’m in much more severe pain now, and I just can’t fathom dealing with an 11 hour flight to Chicago, all the necessary conference shuttling and walking and sitting, sleeping in a hotel bed, and Chicago’s heat (which was oppressive even when I felt well).

I’ll be missing out on the Python preconference, which makes me feel sad and irresponsible. I was really, really, really looking forward to that. I won’t be able to celebrate/commiserate with my running mates for ALA Council, which makes me feel left out and not collegial. (Results are announced sometime this afternoon, which makes this post kind of poorly timed, maybe. Sorry.) I’ll miss my last meeting as NMRT Member Services Director. It’s just a bad scene, all around.

But I’ll use the time to heal, so I can hopefully be myself at the LITA Forum. And I’ll follow the Twitter conversation with interest. And, if I’m really lucky, someone will take pity and mail me some of the awesome and/or hilarious ribbons I hear are being created. :)

And I’ll see everyone in Philly, for sure.

Anchorage Programming Workshop held its first class last night, on GitHub, and I think it went really well. Besides the two teachers, four people showed up—fewer than we want, long term, but a great start, given that we really hoped to ease into this whole thing, anyway. Their backgrounds and learning styles varied a bit, but I think they all got something out of the class. Becky did a great job of teaching, and I was able to contribute what I hope was some helpful input. Everyone left with a working repository—and hopefully the confidence and know-how to get GitHub set up on their home machines.

Our plan is to do HTML/CSS next, though I’m debating maybe starting with Girl Develop It‘s Intro to Web Concepts (slides/repo), modified to fit my presentation style. It would give us time to figure out hosting for people’s projects (Heroku?) and to make sure there’s a core group who is comfortable with where we’re going. But perhaps I’m being too conservative/cautious?

Anyway, no matter where we go with our next meeting, it’s really good to have this thing off the ground! :)

In Week 1 we covered functions, the modulo operator, comparisons, and if/elif/else. They offer a tool called “Pystep,” where you can see functions being evaluated. I am not sure whether it is actually more helpful or more confusing to someone who is unfamiliar with programming, but it’s a cool idea and another way to try to visualize what’s going on. Similarly, they talked about functions in terms of “black boxes.” As an engineer, that’s super intuitive to me, but I find myself really curious about whether that made sense to anyone who’s new to programming. I do remember finding truth tables really confusing when I was in school, and I looked away while he was going through them in this class—I think it’s related to my (mild!) dyslexia. I evaluate complex Boolean statements really well, but I don’t do it with tables. I wonder if truth tables make sense to most people, though.

Honestly, I’m thinking I’d start a group of librarians with True/False and comparators, before I even went into the other operators. Librarians are pretty familiar with Boolean logic—something that the newbies who are non-librarians might have some trouble with, at first—but, for a librarian, that part should feel like home and should help build up some early confidence.

I wonder how non-librarians who haven’t programmed before felt about the quick intro to comparators. It was … speedy.

Anyway, back to class: the assignment was to build Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock. I was kind of sleepy, which always makes my dyslexia worse, so once I had it written, it was a little hard to evaluate whether I got it right or not. I dread doing the peer evaluations for that reason. But it was a pretty good, simple starting project—assuming you caught the part of the lecture where he told you how to do the clever modulo trick. (You assign a number to each one, when they’re arranged in a certain order. Then, to determine who wins, you take the difference modulo 5. If it’s 1 or 2, it’s a win; if it’s 3 or 4, it’s a loss. — I’m not breaking the honor code by saying this here; I’m quoting the professor nearly word-for-word. I know because I had to go back and watch that part of the lecture again.) Honestly, my plan when I heard about this assignment was to power through a bunch of if/elif/else statements. I would never have come up with the modulo thing on my own, and although I’m prepared to blame sleepiness/dyslexia for it and assume it would have made sense on a different day, I’ll come clean and admit that I barely understood why it worked. I just did as I was told and made sure everything evaluated appropriately.

Once again, the quiz was unnecessarily mathy. “Build functions,” (great, yes!) “out of these equations” (REALLY?). Is that necessary? One equation-question might have been OK, but there were three. Why not string operations? Grr.

Now that I’m writing this, I have to say, I feel a little … paternalistic? … complaining about the math on others’ behalf. I don’t know for certain that anyone found programming equations particularly daunting. It just seems like there might be a more approachable way to assess people’s understanding of the programming concepts, given that math-phobia is fairly common and well documented. Maybe I’m focusing on this too much, though.

About Python itself:

One project in, I am starting to understand why people like Python. At first, it was pretty weird trying to program without braces (I always call them “brackets,” for some reason) or semi-colons. But the code reads a lot like English. It’s just… super neat. I’ve never gotten joy from a programming language before—a job well done, despite the language, or a clever solution to a problem, sure, of course, but never the language itself. It’s pretty amazing.

My only complaint so far is “Why elif? Why not else if, or elseif?” Well, and perhaps Python’s unnecessary respect for programming history, in (apparently?) usually counting zero to n-1, instead of zero to n. (For Python aficionados who will have more perspective than I do, here’s where this comes from: somewhere in his assignment or documentation or somewhere, the professor claimed that that doing ranges the way random.randrange() does (x <= N < y) is more common in Python than doing x <= N <= y, like random.randint() does.) It won’t cause me any future problems, because the zero to n-1 pattern is internalized for me, but it’s a weird choice for an otherwise readable language. I nearly turned in the assignment with an off-by-one error, because I was floating on a Python cloud and assumed it would handle things intuitively for a non-programmer. To be fair, I suppose that’s on me, not on the language.

So now I find myself wondering… can people get paid for writing in Python? :)

I worked on a project called “Weed Warriors,” sponsored by the Anchorage Park Foundation (APF). The goal was to have a website and/or mobile app where people could sign up to remove invasive species from APF-identified patches of land. We forked our code from Adopt-A-Hydrant, because the idea is sort of similar—adopt a thing, and take care of it. But fun fact: nobody on the team knew Ruby or Rails (or Heroku, which has yet to bite us, but will probably eventually become an issue?), which Adopt-A-Hydrant is built in. This made things a little tricky.

A local Code for America volunteer, who had worked on Anchorage’s Adopt-A-Hydrant (also, my partner in crime for Anchorage Programming Workshop) kindly set us up with a virtual machine to work in, which saved us a lot of time in setting up our own environments. Or it would have, if we didn’t spend so much time floundering around, trying to get it to work [without asking for help].

Although I did spend a bunch of time making logos and modifying/resizing images, which was super fun, I probably spent more time fighting with development tools, which was … less fun, but probably more character-building. We had a pretty big misunderstanding around how Ruby/Rails handles databases—I use “we” and the past tense loosely, here; I never did get 100% cleared up on it—so I ended up spending a fair amount of time reverting changes in GitHub and expunging-then-rebuilding my VM. Good times.

I also made changes to what I’ll loosely refer to as “the code.” I edited a couple of .html.haml files, including fixing the site’s Terms of Service, and I fixed the definitions in en.yml (and the other languages, as best I could). I didn’t do anything I’d be comfortable describing as “Ruby development,” but I didn’t stay out of the code base, either. (Which is normally something you want from your designer. ;))

Here’s what it looks like:

Compare to Adopt-A-Hydrant for an idea of what I changed.

Honestly, I didn’t end up doing much about the overall UI—just really basic cosmetic stuff. I’m going to suggest—and hopefully help implement—a few changes, but I didn’t go too crazy, this weekend. It took a lot of time for our team to get up to speed, though by the end, it seemed like at least most of them really understood how to make the database changes we need. We’ll have some other hurdles, like how to get this hosted properly, but I fully expect to have a functioning product … eventually. We all agreed that we aren’t willing to stop with an incomplete, undeployed project.

I’m currently working on a script to pull data out of the Excel spreadsheet we were given and add it to the Ruby seed file (I’m not even sure if that’s a generic term, or specific to this project), so that we can add all the known patches in the city. I say “I’m working,” because I guess I’m out of practice in this kind of thing. Or I’m just really, really brain-tired. I can’t seem to get it working. Maybe next weekend.

Anyway, the event was fun, and I’m really glad I participated. There were 7ish women out of 37ish people signed up, which is… about the national average, I guess. Roughly half of them were in one group. But the room, overall, was a little more gender balanced, because a lot of the nonprofits we were volunteering for had women as representatives. I am hoping that, within a year or so, the Anchorage Programming Workshop will have convinced a larger group of women that they can contribute to this kind of effort. (Although our project felt hard, just because we didn’t know the language, there were definitely some that were very newbie-friendly.)

Unrelated to my project, I learned that there’s something called “Google Fusion” that could do wonderful things for future projects.

I watched the Week 0 lectures and did the quiz and homework, and I have to say, I had forgotten how “mathy” CS people were. (I’m differentiating “CS people” from “programmers,” because they aren’t necessarily the same thing. There’s a Venn diagram deal going on, between the two groups.) For the most part, I don’t mind—math’s OK with me—but I kept thinking, during the recorded lecture, how off-putting the early focus on numbers might be, for a big portion of the class’s online audience—and how unlikely it is that the teaching staff will even realize that. Seriously, one of the quiz questions wasn’t even programming; it was just unit conversion (grams to ounces).

So I find myself looking back at and reflecting on not only my formal CS education of over a decade ago, but also the books and websites I’ve used to teach myself in the meantime. It seems like it’s really normal for CS folks to start with a bunch of arithmetic. It might be out of respect for history, because computers were originally designed to do math (though they do a lot more now). But probably not. I think they do it that way primarily because the people who have traditionally gone into CS have been math-loving people, so starting with numbers feels easier, to them, than starting with strings or other concepts. Maybe it is easier, in that operator precedence and simple problems solvable with a pencil and paper are cleaner to teach and easier to grasp, early on.

Looking back at C/C++, my first language, I vaguely recall that the number stuff was easier than the string stuff, but that may have been my professors over-complicating things when they taught strings. Or it might be that C/C++ is terrible. Strings don’t seem hard, in the languages I use now. (Except that I always forget whether I need to use single-quotes or double-quotes. But that’s just syntax, anyway. Syntax is its own thing.)

So now I am having thoughts, mostly about how to make programming accessible to folks who don’t self-identify as “mathy.” Because, like I said (or at least implied), not all programmers are CS people. I honestly believe that you don’t have to be good at math to be good at programming. You have to be good at logic—and you can get good at logic while you’re learning to program—but since they teach logic in philosophy classes, I’m convinced that’s doable without math. I have this weird idea that maybe I could convince people they’re able to do logic—and, by extension, programming—by playing Zendo together. (I got the idea from a programmer I know, named Fred. He’s one of, like, two people I’ve ever met who didn’t like the game Zendo, and he said it was because it was too much like what he did all day.) Also, I feel like I should say, the game’s more fun than the Wikipedia article might make it sound.

Anyway, all of these thoughts aside, I’m enjoying the class, so far. I think I’d be open to teaching people Python in CodeSkulptor, for exactly the reasons the instructors listed, in their class intro. I’m told that learning Python 2.x is probably better than jumping right into 3, since a lot of people haven’t done the conversion yet, so I’m pretty OK with that decision, too.

I’m looking forward to having a working version of Asteroids at the end of the class. :) I’ll have to see what’s involved in exporting my projects to the web, so I can make them into a mini Python portfolio, more for my own entertainment than any kind of employability. Apparently the Django tutorial my husband was following online isn’t finished, so I’m open to suggestions on good Python frameworks to explore, hopefully with online tutorials or really great (and they’d seriously have to be really great) books.

If you aren’t in Anchorage, I unfortunately can’t offer to set up a meeting time with you every week like I’m hoping to do with the locals, BUT I’d still really love to be part of an online cohort! The Library CodeYear Interest Group might let us set up a thread in their Connect space, or … you know, whatever works for whoever’s interested, honestly. And, side note: I realize self-paced courses aren’t everyone’s thing, and nothing about this course is going to be particularly library-centric. So, if you’re a librarian who wants to learn Python, but you don’t see this working for you, you could always sign up for the LITA preconference at ALA Annual this year. I’ll be there in a “teaching assistant” capacity, hanging out and offering help as needed—which is part of why I’m loving the timing of this Coursera course so much; it finishes right before ALA!

Also, I feel like I should explain that this is part of a larger project. Another female developer and I are putting together a group for local women* to learn how to code, a la Girl Develop It/Ladies Learning Code/Boston Python Workshop. We might officially affiliate with a larger group (we have a query in to Girl Develop It), but we didn’t want to wait for that process to work itself out before we got started. At least to start, we’re calling it Anchorage Programming Workshop. If you have any interest in learning to make websites, apps (mobile or otherwise), scripts, or anything that you think might involve programming, please check out our website and “like” us on Facebook!

Also, check out my totally sweet graphic. ;) (I’m still taking suggestions for what should really go where this is on the website. But I’m kind of getting attached to this, at the same time.)

*And friends. A man is totally allowed to come along and learn, as long as a woman brings him. For instance, I’m bringing a guy to this Python class.

I agreed to teach a session on “Best Practices for Blogging.” In case others are making these kinds of presentations, or other libraries are just now starting blogs (hey, we have a couple of new blogs, so surely others must, too, right?), I thought I’d share the best practices I’ve pulled together and leave the floor open for others to comment and add theirs.

I’m focusing this talk on blogs by library staff, for patrons. But these best practices are also applicable to other kinds of blogs (and, arguably, I should follow more of them, here).

Also, I’m really not claiming to be any kind of librarian blogger expert. I’m just a lady who has written some blog posts for a few different audiences, over time, and has learned some lessons (and asked for others’ lessons, too). These are tips I’ve picked up, or borrowed from other bloggers. You’ll pick up other best practices of your own, as you blog.

Without further adieu, some best practices:

• Blogs are social. Don’t think of your blog as a broadcast medium, or your posts as press releases. The best blogs are part of a conversation—they either start a new conversation, or they add to an existing one.
  • Follow other people’s blogs. If they write about something that interests you, or that might interest your audience, write a post with your thoughts about it. Be sure to link back to the post that got you thinking.
  • When you’re not joining an existing conversation, try to write blog posts that are conversation starters.
  • Reply to comments when you get them. If your reply takes the form of another blog post, that’s fine.
• Know your [intended] audience – any time you’re writing content, having a particular kind of person in mind will help you write something accessible and interesting.
• Know the primary purpose of your blog – to educate, to entertain, to share news?
  • Have a purpose for each post you write, too (hopefully contributing to the blog’s overall purpose!) – Don’t blog just to blog; make posts that are worth your readers’ time.
  • Always include Who, What, Where, When, How, and most importantly Why Should You Care? in each post.
• Have a personality. Let a little bit of yourself into the writing. (Or a lot!)
• Write about topics that interest you. Your audience won’t be interested if you aren’t interested.
• Don’t use acronyms or jargon; if you can’t avoid using them, at least explain them.
• Use good grammar and spelling.
• Keep your sentences short and simple.
  • Your posts, too.
• If you can tell a story, do it. People love stories.
• Add an image (or video) to every post, if possible; making the post visually interesting is a nice thing to do for your reader.
  • If you’re taking an image from another website, download it to your computer, and upload it to your blog. Don’t just <img src> it from its home server. That’s rude.
  • Always give proper attribution for images that you use. You can do that via a caption, or you can link to the source with the picture itself.

Some things I’ve seen go well in library blogs:

• Reference question of the week
• Staff profiles – Get to know your librarians
• Trivia (once you have enough of a following that people will participate)
• Exciting resources or services (with reasons why they’re exciting)

I’m considering borrowing from this, a bit. And maybe this.

Some blogs for inspiration (I hope to find more examples before Tuesday’s session):

• Barco Law Library – Seems a little dry, at first glance, but they have 66 subscribers in Google Reader alone. Clearly, they’re doing something right.
• NCSU’s many blogs – Lots of content here.
• UGA Law Library – Fewer subscribers, but I found their content interesting.