Eleanor Graham

Adventures in 3D Printing

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 01:40:19 +0000

I’ve been learning how to use the 3D printers at the Makerspace. We’re off to a bit of a rocky start.

I had such a fast affinity with the Lasersaur. I felt like I could make anything after just hours of experimenting with it. The possibilities seemed endless.

After making a nice cutout of the Kettle logo I promised Carmel I would make badges for the ShenFringe Audience Choice awards. As Fringe approached and the Lasersaur was out of commission, I figured I could use it as a chance to try my hand at 3D printing.

I drew up some designs in Tinkercad and thought the most difficult part was behind me. After a quick intro to the machines I was off to the races.

The first test turned out pretty well, but the letters were hard to read in the center, so I decided to try using the printer with a finer grade nozzle.

Things did not go well.

This turned into hours of tinkering with the machines, tinkering with designs, printing complete failures of tests, printing barely passable versions… I was cursing the very idea of 3D printing, and Fringe was fast approaching.

Finally I ended up with some degree of success.

And, despite my curses, the bad memories are fading into a funny haze – and I find I’m dreaming about what I’ll design next. Just because I can.

The Next Generation of Makers

Throughout this whole process my daughter has been coming in to the Makerspace with me to hang out as I get prints started or check on how the last one turned out. As with everything at the Makerspace, I love showing her how the machines work and telling her that I’ll teach her how to use it all once she’s old enough.

It’s amazing to me to think that only a few years ago I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the very concept of 3D printing. And it’s just a normal part of the world that my girl inhabits.

Operation Mac Revival

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:40:19 +0000

Last year I started to learn web development. I was working on an old refurbished iMac and I started to feel its limitations – should it really take this long to bundle dependencies?

A Dead MacBook Pro

There was another old machine in our house – my husband’s 2009 MacBook Pro that was dead. It wouldn’t power on at all and it was just sitting in the studio looking forlorn. What if I could bring it back to life and take it over for my work machine?

I started researching. It looked like I could put in a new solid state drive, upgrade the memory, and it would be better than new in no time. I ordered tools and parts and set about the surgery.

Back to life…

I felt a flutter when everything arrived in the mail. That evening I took a deep breath and got to work. I pulled up a few tutorials for guidance and unscrewed the back of the machine. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to swap out the hard drive. Getting the new memory in was just a bit harder – it felt like I had to push rather hard to get the second RAM chip to click in place. Still the whole process took less than an hour and was delightfully empowering. I’m even considering upgrading that old desktop now.

Gem and the Rock(climb)ers

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 18:28:12 +0000

Presenting: Hiking Guide

I just finished building a Command Line Interface(CLI) Gem called Hiking Guide. It grabs information on hiking trails in the US mid-Atlantic off of HikingUpward and presents that information to the user on the command line.

But Why?

I’m working through the Flatiron school’s Learn curriculum, and building a CLI Gem is the final project for the section on Object Oriented Ruby. Coming up with a topic and a site to scrape is all up to us, and I decided to use my beautiful home — the Shenandoah Valley — as inspiration. I don’t really expect anyone else to use my little gem (is anyone besides me really interested in looking up hiking trail details from the command line?). Still, after spending so much time staring at my computer screen, I knew I could really benefit from hitting the trails and that was reason enough for me to proceed!

Challenges

The web scraping turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated. HikingUpward is a volunteer organization — this means that the website is maintained by multiple people, and the information presented there is anything but consistent. There were several times that I almost gave up and picked a different topic/project. One particular volunteer in NC added some fancy script to his trail descriptions that required a method all its own to clean up (Hi, Zach! Thanks for the challenge and added hours!) — and I almost decided to just leave NC trails off the list entirely because of this. But I didn’t — I kept at it and figured it out. It’s hard to describe how satisfying that felt!

I also challenged myself to write some tests for the first time, which was great fun. It’s a skill I want to develop, but haven’t had the reason to really push myself. Although I don’t have anything close to full test coverage for this project, the few tests I do have are a good step for me (and it leaves me something to come back to and improve!)

Good Enough

One of the things that keeps me interested in coding is the seemingly endless possibility for improvement. Once I start thinking about a puzzle I have a hard time putting it down; I keep turning it over and over, polishing, refining. So, although I’m calling this gem ‘ready’ I have ideas for things I could improve, should the time and desire present itself. I also have a bundle of ideas for other projects that I feel ready to take on in the wake of this success. It feels good to say that what I’ve created is good enough and release it into the world.

Pairing

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 14:28:12 +0000

Two heads…

A few weeks ago I had my first pair programming experience. Up until that point, I had been working through the Learn curriculum on my own with very little outside interaction. Then I hit one of the final projects in the Object Oriented Ruby section: Tic Tac Toe with Artificial Intelligence. The assignment strongly encouraged us to find pairs. I had misgivings about it: How would I find someone right at the same part of the curriculum as me? How would we schedule around my childcare and other work duties? What if I ended up with a terrible partner? It sounded like a lot of extra work…

Flashback: the dreaded group project

Imagine a Hydra. That’s how I feel about academic group projects. I was a non-traditional student (read: older than my classmates) when I was finishing my Bachelor’s degree. Although I was a musician, specializing in chamber music collaboration, I dreaded group projects in my academic classes. There was so much extra work — scheduling meetings, encouraging the other group members, and then redoing all their work at the last minute to make it presentable (yes, I was that student). Was this pair programming going to be like that?

Two heads… are better than one

It wasn’t like that – no Hydras to battle here. Of course, that’s partly due to the fact that I was lucky enough to end up with a fabulous partner (Hi, Kenlyn – you are a delight!). It felt so good working together and talking through the code. Finally I wasn’t alone in front of my screen anymore. Finally there was someone else wrestling with the same puzzles at the same time. Even the act of talking about the questions we faced helped unravel them. Everything about the experience was valuable.

Not only was the process a great learning experience – we ended up producing a project that was better than either of us would have come up with on our own. As we worked, we pulled the best from each other and refined things further. When we wrapped up I felt energized and excited about future collaborations.

Dry Eloquence

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 13:28:12 +0000

DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself.

Programmers talk about the virtues of DRY code, as opposed to WET (We Enjoy Typing! Write Everything Twice!). The virtue goes beyond funny acronyms: code that eliminates unnecessary repetition is easier for an outsider to read and understand. It’s also easier to extend functionality as the program grows.

Understanding vs Doing

Understanding the value of writing DRY code, and actually doing it are two different things. Although I long for simple and eloquent code, usually my first solutions are anything but DRY. And this may be a good thing.

When I was in high school I remember a math teacher getting frustrated with me for not writing enough steps in my solutions - “Show your work!” Some of the steps seemed so simple I couldn’t bring myself to write them down – I could already see several steps ahead, and at the time I felt embarrassed to show such elementary ‘extra’ work. Not only did I frustrate my teacher with this stubbornness, but I made things more difficult for myself: when things didn’t turn out as planned, it was harder to catch mistakes in the assumptions that I had left unwritten.

The (WET) road to DRY

When I try getting too far ahead of myself with coding I end up tangling things up. If I can allow myself to ‘write everything twice’ just to get initial tests passing, I usually have a much easier time simplifying from there. Starting out WET is only a problem if you never dry off.

100 Days of Commits

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 15:28:12 +0000

I learned about 100 Days of Commits just a few days before it began. I decided to join in without giving it much thought. Now, 13 days in, I’d like to reflect a bit.

Yay

First: Hooray! 13 days in a row of commits is probably twice as long as any previous streak for me. Already I’ve learned a lot, even with my completely haphazard unplanned approach.

Learning

Jumping in with no planning means that I’ve been forced to go with low hanging fruit. Those changes that I’ve been wanting to make to my website? Now’s the time! That new thing I’ve been curious about? Dig in! So far I’ve learned more about Jekyll and Mapbox. I’ve also learned about my own workflow and have made some improvements that feel good.

Community

It’s also been so fun to feel the buoyancy of doing this practice together with so many other people. Even though I’ve just been working on my own stuff so far (no collaborate contributions yet), it makes me so happy to see the other participants progressing. Check out the activity on twitter (@100Commits) – it’s great!

Framing

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 19:28:12 +0000

Parenting || Programming…

My daughter is almost two. She’s hilarious and wonderful. She is a girl who loves to explore. She loves trucks and getting dirty in the garden just as much as she loves dolls and reading books.

As I watch her learn and interact with the world I’m continually struck by the impact of framing. The way that I frame things is helping her form her worldview; my interpretations inform the way she thinks about herself and her own possibilities.

Imagine we’re playing together. She grabs a cardboard box and starts putting other items into it. I could say, “Oh! Are you cooking up some soup in your kitchen?” I could also say, “Oh! Are you doing an experiment in your lab?”

There’s a big difference. I hear the outside world giving my daughter a personal vocabulary that leans heavily towards purses, babydolls, and playing house. I am going to do my best to diversify her vocabulary and broaden her horizons.

So what does this have to do with programming?

Variables = Vocabulary

When we build our programs, we give them a vocabulary. The variables that we write into our programs become a way for them to store data and communicate about that data. Every time we create a new variable, it would behoove us to consider the underlying assumptions that we’re building into our program.

Methods = Behaviors

The methods we write determine the behavior within our programs. Defining new methods broadens the possible actions. Again, our decisions create a frame of possibilities within the world of our program. What frame are we creating?

The Texture of Home

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 17:40:19 +0000

Bird’s Eye View

I’ve always loved riding in planes. I love looking at the patchwork below, seeing if I can identify any parts of the landscape.

Looking at this map reminds me of that. How the the reaching tendrils of country roads spread from central veins; how the denser grid forms, showing a patch of city… It has a texture. I want to touch it like a quilt – feel the grooves with my fingers.

If I could, I would be touching the texture of my own landscape. Feeling home.

Zooming in, I look for my house. I can see the shapes. I recognize the little slip of a street we live on. I see the broader strokes all around us. I find the curves and contours mesmerizing. The grids shift around our hills. The streets and rails converge. Beautiful.

The maps above are my first foray into playing with my own styling in Mapbox. It’s really fun. I can’t wait to dig in more.

Mapping Home

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 18:40:19 +0000

Personal Topography

I’ve always loved maps.

I think of so much of my personal history in terms of maps. The worn map I used when I lived in Berlin to pick my bike routes. The tourist map of Prague that magically showed me the tiny street I needed. The map in the kitchen at my grandparent’s house in Hull, showing the beach where we swam and the harbor that we could see out the window…

I’d like to start telling the stories of these maps. It’s a two-fold project. On the technical side, I want to experiment with new tools – design and build the maps in my imagination. On a personal level, I want to capture some of these stories. I want to explore the places of my memory in a new way.

So here we are. Staunton is my home now.

This small map contains the streets where I make my home and do my work; the bridge I walk over and the farmer’s market where I buy veggies; the shops and restaurants around my home… There is so much significance for me within the contours of these lines.

I know you can’t see it yet. But I’ll show you. Soon.

Strength in Diversity

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 14:40:19 +0000

Cheers to Women In Tech

The most recent episode of Front End Happy Hour is all about Women In Tech – a topic near and dear to my heart. There was a lot of talk about unconscious bias and ways to encourage diversity. It was good to hear the group agree wholeheartedly that increasing diversity in tech leads to more perspectives, greater innovation, and all around better products.

What does Diversity look like?

So, let’s explore this. What does it look like for an existing company to develop this promised strength in diversity? It takes more than talk. It takes more than hiring a token #{diverse_person}. There needs to be a shift in culture – a true embrace of the challenges that come with diversification…

Challenges?

While diversity is proven to yield wonderful results, no one said it would be easy. Homogeneity usually feels easier – if everyone thinks in the same way, that often leads to speedy consensus. The fastest route may not be the best, however. In this case, it’s important to work through any potential discomfort.

With a true embrace of diversity a company is saying that they want more perspectives, more ideas. This means teams need to develop respectful processes for working through different opinions and finding ways forward. Team members need to develop open minds and empathy.

A company can only benefit from diverse perspectives if it makes them truly welcome in the workplace.