Much of the Aberystwyth Contingent: Rebecca, Begum, Praboda, Me, Edel, Danniela, Abby, Joanna, Jasmine, Grace, Savannah and Tamzin (missing: Amanda and Anita)

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On April 4th, we held the 17th BCSWomen Lovelace. I’ve been running or co-running this conference for longer than I’ve been running this blog… so it’s time for an event report. There’s a few missing in my event report sequence as I started this blog in 2009 (after the first Lovelace), I didn’t make it to #3 in Cardiff 2010 (I was working in France at the time), and it seems like 2021 Lovelace didn’t get an event report on this blog even though it definitely happened (online). A well-run conference involves more work in the run-up than anyone could possibly think, and the LovelaceRead More →

Children at work animating and planning their animations in the library

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Aberystwyth University is 150 round about now and as part of the institution’s 150th birthday celebrations they’ve had a series of projects to help celebrate this. Tally Roberts (our faculty outreach wizard) and I got a small grant to run some storytelling and animation based coding workshops for kids, which finished at the weekend. We ran five workshops (two in the Town Library, two in the Arts Centre, and one in the Ceredigion Museum) to coincide with school holidays, and had about 45 kids attend overall. The aim was to do some programming in Scratch in a creative context, telling stories about Aberystwyth. They didn’tRead More →

embroidery machine in action

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Over the last couple of months I have been intermittently playing with code and with the embroidery machine, and there are a few things I’ve learned. Here’s a blow-by-blow account of creating an embroidered image from a photo: First I cut out the image I was interested in using GIMP, and then blurred it to reduce the amount of detail. With my blurred image, I then ran Watershed to segment it into coloured blocks or regions. This gave me something like this: This original attempt at a pattern was – with hindsight – too complex. However I didn’t know that at the time so IRead More →

a test of the stitching capabilities

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We’ve got a new piece of kit in our university Makerspace! Thanks to Chris Price we’ve got a Brother Innovis NV880E embroidery machine https://www.brothermachines.com/sewing/2947/Innov-is_NV880E_Embroidery_Machine. This is a sewing machine with a robotic element – you put material in an embroidery frame, and the machine moves the embroidery frame around in order to sew in different directions with different stitches. This means that you can sew patterns! Combined with an online system called TurtleStitch you can program embroidery using a blocks-based language. The machine also has some inbuilt patterns and text but these are not as exciting as being able to program embroidery… My first testRead More →

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Programmed Inequality by Mar Hicks is a history of early computing in the UK, starting right at the beginning. The book concentrates on the experiences and conditions for women in tech, and their changing status. Much like Recoding Gender by Janet Abbate (which I read recently but didn’t, for some reason, blog about) it looks at the way the computing profession is first invented and then changes over time, influenced by and influencing women’s position in tech. The simple tale is one that’s been told a few times… 1940s-50s – to begin with, computer was a word that referred to someone who computed, probably aRead More →

The 3d printed cog

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One of the jobs I have at work is to “manage” the makerspace, a room with a 3d printer and laser cutter and a few other cool toys in it. This room is supposed to be a facility for students and staff to build small prototype objects for any projects they have, however work-related or wacky – it’s been used to print cases for kit, build replacement lab components, try out ideas for robots, and print any number of D&D figurines and small plastic dinosaurs. When the pandemic started, it was closed to humans and the printer got commandeered into a PPE printing effort (bravo).Read More →

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BCSWomen Lovelace 2022 happened! It happened online, again, for the third time. Little did I realise that when we moved 2020 online due to threat of COVID and lockdown, I’d be chairing Lovelace 2022 online whilst actually suffering from COVID. I cannot recommend the experience of hosting a conference and being ill with COVID. From our core team of 4, one had been off with a virus in the run up and two of us had COVID so the whole event was a bit snotty. I’ve written a detailed account here: https://bcswomenlovelace.bcs.org/?page_id=398 so if you want to see who won and watch the talk videosRead More →

view from bristol city centre marriott

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ACCU was my first conference for a long time and I threw myself into the conference experience, enjoying talks on all sorts of topics. The event was a bit more dynamic in planning than many conferences because people kept pulling out with COVID (and so other people kept stepping up and offering talks to fill the gaps). This meant there were more short talks than I think had originally been planned. There were also more general talks, which suited me fine. Here are the things I’m taking away from those sessions attended: Day 1 highlights Guy Davidson’s keynote on growing better programmers: Lots of goodRead More →

Me, about to deliver a keynote

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In the first week of April I went to my first in-person conference since all this [gestures at world] kicked off. ACCU is out of my area (it’s a programming conference, and not an academic one), and the invitation to deliver a keynote arrived back in June last year. When making a decision about whether I could do this I looked back at their past list of keynote speakers and hoo boy there’s some big names there – it’s perhaps unsurprising that they’ve had the inventor of C++ (Stroustrup) but they’ve also have the inventor of Haskell (Peyton Jones), and Python (van Rossum). Whoa. AnywayRead More →

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Sometime before xmas I was working from home and there was a bang on the door (around school drop-off time). I opened it to find Clive, the curator of TEDxAberystwyth, wanting to discuss lineup, promotion and so on. I’d been heavily involved in the first one as an organiser, on the small team that pulled it together. So I am familiar with the rules of TEDx and have even negotiated the whole “building a TEDx-compatible website” and “booking a room and making it look a bit like a TEDx event” things. The knock on the door turned out to be my “Would you like toRead More →