Note #15167

Can we fix it it? Yes we can! Yet more unusual work by the @BodleianLibs web/digital team (featuring @olearyalice).

Natalie and Alice at work.

 

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When Experienced Women Engineers Look for New Jobs, They Prioritize Trust and Growth

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

How can we increase gender representation in software engineering?

Our Developer Hiring Experience team analyzed this topic in a recent user-research study. The issue resonated with women engineers and a strong response enabled the team to gain deeper insight than is currently available from online research projects.

Seventy-one engineers who identified as women or non-binary responded to our request for feedback. Out of that pool, 24 answered a follow-up survey, and we carried out in-depth interviews with 14 people. This was a highly skilled group, with the majority having worked in software development for over 10 years.

While some findings aligned with our expectations, we still uncovered a few surprises.

Excellent research courtesy of my soon-to-be new employer about the driving factors affecting women who are experienced software engineers. Interesting (and exciting) to see that changes are already in effect, as I observed while writing about my experience of their recruitment process.

Counting Down

I wasn’t sure that my whiteboard at the Bodleian, which reminds my co-workers exactly how many days I’ve got left in the office, was attracting as much attention as it needed to. If I don’t know what my colleagues don’t know about how I do my job, I can’t write it into my handover notes.

You have [20] work days left to ask Dan that awkward question.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, boom.
So I repurposed a bit of digital signage in the office with a bit of Javascript to produce a live countdown. There’s a lot of code out there to produce countdown timers, but mine had some very specific requirements that nothing else seems to “just do”. Mine needed to:
  • Only count down during days that I’m expected to be in the office.
  • Only count down during working hours.
  • Carry on seamlessly after a reboot.
Screen showing: "Dan will be gone in 153 hours, 54 minutes, 38 seconds."
[insert Countdown theme song here]
Naturally, I’ve open-sourced it in case anybody else needs one, ever. It’s pretty basic, of course, because I’ve only got a hundred and fifty-something hours to finish a lot of things so I only wanted to throw a half hour at this while I ate my lunch! But if you want one, just put in an array of your working dates, the time you start each day, and the number of hours in your workday, and it’ll tick away. × ×

“One of the best things about working at The Bodleian… Pretending to be a PhD student…”

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

One of the best things about working at The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford? Pretending to be a PhD student for a photo shoot! Watch out for me appearing in a website near you…

Natalie pretends to be a PhD student.

My team and I do get up to some unusual stuff, it’s true. I took part in this photoshoot, too:

I’m absolutely not above selling out myself and my family for the benefit of some stock photos for the University, it seems. The sharp-eyed might even have spotted the kids in this video promoting the Ashmolean or a recent tweet by the Bodleian

Dan Q found GC55HCZ Take a break!!

This checkin to GC55HCZ Take a break!! reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The battery indicator on the eV I’m renting wasn’t confident that I’d make it all the way back home without a top-up, so I stopped for a 45 minute charge and a drink – the former for the car, the latter for me – at the services (pic attached of me at the chargers: this is nowhere near the GZ!) and figured I’d try to find the cache while I was waiting.

Coords took me to an unlikely looking spot and the hint wasn’t much use, so I looked at the logs and noticed that a few people had reported that they had found themselves on the “wrong side of the road”. That could be me, too, I thought… but the wrong way… in which direction? There were two roads alongside me.

I spotted a tall white thing that was different to the others and guessed that maybe that was what the hint referred to? When I got there, I even found a likely looking hiding place, but clearly my brain is still in USA-caching mode (I was caching on California a couple of weeks ago) because the hiding place I was looking at was the kind of “LPC” that just doesn’t happen over here. Damn.

So I stopped and tried to look nonchalant for a while, pacing around and looking for anything else that might fit the clue. Then I saw three things close together on the other-other side of the road and it immediately clicked that I was looking for something like them. I crossed over, sat down on the convenient perch while I waited for some muggles to pass, retrieved the cache and – at last – signed the log in what was basically the only remaining bit of space.

Had my GPSr sent me to the right place to begin with this adventure would have been much shorter, but I got there in the end… and still with 13 minutes of charging time left before I could drive away. TFTC!

Dan and an eV at a charging point

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Note #15151

These three explanations collectively describe quite well what @3RingsCIC and I are doing at @FairlawnsHotel today. 😊

Do Not Disturb sign with reasons: Sleeping, Working, Saving the World.

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