For a while now I’ve belonged to a London-focused Women In Technology group called Ada’s List. It’s a fantastic way to find out about events and training, but more importantly, the frank conversations which form part of the group’s ethos really help me to feel more confident in my career. Even when I’m not actively … Continue reading
Category Archives: Technology & Society
Think Drink Do: Innovation from Paper, November 2014
I always enjoy innovation agency Paper’s Think Drink Do events, in which they have a series of speakers focusing on behaviour change and related concepts followed by a practical crowdsourcing innovation exercise. This time we had Cath Richardson from the Government Digital Service providing insights about how to encourage government departments to focus on citizen … Continue reading
Coded Feminine: Diversity Protocols in the Tech Industry
Originally posted on quiteirregular:
This is a guest post by Dr. Caitlin McDonald, author and data analyst. Caitlin blogs at https://inamerryhour.com/ and can be found on twitter @caitiewrites Can I tell you a secret? I sometimes feel like a fraud. I work in data analytics, with an increasing role not only in crunching the numbers…
Mozilla Festival 2014
Mozilla Festival is many things to many people. For me, it’s mainly encapsulated by a feeling. That feeling is passion for sharing joy in technology, tempered by a sense of responsibility to curate the web as a community space. I find trying to explain the festival in any more detail than that makes the description … Continue reading
Data (from Different Angles): All Your Base 2014
I went to the All Your Base database conference last week and while there it struck me that people mean really, really different things when they talk about data, even within the same business. My background is in data analysis, so to me until very recently ‘data’ pretty much only related to enterprise data or … Continue reading
Designing Dating
I’ve been trying online dating recently, because that’s what single Londoners do in the summer. Because I work in tech, so far one of the most striking aspects of this experience has been how utterly disappointing the functionality and interface of the service I’m using is. That isn’t the fault of my potential dates, of … Continue reading
Scaling Twitter
On Thursday evening I went to an event at Twitter hosted by their Women in Engineering group featuring a series of lightning talks on the challenges of designing technologies that scale. As ever, I’ve put together a Storify of the event here. Tom Woolway, one of Twitter’s engineering managers, also collated a tweet collection summarising … Continue reading
Events: Think, Drink, Do and the London Quarterly Technolgy Briefing
I went to two tech events this week and I thought you might like to know a little about them. On Monday I attended Think, Drink, Do run by an innovation agency called Paper. The idea is to get together of an evening and do a little of all three. There were three talks to … Continue reading
Data for Good: DataKind’s Data Dive, 6-8 June 2014
This weekend I volunteered for my first Data Dive, DataKind UK’s initiative to connect data scientists with charities and social organisations to help them tackle some of their biggest challenges. This month’s Data Dive focused on Buttle UK, the Access Project, Shooting Star Chase and Citizens Advice Bureau, looking at a range of issues from … Continue reading
Things to Do with Data (and Theatre)
So if you read this blog often (and if not, why not, gentle reader?) you’ll know that two of my big life interests are data and theatre. When I try to explain about the data to the theatre people they either get vastly excited like I’m some kind of wizard, or the conversation dries up … Continue reading
In a Merry Hour: Caitlin E McDonald 