DEV Community: Claire Pollard

Back after a looooong hiatus

Claire Pollard — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 17:37:02 +0000

So it's been a while since I've posted on Dev.to, but I'm back.

I've since left my job as a full time FORTRAN programmer, became a Technical Marketing Manager in the Raspberry Pi community for ModMyPi, learnt lots about Python and working collaboratively online, got made redundant when my company got bought, and now I'm back as a full time developer rolling around in C++ backend code for a brilliant company called Imagen.

I posted a tweet thread today about my experiences as a developer coming back into the field and the interview process. I kind of feel like this might make good posting material. What do you think? Let me know.

Claire Pollard

@thetuftii

A thread about coding and being a programmer...

4 months ago I was made redundant from my job as a Technical Marketing Manager. The majority of my job was creating content, with a little bit of programming to build libraries and scripts.

17:01 PM - 01 Oct 2019

0 1

It's lovely to be back. :D

Nevertheless, Claire Pollard Coded

Claire Pollard — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 05:47:06 +0000

I continue to code because...

Coding enables me to solve problems at the intersection of all of my passions. I've used it to do my day job and solve technical problems in engineering, for running MTB events, hosting websites for myself and others, with my cross stitching, knitting and crafting... everything and anything!

Over the last 12 months I've become a lot more comfortable with my multi-hat approach to life and am happy to be thrashing about on a BMX track, completing my latest cross stitch and dabbling with a new language in the same day. This is mainly thanks to Emilie Wapnick's wonderful book "How to be Everything" which has helped me immensely come to terms with not having "one true calling" in life, but multiple different things I love and can work hard at.

Coding is one tool I can use for good in multiple ways.

I recently overcame...

The fear of having my career move in a direction I wasn't entirely comfortable with at the time. I initially thought moving away from coding and towards marketing would reduce my effectiveness when it came to programming and keeping up with what was happening with our product, but if anything, it's made me more excited when I return to coding that I'm more productive as a result.

I want to brag about...

Giving up my spare time to help people, however small, in their achieving their endeavors: either my fiancee with his company PiBorg, as a BMX coach at Royston Rockets, as a Guild Of Makers #MakersHour host and lending my social media skills to help Peter Jukes cover the infamous Phone Hacking Trial in the UK (which lead to me being mentioned in a book and becoming 100% recluse at the launch when Hugh Grant turned up).

My advice for allies to support women and non-binary folks who code is....

Shout about the amazing women, non-binary, fluid, trans, men or however they identify in your life. As the wonderful Tim Michin said in his UWA Address:

"Be demonstrative and generous in your praise of those you admire."

It makes them feel amazing about themselves and sometimes if things are tough for that person, one message can make the difference in turning things around and spur them on.

My advice for other women and non-binary folks who code is...

Be bold. Try new things outside of your usual comfort zone. Expect to fail sometimes. Ask for help. Use your free time to help others where possible. All of these things will lead you to interesting and exciting new places.

If you code to music, what type of music do you listen to?

Claire Pollard — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 15:29:52 +0000

After I saw the discussion about headphones I was curious... Do you have a go-to genre of music when you code or is it anything or everything?

What should you do if your company's code is stolen and being publicly reused without permission?

Claire Pollard — Sun, 07 May 2017 15:24:01 +0000

I really hate being negative on the web, it goes against every thread of my being, but something came up this weekend that really irked me.

A friend, who shall remain nameless, has spent a long time building up their company and providing code libraries for people who compete in their events. The libraries are very specific to the event, and really have taken time and effort for their developer to write (I'm talking months of development time). You pay to enter into the event and the code is given to you to use in the event exclusively. The entry fee is used to stream the events online, provide support and do all the admin for the event.

Someone who shall remain nameless, has paid to enter the event, they've taken the code libraries for the event, uploaded them to a public GitHub repo, and started running their own version of the event using the code.

My friend has approached this person and asked kindly for them to stop doing it, they did stop for a while (and kept trying to convince my friend to open source the library, which my friend didn't want to), but we have recently found out they are doing it again and running events using the code without permission.

My friend feels pretty helpless and doesn't know what to do next as the person copying the code is quite well known in their community.

What should my friend do?

UPDATE: My friend emailed the copying party and threatened DMCA and they took the Github repos down and apologised. Thank you for all your advice and support â¤ï¸

Formula Pi: Racing Software Engineers

Claire Pollard — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 20:05:30 +0000

This feels a little shameless (and a complete divergence from my previous posts), but I'm super excited about this so please forgive me!

Formula Pi is the first remote autonomous robotics racing series based on the Raspberry Pi single board computer, fairly niche I know...

I've got a fairly vested interest in the contest, and not from a developers context, but I'm the one who provides the commentary. It's terrifying and fascinating in equal measure (the racing, not my commentary).

The idea of the series is to get software engineers to compete against each other on a level playing field, i.e.: start with a library of Python code to improve how ever they choose, or start from scratch with their own language of choice, and a standardised robot which is maintained by the team at PiBorg. The races are streamed live on YouTube roughly once every two weeks.

The Python code for Formula Pi utilises the OpenCV library, a popular open source computer vision library which has a great library for manipulating image data in real time. The Formula Pi starter library uses this heavily along with Raspbian OS on the Raspberry Pi.

The first series final was broadcast in January of 2017 and featured:

The Hayler-Goodalls: A family from the UK,
The Super Ward Brothers: Brothers from the US,
Team Enigma: A team of engine specialists,
Scudaria Gato Rosso F-Pi Team: A team of ex-F1 software engineers,
RasPerras del Infierno: Friends from Spain who meet up at the pub to discuss their programming projects.

Without spoiling the final result, you can watch the final in full below:

What surprised me about the competition was the sheer variety of types of teams that entered. There were hobbyists, professionals and school children competing on a level playing field, and no one background was clearly an advantage. It made for some really exciting contests where anyone could win!

The second series is due to start testing on the 26th of April at 18:00BST and can be watched live below:

For more information on the series, head to the Formula Pi website.

Coding with Care

Claire Pollard — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 12:41:08 +0000

I like to think of myself as a hard-working person, and regularly work 14 hour days in a combination of my software developer day job, helping out my fiancÃ©e with his robotics business and volunteering in the community at my local BMX club. I very rarely fully unwind and chill out. I'm the first to admit it's not healthy and burn out is a regular worry for me, and does happen a little too often for my liking.

After the first 4 months of 2017 have flown by in a blizzard of deadlines, weekend events, hospital trips, becoming a qualified cycling coach and redesigning a couple of websites for good measure, I found myself sitting in the doctors surgery not feeling so great. Thanks to my doctor running late, I came across an interesting article on the Verge combining mindfulness and coding.

Google Developer Monica Dinculescu has designed the lovely Tiny Care Terminal, using the ever wonderful Party Parrot to help deliver useful mindfulness quotes and advice to your terminal window to gently remind you to take care of yourself when coding.

At some point we're all guilty of becoming welded to our desks and peering at emacs (other editors are available) for what seems like an eternity, whilst slumping into a heap with an awkward posture, and downing that 8th cup of coffee in the vain hope that the buzz will get us that little bit closer to the Ballmer Peak (don't drink and code kids), and we'll eventually fix whatever bug has been hassling us for days.

But with Party Parrot on hand to remind you to take a breath, practice some mindfulness techniques, and give yourself a break, we can all take a little bit better care of ourselves and attempt to de-stress from those times when professional coding gets too intense. And ultimately feel better and code more effectively. While stress can be a useful thing to have at times, too much can prevent us from thinking clearly and rationally, potentially making bugs for our future selves.

The Tiny Care Terminal pulls tips from three Twitter bot accounts, caring bots @tinycarebot, @selfcare_bot and the mysterious storytelling bot @MagicRealismBot and presents them along side to do, done, and commit lists in the terminal window. You can change which bot accounts are used for advice if you prefer a different style of messages. Whilst most of us have Twitter accounts, we don't sit glued to our feeds to catch each and every tweet that's posted, so rounding up a selection of helpful caring tweets and putting them somewhere we're looking all day just gives us a reminder to look up from our screens and breathe for a second.

As I'm still sat in the doctors waiting room (she's now 50 minutes late) I haven't had chance to try the Tiny Care Terminal for real, but I'm running to Github as soon as I'm back at my desk to get it. Well not running... But sauntering and breathing deeply :)

Does anyone else have any different techniques for relaxing whilst coding? Or work routines that help limit stress? I'd love to hear them in the comments.

Nevertheless, Claire Pollard Coded

Claire Pollard — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 17:21:39 +0000

I began coding because...

At school, I finished IT class work early and my teacher let me code in VB. IT at schools in the UK in the 90s was basically "Can you use MS Office?". So I was let loose with Visual Basic in Excel and Access...

I loved Maths the most at school, and was never really into programming as such, but my IT teacher always said to my Mum at parents evening "She'll be a programmer when she grows up".

I chose to do Mathematics at the University of Kent, but shortly into my first year I found myself enjoying the computing modules on my course, which were mainly using Maple and LaTeX. I asked to switch to a Mathematics and Computer Science course and it went from there!

My first experience of a language was Java. Bluejay was a great introduction to the idea of an IDE and writing OO code with helpful class structures visualised in the IDE. After that throughout my degree we were introduced to wide and varied set of languages; C, Haskell, Occam, C++, GAP (C for algebraists), and from this I decided academia was for me.

After completing a MSc in Pure Mathematics (with a heavy CS backbone) I enrolled at CIRCA (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra) to start a PhD in Mathematics. This didn't go quite to plan, and I left after 12 months, with little idea of what to do next.

I came full circle and started off with a job writing models for the NHS in Excel. Whilst the work was interesting, there was a lot of politics both in our office and in the NHS. This made the work hard going, so I left.

After looking for a new job, I accidented upon a company looking for programmers with a strong mathematical background. I went for interview and was offered a place after a couple of days, and I've now been working at ITI for nearly 6 years. CADfix is a CAD translation package used to repair CAD models or prepare them for some sort of downstream application, such as CFD, CAE or another CAD package. I work on designing algorithms for geometry manipulation and improving existing tools. We work with a host of engineering companies from multiple areas of industry. Aerospace is our main sector, but we also have customers in civil engineering, 3D printing and automotive.

Since being a developer here I've taken on a role which sits between the developers and the marketing team to help generate interesting content for our customers (my time is split 80/20 towards programming). Having an ear on what marketing and sales are hearing from the market can help us develop tools which are actually useful in the real world, and it's important that developers help marketing/sales explain what great tools we have on offer, it should never be the sole responsibility of the marketing team to explain your code.

I'm currently hacking on...

Apart from my work on ITI' CADfix product, I help my fiancee with his business PiBorg who create add on boards for the Raspberry Pi. Being part of that community has helped me feel more confident as a programmer in my own right, as they promote inclusiveness and really are spearheading the movement to help make engineering/computing a more diverse industry to work in. If there is a Raspberry Jam or Code Club near you soon, I strongly advise anyone to go along and take part, you can really make a difference by being a role model for other young coders. For more info head to Raspberry Pi Community.

I'm excited about...

... tech in general!

I love seeing how technologies new and old are being applied in interesting and varied ways. Particularly autonomous robotics (self driving cars and warehouse robotics are fascinating) and new technologies in CFD to do with modelling in high-orders beyond standard linear models is really cool and something I'm excited to be learning more and more about each day.

My advice for other women who code is...

Try to be a positive role model to all coders from all backgrounds. Keep being true to yourself and never give up. Also try things that are outside your usual comfort zone, even just a little bit. Where they lead you to might be surprising!

Hi, I'm Claire Pollard, or Tufty to my friends.

Claire Pollard — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 16:45:51 +0000

I have been coding for 17 years and professionally for a little over 6 years.

You can find me on Twitter as @thetuftii

I live in Cambridge, UK.

I work for ITI developing algorithms for our product CADfix. I also liase between the marketing team and development team to help provide a technical slant to our blogging/web content.

I mostly program in these languages: FORTRAN, C/C++ and a smattering of Python and TCL.

I am currently learning more about Wordpress for web development and website management. Learning CSS, HTML, JS, MySQL and PHP as a nice side effect of this.

Looking forward to learning more on DEV.to!