Women Who Code 2016 Conference - Takeaways

April 29, 2016 - 4 minutes

Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Women Who Code CONNECT conference in Seattle. It was a two-day-long technical conference featuring a ton of awesome technical and career talks from inspiring women in tech, plus workshops and networking and all that good stuff. All the speakers were fantastic. Some of the highlights for me were Maira Benjamin, Director of Engineer at Pandora, who shared some of the valuable lessons she learned during her 30 years as a woman in tech; Neha Batra from Pivotal Labs, who did a tech talk on pair programming that convinced me that I really want to try it; and Nandini Ramani, VP of Engineering at Twitter, who shared her compelling life story and lessons her grandmother in India taught her.
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Career Conferences

No laziness allowed with Entity Framework 7 beta

December 5, 2015 - 3 minutes

If you’ve worked with .NET before, you’ve probably run across Entity Framework (EF) – a tool that essentially helps you map entities to data. For example, a project that I’ve been working on in order to get up to speed with the new .NET 5 and EF 7 beta releases is a simple recipe web app that lets you create, edit, and view recipes. For the recipes to be saved somewhere, I’m using EF to map the recipe model properties to columns in a database table.
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The new ASP.NET 5 and why it's awesome

April 9, 2015 - 1 minutes

So Microsoft is coming out with a new version of the ASP.NET framework, and I am excited! Here’s why: It’s open-source. That’s awesome, and a pretty radical shift for Microsoft. Web Forms are going away. Need I say more? It’s cross-platform. Meaning it can now run on Linux, yay! (Mac too, for you Apple fans.) It’s lightweight and modular. No word yet on just how much more so, but it looks promising.
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Musings Uncategorized

What you didn't learn in your CS program

March 17, 2015 - 4 minutes

When I started my first software development internship a few years ago, I was immediately overwhelmed by just how unprepared I was. There was a whole environment to set up with lots of tools I’d never heard of, a large unfamiliar codebase, and layers of abstraction in the code, not to mention SCRUM processes and meetings. Sure, I’d learned a bit of version control (in class it was the rather outdated CVS, although I dabbled a bit with Git in my own time since I’d heard it was useful), and the concept of abstraction had maybe been mentioned by a teacher.
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Career Educational Musings

The magic of PHPMailer

November 10, 2013 - 2 minutes

Recently I updated the website for my club, the Association for Women in Computing at WWU, to send e-mails via PHPMailer. We have a contact form with the usual subject, content, name, etc. and want to send all that to our e-mail address. The previous e-mail system went through the school’s network and was very much broken, so it was in need of a good fix. It was easier than I thought it would be, mostly just building some basic PHPMailer code.
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Educational

Generating one-time passwords using the SHA-256 hash function

March 12, 2013 - 3 minutes

A one-time password (OTP), in the realm of computer security, is a password that is only valid once and expires as soon as it is used. OTPs are important because they provide an added layer of security to many systems, especially since they are invulnerable to replay attacks. My latest project was to make a Java program that could generate OTPs using the SHA-256 hash function. SHA, designed by the NSA, stands for Secure Hash Algorithm and serves to hash a dataset of any size into a fixed-size output (256 bits, in this case).
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An Intro to Linux Mint

January 29, 2013 - 2 minutes

First released in 2006, Linux Mint is a “flavor” of the Unix-like operating system Linux that has gained widespread popularity and continues to be one of the easiest versions of Linux for beginners to use. Mint is based on another popular and widely-used Linux flavor, Ubuntu, but differs in that it comes with pre-installed software and plugins so that it is functional directly out-of-the-box. This feature is extremely appealing to new users of Linux who don’t want to experience the hassle of figuring out how to download and install this software themselves on an unfamiliar new environment.
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Welcome to Cryptic Coding

December 24, 2012 - 1 minutes

I feel like I should write something spectacular for the inaugural post of this blog, but since nothing particularly grand is coming to mind, this will have to serve as a placeholder. So welcome to my programming and technology musings!
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Uncategorized