A Bit Of A Rant But Why In The Hell Are Technical Information Technology (not Management) Degrees In

Academic advice that you must remember while you follow the "aesthetic"

romanticising school and studies by using aesthetics (i.e. Dark academia, art academia, chaotic academia, etc) is really helpful for motivation, but there are many things you must keep inmind

★ Stop romanticism of insomnia. I mostly blame dark academia fanatics for this (not all, but most). in order to remember what you have studied properly as the brain absorbs the information you studied while your sleeping and it maintains a good mental health. Put an end to the "sleep is for the weak" mindset. Cause no sleep actually makes you weak.

★ stop worrying about not having aesthetic notes with colourful pens, heading and doodles like you see in the "study with me videos". It doesn't matter how it looks, as long as you understand, that's the whole point of having notes in the first place. To study, it's not an assignment or project for you to spent hours switching between pens and markers.

Partly people are so deep focused on making everything look "aesthetic" and forget to study, which was supposed to be the main priority.

★ if you get a bad grade once in a while, don't get demotivated. Sometimes no matter how hard you study you won't get the result you want, it might sound cliché but all you can do is try again. No matter how good someone's grades are, these is always a moment where they get a low grade for wherever reason, instead of taking that as a cue to give up, take it as an opportunity to bounce back

(remember, some study hacks may work for some people but it won't work for everyone, so try to find a method that's best suitable for you)

★ Put you phone away when your studying, it's a huge distraction (wow mom was right) now, if your study materials are in your phone or you study through YouTube, then i suggest you turn off you notifications of social media apps (i.e YouTube, Instagram and even Tumblr)

Also not a study advice, but avoid using your phone when your eating, pls it's for you own good, and stop creating fake scenarios when you sleep, it's the reason you can't sleep dummy

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

the average human lifespan globally is 70+ years

taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult

at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)

'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65

it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age

it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.

you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, be fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.

young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!

there are a million things to do in the world, and they don't vanish overnight because an imaginary number gets too big

28.04.2024 // starting my morning off in this gorgeous coffee shop (where I feel like I’ve already become a regular)

The women who laid the foundation of tech

EDIT: I noticed that this post ended up being reblogged by terfs. If you're transphobic this post is not for you to reblog. I want to celebrate everyone who is not a cis man in this industry, including trans women and nonbinary people in tech, and it was my mistake to only include cis women in this post when there are so many trans women and nonbinary people who have done great things in tech as well. Trans women are women and just as important.

Here you can read about trans ppl in tech, and please do:

https://www.thecodingspace.com/blog/2022-03-01-six-trans-programmers-who-shattered-the-lavender-ceiling/

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/transgender-tech-visibility-obstacles-remain/story?id=76374628

The morning of women's day i attended a super inspiring seminar about being a woman in tech at a large tech company in my city, and now I'm inspired to share what I learned with all of you!

I didn't have time to finish this post on women's day, but it's not too late to post now: every day is a day to celebrate women!

Women actually laid the foundation for a lot of the tech industry.

For example, the first computer, ENIAC, was programmed completely by women! While men were the behind the scenes engineers, it was women who did all the actual programming of ENIAC.

The women who made up the team responsible for programming it were called Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances V. Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum.

I think one woman who is finally getting her overdue recognition is Ada Lovelace. She was a mathematician (also often referred to as the first programmer) who created the first algorithm in 1842, which wasn't recognized until 1953! However, since none of her machines were ever completed it was never tested in practice during her time.

She has since been celebrated by giants such as google, and she has given name to a programming language (Ada). She was also the first person to write about what is today known as AI. Back when she was practicing, computers were simply thought of as calculators. But she had an idea that if computers can understand numbers, then that can be translated to letters, and in turn that can lead to computers being able to handle words, and eventually even write, draw and create music.

Hedy Lamarr was a famous Hollywood actress in the 40's, but she was also an inventor who laid ground for what we use today for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS services.

During WW2 she wanted to contribute positviely to the military efforts against the Nazis, and she tried to figure out how to radio control torpedoes. In 1942 she patented her technology "Secret Communications System", also known as frequency hopping, which laid the foundation for the technology we use today for Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. It wasn't until 1962 that it was first used for its intended purpose, during the cuban missile crisis.

Grace Hopper invented the first compiler, called A-0, in 1955, and was also part of the Univac team, which was the company also responsible for building ENIAC. She also initiated work on the COBOL programming language.

She was also the one to coin the term "bug" in 1947. Computers back then had lights to visualize their working process (which was also a womans idea to implement btw) and bugs would be attracted to the lights, but usually that was no issue - until a bug made its way into a tube which caused the computer to stop working. Hopper taped the bug to a piece of paper and logged what caused the crash - a bug.

Dorothy Vaughan (left), alongside colleagues such as Katherine Johnson (middle) and Mary Jackson (right), was a mathematician at NASA (called NACA when she started) who worked on the orbit for the first ever manned spaceflight and later also on Apollo 11 that would take humanity to the moon!

When Vaughan started at what was then called NACA, segregation was still prevalent in the US and she was not allowed in the same areas in the office as her white colleagues. Another department was formed for the black staff, and when the director of said department unexpectedly died, she was appointed as the new director and thus became the first ever black woman at that position at NACA/NASA. In 1958 when NACA becomes NASA segregation is forbidden, and that is when Vaughan and her colleagues Johnson and Jackson started working on programming the orbit and later also Apollo 11.

Continuing on the same track of NASA and space, Margaret Hamilton was the Apollo project's first actual programmer. Hamilton became the director of software engineering at NASA in 1965, and she was also the person to first coin the term !

In the image above, she stands next to all the handwritten code that was used to send humanity to the moon. During the early stages of the project when she would speak of "sofware engineering", software development was not taken as seriously as other forms of engineering, and it wasn't regarded as a science, either. She wanted to legitimize software development as an engineering discipline, and overtime the term "software engineering" gained the same respect as any other technical discipline.

And lastly, if you're a woman in STEM, I want to highlight and celebrate you! Being a woman in a male dominated industry is not easy, we often suffer from sterotype threat and are not seen as our own individuals, but rather "the woman" in a room full of men. But just as these women, I'm sure you will achieve greatness!!

Here are some additional resources if you'd like to learn more:

nytimes.com

The Secret History of Women in Coding (Published 2019)

Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?

en.wikipedia.org

Women in computing - Wikipedia

https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued

https://digitalfuturesociety.com/programming-when-did-womens-work-become-a-mans-world/

And this was mainly my source for this post, but it's unfortunately only available in Swedish:

Internetmuseum

Datadamer | Internetmuseum

Teknikhistorien är full av kvinnliga pionjärer. Vi lyfter fram kvinnorna som gjort världen lite mer digital.

Thank you for reading ✨

~ 100 days of productivity challenge 2/100~

Skipped yesterday because I didn't feel like a human and didn't do much today because I had work and workout class afterwards.

Done

30 minutes of Network+ exam videos

Did the dishes

Went to taekwondo class

Workwise: three meetings and a metric ton of emails

To Do

Sweep the floors

Do the dishes again

Review study guide for Network+

“My main goal in life right now is to be happy.. thats all”

— Unknown

~1/100 days of productivity~

attempting the 100 days of productivity challenge to hold myself accountable for school :)

accomplished

meal prepped for lunches this week

studied network+ certification material for 2.5 hours

did dishes and reorganized bakeware cabinet

started laundry

to do tomorrow

finish 2 more exam objective videos

fix squeaky bed 💀

read three chapters of latest read

clean altar

2025, week 1 (dec 30th - jan 5th) ✨

for this year, I felt inspired to take a page out of @lostlibrariangirl's book and try weekly posts! I like the idea of collecting little moments throughout the week & reflecting on them at the end.

this week was very strange and kind of difficult, tbh. I blame new year's day falling in the middle of the week - my routine-loving brain did not have a good time haha. I was also struggling to get some work projects done. I find that some projects flow really well, and others seem to drag on forever and make me question my purpose, but I suppose it all balances out in the end. I'm hoping that things will feel more normal next week, now that all the holidays are over. swinging between feeling super exhausted and super motivated is not fun :(

one of the things that I did this week was fill out a goals page in my 2025 planner! I wrote down a lot, but I think they're all achievable, and it's okay if I don't get everything! it'll still be nice to look back at the end of the year and see what I've done. there are some cybersecurity courses that I want to work through, and I want to properly get back into language learning this year, but I wrote down some fun goals, too! here is a small selection of what I want to try and do in 2025:

complete the TCM Practical Malware Analysis and Triage course

read a book in Spanish

reach 50 birds on my life list (this is a totally arbitrary number, but that's like 1-2 new birds per month which I think I can do if I really try) (a subgoal of this is trying to spot an american woodcock bc their range technically overlaps with where I live and they are so goofy looking. I want to see one of them doing that funky lil dance in person so bad)

mend at least 1 item of clothing

get a technician amateur radio license (everyone on my dad's side of the family is licensed, and I think it would be a fun hobby to get into as a combo of learning the science behind radio & also learning to help with communications from a disaster preparedness perspective)

I think 2025 is going to be a year where I have to keep reminding myself that I can do anything, but not everything. I also want to make it a year of reaching out and forging connections with people in my community & online friends. the world feels like a very heavy place more days than not, but we can get through it together.

some highlights from this week:

drinking lots of tea

settling into my 2025 planner

getting back into language learning with clozemaster & busuu

outlining & starting the first draft of a fic that's taken over my brain the past few weeks lol

finishing two projects at work so I can start fresh next week