Her Secret to Success

By -
I have finished reading Kurt W. Beyer's book titled "Grace Hopper And The Invention of The Information Age."
Naturally I want to know what is the secret Grace Hopper succeeded in her career. The book gave a wonderful presentation about Grace Hopper's career life. At the end of the book, it summarized several reasons that can contribute to the success of Grace Hopper. I am impressed by three listed in the book. First, she empowered youth, which seemed non-intuitive but also used by both Microsoft and Google and etc. She felt the young, inexperienced programmers can approach problems beyond "what is" and grasp "what could be". Second, since youth is fleeting, she had learned from margins during her career life. She mastered mathematics, military, insurance, aerospace engineering, etc., which resulted her intellectually informed mind was ready to approach any problem from a various of angels. And the last but not the least she embraced distributed inventions. She had emphasized collaboration since she started her computing career in Navy when she was programming in Mark 1 using machine language. And she played an essential role to collaboratively invent COBOL. What a wonderful career! And what a great human being!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

25 Google Interview Questions

By -
1 Prepare Before Your Interview Do you prepare before your interview at Google? Of course you will. But how and where to start? This report will provide you a list of 25 questions collected from Web provided by Google interview candidates. The list of questions is focus on CS fields. 2 Questions The question listed as follows are not ordered based on any criterion. The programming languages are required to be used are usually not specific. You can practice using Java, C++, C, C#, etc. For each problem, you need figure out at least one solution. If there are multiple solutions to the problem, make sure you understand how to analyze the efficiency (both time and space). Describe a data structure as well as operations on the data structure. What is the difference between function overloading and overriding? Given a superclass A, a subclass B of superclass A where B overrides a function foo() in A, an instance of class B, how to invoke foo() defined in class A? How to check if tw
Read more

Convert LaTeX to HTML

By -
Today I spent quite lots of time to figure out how to convert LaTeX source files to HTML documents. I was trying to install latex2html using fink . The installation of tetex-base failed quite a few times. Eventually I got latex2html installed using fink . Unfortunately, the conversion from my tex files to HTML documents again failed to read document parts. I finally gave up and remove my fink installations from my computer. I then did a few minute google search to use htlatex from TeXShop since I have TeXShop installed in my Macbook. What I did is copy the file htlatex.engine from /Applications/Tex/TeXShop.app/Contents/Resources/TeXShop/Engines/Inactive/TeX4ht/ into folder /Users/ /Library/TeXShop/Engines/ Then, I am able to compile my tex files using htlatex in TeXShop . It works perfect!
Read more

Art of Software Development

By -
Image
New York City artist  Nathan Sawaya   exhibited the following art piece of Lego art.  I guess everyone knows to how to connect, manipulate lego pieces.  But only artists like Nathan Sawaya can make such art from the ordinary lego bricks.   We study software development by learning programming languages, tools, methods, ways of thinking, etc.  These topics are normally covered in computing-related curricula.  We also know that experiences are very important ingredient to master programming.  Exactly how all of them work together to upgrade software developers?  What is the journey by which a programmer can reach the mastery of programming or coding and produce art pieces of software?   
Read more