Ride Sally Ride

It's good to be back on blogger. This will be a long-winded blog because I don't have time to make it concise. :-) I've been thinking a lot about the space program lately. The picture from 1983 shows astronaut Sally Ride working on a mission sequence test for STS-7 at the Kennedy Space Center's vertical processing facility. She is with Anna Fisher, a physician and astronaut.

It's been an interesting week for me personally. I spent the week in a terrific class on enterprise architecture. The instructor and all the students were amazingly smart. They work with very large companies on challenging information technology problems and it was a joy to be able to participate in a class with them. The instructor was highly intelligent, knowledgeable, and a good presenter and teacher.

One of the examples that the instructor used to help us understand stakeholders and their concerns (an important step for enterprise architecture projects) was President Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s. (Who were the stakeholder? The vice-president perhaps? Why was mission control in Texas? The Navy? Why was there an oceanic landing?) Now, to get to my point, the instructor said the requirements for an astronaut were a man who was good at science and engineering, a pilot, and capable of fixing things in case something went wrong. Now, for the entire class, I had kept my mouth closed regarding all the examples referring to managers and architects as males, because it didn't really matter. The meaning was clear. "He" was shorthand for "he or she." Plus I was the only woman in the room and it would have seemed petty to comment. But this statement really confused me. Although I haven't been able to confirm this, I'm pretty sure, even back in the 1960s, the requirement wasn't that the astronaut be a man. Does anyone know? Post a comment on my blog if you do! Thanks.

Another reason I've been thinking about the space program is because I think we are again in need of a challenge like Kennedy's goal to land a person on the moon by the end of the decade (or at least beat the Russians to it). We need something today to get school kids (both girls and boys) excited about math and science again. I remember in 4th grade poring over the Weekly Reader articles that talked about space travel. I was thrilled at the idea that I personally could go to space (I hope I still can). I remember our teachers teaching us "new math" because it was somehow important for the future. I loved Venn diagrams, set theory, base 2 (binary!), and Boolean logic. Usually we did "new math" for a couple weeks and then the teachers scuttled back to making us memorize multiplication tables when they found themselves too far outside their comfort zones, but that's OK.

"New math" was introduced in the U.S. shortly after the Sputnik crisis with a goal of boosting science and math education so that the intellectual threat of Soviet engineers, reputedly highly skilled mathematicians, could be met. What do we need in 2009 to help us boost our math and science skills while also helping us with an important, challenging problem that threatens our economy and national security? I think it's our dependence on fossil fuels. Let's get girls and boys excited about math and science again by getting them excited about harnessing different energy sources, whether it's solar, wind, nuclear, or something that is still just a gleam in the eye of a little girl in 4th grade.

Happy 25th Birthday, Macintosh!

This photo shows part of the Mac team, including Steve Jobs at the piano. In the back you can see the pirate flag which flew over the Mac building (except when the Lisa team stole it!)

The Macintosh was introduced on January 24th, 1984, at Flint Center in Cupertino, CA, 25 years ago today. I was there. I rode my bicycle to Flint Center from my apartment in Cupertino. My boyfriend, Alan, who later became my husband, rode with me. He was worried there would be traffic and didn't want to drive. This has been a theme of our marriage. My husband hates traffic. Alan got to sit pretty near the front, as I recall, because he had done some work on the Macintosh. I was on the wrong team. I was a software developer for the Lisa computer, the clunky business machine that wasn't a commercial success. I had to sit in the balcony.

A few months after the Mac shipped, I got one in my office! One of the first Macintosh programs I wrote let Lisa talk to it. I designed a protocol to send messages across a serial link between the two. Instant messaging in the 1980s! To demonstrate my software, I had the Lisa send the commands necessary to put up a dialog box with text in it on the Mac screen. My first message from Lisa to Mac was, "You little squirt. You think you're something, don't you? :-)"

I clearly remember some parts of January 24th, 1984. I remember Steve Jobs walking onto the stage at Flint Center, wearing a suit and bow tie, looking like he had a card up his sleeve. He's a master showman. He slowed the show down and recited some lines from Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changing.'' Then he walked over to a rectangular canvass carrying case. He reached in and pulled out the most adorable computer ever invented, the first Macintosh. Jobs inserted a floppy disk and flipped a switch to boot the computer. A smiley face came on the screen and the little computer spoke: "Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag!" The audience went wild. We cheered and clapped and stamped our feet. Even the Lisa team.

Female Makers of Things

Let's not forget the women who are makers of things. The actress Hedy Lamarr (1913-2000), shown in the picture on the left, helped invent frequency hopping used by wireless networks and cell phones. Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), sometimes considered the first programmer, helped Charles Babbage create a design for an analytical engine capable of "developping [sic] and tabulating any function whatever." Admiral Grace Hopper invented the compiler and Frances Allen creates compiler optimization algorithms. Dame Wendy Hall helps run the Web Science Research Initiative. The list goes on and on.

Perhaps there are indeed innate differences between men and women, as Larry Summers so infamously claimed when he was President of Harvard University, and how terrific it would be if engineering fields could take advantage of women's special abilities. There's much work to be done and many problems to be solved. Men can't do it alone and it's time to make better use of women's abilities and skills.

From my unscientific study of women, I have deduced that women tend to communicate effectively with colleagues and customers, leaving egos aside and focusing on the problem to be solved. Talking, collaborating, consoling, analyzing relationships to make them better -- we start doing that in grade school. Those skills make us good at engineering and computer science. Not only can we work together well, but we have abilities and skills that help us quickly understand how computers talk to each other in a network and how software modules integrate with each other to accomplish a task.

Our empathy with humans helps us build effective user interfaces. (Wouldn't it be nice if more error messages on computers were written by women? Would the messages tend to say things like, "May we suggest that you type such-and-such and click OK" instead of "Input error, continue or abort?" :-)

Women often have superb analytical skills, which come in handy at the beginning of a project when goals are being set. They don't jump in and start coding. They analyze the problem, the options for solving it, and the process for selecting the best solution. They implement clean, efficient designs and then are persistent debuggers. They don't declare a project complete until the outcomes have been thoroughly tested. In other words, I think women are innately good at engineering and a good fit for my blog topic, the makers of things.

The Makers of Things

My husband, Alan, and I were struck by how inspirational as well as inclusive President Obama's speech was. We got renewed inspiration to continue our careers as nerds who make things by this paragraph:

"Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom."

Obama's speech indirectly mentioned people from all walks of life -- scientists, educators, farmers, and yes, engineers! If you are one, you know what I mean. Engineers make things.

I used to be an engineer, and I sort of consider myself one still, even though these days my creations consist mostly of training classes and websites, rather than the software or network designs that I used to develop. (I'm getting TOGAF-certified next week, though, for what it's worth. The A in TOGAF is for architecture, which is similar to engineering, though different also).

What does engineering mean exactly? What makes a good engineer, I wonder? Persistence, problem-solving skills, a structured mind that thinks in terms of systems are all required qualities. What else?

A good engineer designs systems that are maintainable, scalable, usable, affordable, and safe. A good engineer analyzes requirements and constraints and develops a system that meets specified objectives. Good engineers test their designs in a systematic way and optimize the results if the performance needs tweaking. Good engineers have criteria for recognizing when a test succeeds. What else can we say about engineers? They make good spouses, lovers, and friends, even though many of them don't have good social skills. But they know how stuff works and can fix broken things. They are reliable, realistic, knowledgeable, helpful, and in my opinion, great fun to be around!

Artists make creations that delight the senses and evoke emotions, but if they also apply science and technology to the development of systems that meet stated objectives, then they are engineers. They are the makers of things.