I’m feeling so lucky to be a recent graduate of the Google Women Developer Academy! It makes so much sense to tackle the issue of representation of women at tech conferences by proactively encouraging existing women in tech to be the ones to appear at tech conferences. Well done Google for recognising the problem and for putting resources behind it to help fix it!
So I was one of these lucky people that was admitted into the academy. Over the course of 5 weeks we learnt about how to choose a topic to present, how to write and deliver your…
I’ve been speaking a lot about accessibility recently.
I hold two main beliefs on the topic:
1 — Accessibility is important, just as important as performance, or security or any other engineering constraint. It’s also really really important to your users, ‘disabled’ or not. If people (engineers, designers, product managers) felt how important it was, particularly for those who rely on it, then the web would be a much more accessible place.
So the goal of this blog is to convince you that accessibility is important and that you should put thought into ensuring whatever you are building is accessible…
I’m no longer ashamed of the fact that I first came to learn to code at the darkest point in my life.
For other people, perhaps going through similarly dark times, pandemic related or otherwise, I wanted to share how learning to code pulled me out of a difficult place.
Frequent Small Wins
Web accessibility is important. (If you don’t believe me I wrote this blog post to convince you!) Here are 5 simple checks that there are no excuses for not doing. Do not push to production until you can check off every one of these!
1. Look at the HTML of your page
Are the headings in the correct order?
This is often easy to get wrong, particularly if you are using components that dictate the heading level. Make sure that you only have one h1 on your page and it holds the most important information for your page. This will help somebody accessing your site via a screen reader to navigate your page. …
I recently decided to see what I could do with Amazon’s Alexa Skills development platform. Here’s what I found — and how to get started yourself.
You don’t have to look far to see how prevalent voice assistants are becoming. Voice assistants on smartphones, desktop computers, and home appliances have reached mainstream adoption, and other applications are set to follow. You’ll find voice recognition in your car and even in the lab, and the list of applications is growing exponentially. By 2021, voice assistants will outnumber the world’s population, at around eight billion devices. By 2022, voice shopping is…
A few months back I started experimenting with building voice assistants. (You can follow my journey here, or in Spanish here.) I’ve said before (here) how much I love this technology, but I feel like I’m in the minority.
I set up a Google Alert for when a new article pops up about voice assistants and an overwhelming percentage of these articles seem to be negative, focussing on how people are nervous about how this technology records you, and what the companies who build this technology do with those recordings. …
I’m now a year on from graduating from General Assembly’s Web Development Immersive course (now Software Engineering Immersive), and starting my new career at BCG Digital Ventures. Here are my takeaways from the past year.
Experience is as valuable as knowledge — it takes time
A year or two ago a computer was a word processor and perhaps Google to me. That’s pretty much where my computer knowledge ended. A year later and I am building digital products for big deal clients. That is mind blowing.
But it’s so easy to forget how far you’ve come and what you have achieved in a very short space of time and it’s…
¡Lo hiciste!
- Ya sabes cómo funciona Alexa y cómo configurar tu Skill en la Alexa Console developer.
- Además, ya has creado un endpoint, en nuestro caso, esta fue una función Lambda en AWS.
- También saber cómo escribir la función Lambda — básica y personalizada .
- Has probado tu skill.
- Ahora lo único que falta es poner en la Skill Store tu Skill, para que todos puedan usarla.
Esta es probablemente la parte más fácil de desarrollar tu skill ya que Amazon te acompaña en todo el proceso. Incluso si su skill termina fallando en el proceso de certificación de Alexa, he descubierto…
Hasta ahora he explicado cómo funciona Alexa y cómo configurar su habilidad en la Consola de desarrollador de Alexa . Luego creamos el endpoint, en nuestro caso esta fue una función Lambda en AWS. A continuación, te enseñé a escribir la función Lambda en estos dos artículos: básico y personalizado . Ahora es el momento de probar tu skill antes de implementarla en la Skill Store. Para ello:
- Vuelve a la Consola Lambda. Visita mi artículo si estás un poco perdido.
- Encuentra la función en la que has estado trabajando.
- En el cuadro Código de función, todo lo que tienes…
It is generally agreed by most studies that women make up fewer than 20% of those working in tech. Whilst we might might not have the solution to redress this balance, here are a a few thoughts on small things that would make a huge difference.
1. Remember that women work in tech too
When I first started going to women-in-tech meetups, so many women told me the same story. It goes something like this.
You’re at a tech conference, and as usual, women are grossly under-represented. I’ve been to some conferences attended by literally hundreds of people and only a small handful of women. Man after man…
