Tag Archives: technology

My Nerd Story: Ham Radio, Atari, and UNIX

First, a huge thank you to Crystal Beasley for encouraging me, and others, to get organized and write our nerd stories in the aftermath of the recent comments from Paul Graham.

My geek story started early, probably because my dad and grandfather were into amateur radio (ham radio) in a pretty hard core way from the time I was little. I remember my dad studying for one of the morse code exams when I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, and me being the little sponge that I was, picked it up pretty easily. Nothing like a mouthy toddler shouting the answers to motivate someone to learn. 🙂

My parents got divorced a year or two later, and a few years after that we moved onto my step-dad’s farm. I was in 4th grade at the time, which I guess would make me about 9, and it was in a rural area where people just didn’t have any extra money lying around for luxuries. It was also the late 70’s / early 80’s when computers and related technology were pretty uncommon in most houses, since this was before the PC era and way before most people had any type of online access.

Atari 400 ComputerAround this time, dad bought us an Atari 400 for Christmas. At the time, we didn’t know anyone else near where we lived who had a computer at home. I eagerly started playing games (pirated copies on tapes that required a lot of patience to load), and I got my first taste of programming. As a side note, the Atari 400 had one of the worst keyboard designs ever, the membrane keyboard, which prevented accurate typing, and as a bonus, random keys would occasionally just stop working, but I stubbornly persisted. After seeing my interest in programming, Dad later upgraded us to the Atari 800.

Atari DOSKeep in mind that this was before Windows and other modern user interfaces. There was no mouse and no point and click interface. The operating systems of the time were pretty limited, and programming was typically done in BASIC. Since we didn’t see our dad very often, and my mom and step-dad didn’t know anything about computers, I had to figure it out myself. I started by typing in programs from books or magazines (like Byte), and I began to make small changes just to see what else I could make it do. A lot of it was trial and error, but it didn’t take long for me to start writing new programs.

My dad and grandfather got more and more into computers throughout the years with my dad turning it into a career later in life. My grandfather even built some of his own computers, which he used as part of his ham radio setup. My grandfather also helped my study for my amateur radio exam, and I went on to get my ham radio license (KB8AGX) in 1986, which I continue to renew every 10 years just to keep the geek cred. 🙂

When I went to college in 1989, I started as a math major with plans to teach high school math (my favorite subject in high school). I took an Introduction to Programming class (required for the math degree), which was a Pascal class taught on a VAX/VMS system. As part of the class, we each received a temporary email address (which was deleted at the end of the semester), and I used it to email my grandfather (the only person I knew outside of the university with an email address)!

About 4 years later, I was almost done with my math degree (12 credits away from graduation – all I had to do was a semester of student teaching) when I realized that I didn’t want to teach (I’m not particularly good with kids). It was around 1993 and computers were getting a lot more attention. I remembered how much I enjoyed programming, so I changed my major to computer science. The computer science department at Kent State University was part of the math college, and it had a lot of math courses as part of the curriculum, so I was already most of the way there. Since I had taken so many of the required courses already, I was able to get through the computer science program in 3 or 4 semesters. By that time, the computer science department had moved to UNIX (mostly SunOS). I took assembly language programming, built a little operating system, wrote a compiler and took a variety of other computer classes, but my favorite was a UNIX system administration course taught by one of our university sys admins. This led to my very first job in 1995 as a UNIX system administrator for a manufacturing company in Ohio.

Since then, I’ve done a little of everything: system administration, programming, project management, market research, people management, and much more. I’ve worked for companies ranging from tiny startups to huge companies, like Intel. I finally settled into a comfortable little niche of community management with a focus on technical communities and open source communities, and since community manager is a broad role, I get to dabble in all kinds of different things. It’s also one of those fields where every day is different, which suits me perfectly!

Where I grew up, most of the people I knew worked on farms or in factories, and college degrees weren’t very common. I knew that I wanted to go to college, move to a city and be able to support myself. When I graduated and got that first tech job, I thought of it as a good job that would pay my bills. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that my computer science degree and the career that followed would completely change my life.

I’ve traveled all over the world as a part of my job: China, South Korea, Brazil, and all over Europe. I’ve presented at more conferences than I can count: SXSW in Austin; OSCON in Portland; various LinuxCon events in Prague, New Orleans, Edinburgh, Barcelona, etc.; FOSDEM in Brussels; and many more. Because I’ve been to so many conferences and have managed global open source communities, I can travel to most locations around the world and visit people that I know. I also have an amazing group of friends here in Portland, and I met most of them through the local technology community.

Dawn Foster and Jimmy Wales

I feel tremendously fortunate to have this opportunity to work in a field that I love while doing interesting things that a younger me could not have ever imagined would be part of my daily job.

I’d like to end my nerd story with some advice for how other young people, especially women, can make their own nerd story:

  • Do some programming – on your own, in a class, or as a technology major of some form. Try a few things, and find something you enjoy.
  • Use internships as a way to try out a few companies / jobs, but get paid for them (do not take a free internship doing tech work)! It’s a great way to try out a job and a company with little risk, since they are usually a 3 month gig. If it goes well, and you enjoy it, your chances of getting hired by that company are good.
  • Pick a topic you are interested in and speak about it at a conference. Most of my career opportunities are a result of speaking at conferences.
  • Watch my recent presentation about building a successful technology career for other tips.

So what now? Share this story and others on the social media platform of your choice, encourage other women to write their stories, or blog about your nerd origins and share it with the hashtag #mynerdstory. You can also check out the My Nerd Story Facebook page.

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Communities as Games

Social networking sites (Digg, Facebook, and YouTube) can be thought of as games with goals, actions, play, strategies, and rewards. This idea comes from C. Weng’s free e-book, The Web: Hidden Games. On Read/WriteWeb yesterday, Richard MacManus talked about these Social Websites as Games:

The e-book goes on to tell you how to “win” at Digg and notes that “like all games, Digg’s system can be cheated.” It also compares YouTube to chess: “there are an infinite number of ways to win in YouTube but it only occurs under certain conditions. Every single method, strategy, and theory leads back to the essential factor: getting people to view your videos.” And as for Facebook, it is compared to The Sims: “The object of the game is more to monitor or to guide characters in daily life rather than to win at something. There’s no simple goal in sight but it is all about the process of playing.”

(Quoted from by Richard MacManus on Read/WriteWeb)

I think this idea extends past social websites and into communities as well. I recently blogged about using reputation systems in communities with a discussion about people can game community reputation systems. The important thing to recognize is whether people are gaming the system in a productive manner that helps the community or in a destructive way that serves only to clutter the community with worthless chatter that annoys other members.

Thinking about the community as a game where you can accumulate points and status can help the community when members use the points as incentives to post productive content and answer questions from other members. This productive gaming serves to improve the content within the community.

The danger with reputation systems (and social networking sites, like Digg) is when the gaming becomes destructive. In communities, people can post worthless one-line responses to discussions that add nothing to the conversations, but act only to accumulate points. In Digg, people can get together to Digg worthless stories to the home page solely to generate advertising revenue for the owner of the site.

The key, as I’ve mentioned before, is transparency and proactive adjustments. Community reputation systems can be adjusted to help prevent people from accumulating any significant amount of points just for responding to discussions without meaningful content. Digg has continually adjusted their algorithms to help prevent gaming. It is also important to recognize that no technical solution can entirely prevent gaming of reputation systems or social websites. Because you cannot entirely prevent it, transparency is the key to making sure that other people can see which members are gaming the system. As a community member, if I can see that all of Joe’s posts are one line responses of the “great post” or “thanks for the info” variety, I will start to ignore his responses, and if the system lets me block him from my view, I may chose to exclude his responses. On a site like Digg, I may also chose to block stories submitted by a user who always submits stories from a couple of sites (probably his sites).

I like reputation systems and think that they can be used productively in communities if monitored carefully. People are motivated in many different ways. While some community members will contribute freely without any reward for their effort, others will contribute more often if they can see some tangible rewards for their contribution.

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