How I Got Into Computing

Following Wendy Tan White's blog post and the suggestion by Hannah Dee that BCSWomen should follow suit and share their stories I thought I'd write how I got into computing.

Maths and science were always my favourite subjects at school and, having grown up with an engineer father, decided that I'd like to follow suit. I had my one and only encounter with a careers advisor just before I started A levels. When I said that I was thinking of doing engineering he suggested that pharmacy would be a good idea - at that point I gave up on careers advisors! When I was taking A levels ( maths, chemistry and physics ) I was really interested in the small amount that we did about atomic physics and thought I'd like to do nuclear engineering. On investigation I found that there were only two universities running this course but that I could also do a mechanical engineering degree with a nuclear option. I applied for sponsorships and was given one by National Nuclear Corporation ( whether I'd choose that option now is another matter!) and spent a year doing workshop training and working on site for the year before I went to Nottingham to do my mechanical engineering degree.

I met a computer for the first time in the first year of my degree - Fortran IV on a mainframe. In the second year it was basic on Commodore PETs and by the third year I decided to take a double software engineering course and discovered the joys of PDP11 assembler.

I returned to NNC to complete my graduate training but as the year progressed I knew that this wasn't what I wanted to continue doing. When I received a letter from the previous year's software engineering lecturer asking if I was interested in returning to do a PhD I jumped at the chance. During three years of designing and building a filament winding machine including all the mechanical, hardware and software I realised that software was the thing that made me tick.

From there I moved to the Computer Science department at Nottingham University working in the drawing recognition research group but employed by CadCam Technology. I think at that point I knew that I wouldn't work as a mechanical engineer again. I still love writing software and my current job developing systems for reading travel documents is always interesting and challenging.

Flexible Working

Life has been manic since the Ada Lovelace Day post, mainly because of a looming work deadline. We are developing a new system for reading travel documents and are hitting the downside of having a far flung workforce ( if, indeed, four people constitute a workforce!). A tiny team divided between London, Nottingham and Northumberland for the most part we are developing software and being in different places isn't an issue. When hardware comes into the equation life gets a bit more complicated! We now all have the new unit ( in spite of my cleaner refusing to sign for the parcel on Wednesday and delaying delivery by another day! ) and so should be able to progress and hopefully meet our deadline next week.



Computing magazine reports today on new legislation to extend the right to flexible working. I have worked from home since my son, now 14, was two years old. For me it was probably the only way I could have worked at this time. My daughter, then four, had major surgery when she was born and had been in and out of hospital since then. Being able to work from home meant that I could continue to work whilst she continued to have frequent spells off school. She is now a fit and healthy sixteen year old but I still appreciate the flexibility that working from home gives. In theory I work 20 hours a week but have worked considerably more over the last few weeks.



Next week will bring a concerted effort to meet a tight deadline but live in hope that I will be able to take advantage of my flexible working to regain those extra hours in the not too distant future!

Ada Lovelace Day

Today is Ada Lovelace Day and more than 1500 people have pledged to write a blog post about an inspirational woman in computing.

As such I'd like to write my first post about a woman that I learned about when writing my article "The $100 Role Model" for the BCS's ITNow magazine. Mary Lou Jepson was the amazing woman behind the One Laptop Per Child project aimed at taking the internet age to children who would normally have no chance to experience such things. Having been diagnosed with a brain tumour she battled against the disease and carried on to be the lead innovator for the OLPC project which resulted in the XO laptop.
In 2008 she was named by Time Magazine in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world - a truly inspirational woman.