Science, Computers and Horses

Mary L Gorden

Chemotherapy and Hair Loss

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Everybody knows that people with cancer lose their hair when they get chemotherapy. Like most bits of common wisdom, this is only partially true.  It depends on what type of chemo you received.  For some types of chemotherapy there is no hair loss.

However, one of the most common side effects of Paclitaxel (Taxol), the chemo drug that was chosen for me, is hair loss. So I went into treatment sure that I would lose my hair.  I got a wig.  I didn’t do anything radical.  It was very close in color to my real hair, mostly grey. That blew my belief that I still had blonde highlights in my hair.  I also got several hats to wear if I didn’t want the bother of a wig.  I learned to tie a bandana into a makeshift hat.  There is nothing like being prepared.

As I started treatment, I was totally focused on the side effects of that treatment not on the cancer itself. Surgery had removed all of the cancer that could be seen on a full body scan.  We were doing chemo to clean up any remaining “too small to be seen” cells that were left in my body.  Treatment wasn’t going to be any fun but it wasn’t a matter of life and death as it is for many people diagnosed with cancer.

And right on schedule, 19 days into my treatment, I discovered that a few strands of hair had fallen out. My hairdresser had said that when it started falling out to come in and she would shave my head.  Normally hair that falls out because of chemo comes out in clumps and shaving the head is the best approach.  On the other hand, my cousin reported that when his son had cancer related hair loss he woke up one morning with all his hair on his pillow.  I was prepared for either scenario.

What I wasn’t prepared for was that the hair loss was very slight. Strands kept falling out every day but not large clumps.  My hair was thinning, not falling out.  So I began to hope.  Could I be the rare person who didn’t lose their hair to Taxol?  Weeks went by and my hair got thinner but it still looked like hair.  About two months into the 12 weeks of treatment a friend, who hadn’t seen me for about six weeks, commented on how thin my hair was getting.  So I looked closely and discovered that I had developed typical male pattern baldness, a bald spot on top of my head near the back.  And since I was looking at my hair closely I realized how very thin it was.

I decided to start wearing hats in public. Hats are very fashionable in the dead of winter.  However, I quickly gave up on the hats, as I wasn’t used to wearing them and they were a nuisance.  Still the word had gotten out that I was wearing hats and my book club did a wonderful thing.  I showed up for our December meeting (not wearing a hat) and everyone else had on a hat.  They had decided to not allow me to be the only one there with a hat on.  I have some very nice friends.

Then chemo was over. I’d had my last infusion and still had some very thin hair.  I couldn’t believe that I’d made it through.  About 2 ½ weeks after my last chemo infusion I knew that soon the new hair would start growing in, covering the bald spots and thickening my hair.  Everything I’d read or been told about hair loss said that two to three weeks after the end of the treatment hair would start growing back in.

Then, 3 ½ weeks after the end of chemo, the unfairness of a very unfair disease rose up and knocked me down. My hair started falling out in bunches.  I sent a message to my doctor to make sure that this wasn’t something serious.  She responded with a phrase she’d used many times before “everyone reacts differently”.  My delayed side effects weren’t unusual.  She also said it could be another month before my hair started growing back in.  One month after my last chemo infusion I was totally bald. I looked like I was expecting to look months earlier.

It has now been six weeks since the end of chemo. I am now wearing a hat in public as the baldness makes me self-conscious. Some ”peach fuzz” may be starting to appear on my head or it may be just wishful thinking.  Most of my side effects from chemo have been milder than expected.  Hair loss appeared to be following that pattern but it was not to be.  Still I can’t complain too much.  I still seem to be cancer free.

Hidden Figures

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hidden figures review

Back to book reviews.

Today’s book is Hidden Figures by Margot Shetterly. It is the story of the many African American women mathematicians who worked at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia from WWII through the early years of the American manned space program.

If you haven’t seen the movie Hidden Figures, based on the book, go see it. The movie tells the story of three of the women, Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson in the time just before John Glenn’s orbital flight in 1962.  In addition to providing a summary of the book, it is an excellent movie.

But the book covers so much more than the movie.

After seeing the movie you may ask “where did these African American women, born between 1910 and 1925, come from?” They were so much a part of the space program. There is no question that they were smart and had a talent for math. However, we know that being smart and being good at math isn’t restricted to a single gender or ethnicity.  But these women were working with mathematics at a high level.  It was a level requiring knowledge well beyond high school algebra and geometry.  How did these women get trained?

Hidden Figures describes the culture of the black colleges whose graduates could not hope for jobs in science and engineering. Those jobs were reserved for whites.  So the profession of teacher was honored in the black community and provided a way to identify students with a talent for math and the sciences and educate them.  Communities came together to provide financial support when the family did not have the means to send their children to college.

So women like Vaughan, Johnson and Jackson had to opportunity to go to college and be educated in mathematics. They returned to their communities and taught the next generation.  Teaching was considered a very good job.

Unlike the movie, which compresses many stories into a short period of time, the book covers almost thirty years. It begins with the early days of World War II when Philip Randolph, the head of the largest black union in the country, was able to convince President Roosevelt to sign the act that removed race as a hiring criteria in the defense industries.  Before Langley was a major NASA facility, it was a major aeronautical research center and a key facility in designing and building the airplanes that helped win the war.  This was the environment where the “colored computers” like Dorothy Vaughan began using their mathematical training.  The book ends with Katherine Johnson’s watching the Apollo 11 moon landing, another space milestone she played a role in.

Hidden Figures tells a fascinating story of community and of individuals willing to push boundaries. It contains stories of frustration and triumph.  The humiliations of the Jim Crow years are described.  It is a well done history of a time and of people that have been hidden from general knowledge for too long.

In a very real sense Shetterly is the third generation of African Americans that impacted the American space and defense industry. Her father, who was born in 1944 and worked at Langley, was the same generation as the children of the main characters in the movie.  That first generation paved the way for their children to follow in their footsteps.  Shetterly, part of the next generation, grew up thinking that it was normal for black men and women to be scientists and engineers.  By writing the story of the women who began it all, she adds herself to a long list of women who have made Langley Research Center famous.

 

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Plan for New Year

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picture by Mary L Gorden

picture by Mary L Gorden

Once again as I came to the start of a new year, I was standing at a crossroads.

My marketing plans for my first book Life Without Ceilings: A Woman’s Career in Computers ended the year in pieces all over the floor.  And my next book (working title Lucky’s Story) is starting to come together in my mind.  They both need attention and I don’t seem to be able to work on both of them at the same time.

I needed to make a decision as I know from bitter experience, I’m at my least productive when I’m dithering. Two posts on twitter seemed to give me the push I needed to make a decision.  They were very different stories, but they both described someone’s experience when they needed to make a decision.  One post was about an author, the other wasn’t.  One post was by someone famous, the other wasn’t.

In the end they both come down to:

  • What are your priorities?
  • What really forces to you make a decision?

I’m happy to use the start of a new year as the reason for finally making a decision. And by really focusing on my marketing priorities I’ve figured out a way to slim that task down enough that maybe I can both write and market.

In some ways it’s surprising that the decision was hard to make. I’d rather write than market and I have the luxury of not having to sell books to survive.  But there was the old bugaboo that “I should” be doing marketing.  And I know, again from bitter experience, that doing something because “I should” uses up mental and emotional energy faster than anything else.

I finally realized that there was a piece of my marketing plan that was important to me. It wasn’t selling my book; it was sharing my knowledge of the role of women in computing in the last third of the Twentieth Century.  This was the reason I wrote the book in the first place.

So I’m no longer standing at a fork in the road. I have a plan.

  • Write “everyday”. I know how to do that.
  • Schedule selected days or parts of days to devote to promoting myself. Learn to be comfortable not chasing “leads” instantaneously.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

 

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Thinking Like a Programmer

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When I retired from my thirty-five year career in computers, I walked away from everything technical. I stopped thinking like a programmer and I became a user of computer services not a developer of them.

I was comfortable with this change in my life. The stresses of my job had totally burned me out.  Moving from the suburbs to the country gave me many new things I could figure out how to do.

A few times I was tempted to return to the world of computers. These temptations came when a group I was part of needed a backup for its webmaster.  So I would sort of volunteer.  The current webmaster would explain the task to me and then I would lose interest.  It wasn’t that I didn’t understand how to do the job, I did.  It was that I was uncomfortable in the environment as I’d retired just as the internet was becoming a business tool.

But then in late 2015 I was introduced to blogs as an author marketing tool. Suddenly maintaining a website stopped being an optional task.  As an about to be published author I needed my own website.

Everything I read steered me to WordPress. It was easy to learn and by using it anyone could build their own website.  Or at least that was the story being told.

My experience was different. I would stare that the screen for what seemed like hours, go back and look at the help information again, Google the problem I was having and sometimes make things work.  I kept saying to myself, I must have missed the memo that explained the basics that aren’t written down anywhere.  After a long time I had a basic web page.  It had a title, a header picture, an “About” page and my first blog post.

It was a long way from a professional author’s website. I needed help.

I knew exactly what type of help would work best. WordPress is pretty basic.  Sometimes you push a button, sometimes you type something into a field and sometime you drag and drop.  However, when to do what and where wasn’t the least bit intuitive to me.  I needed someone to stand at my shoulder and say push that button now.  Enter “x” into that field now.

Fortunately about the time I’d decided what I needed, I discovered Bakerview Consulting. Barb Drozdowich claims she can teach anyone WordPress.  Her motto is “Helping Authors, One at a Time.”

She was exactly what I needed. Even though she lives almost a thousand miles away and I don’t do Skype we set up an environment where she could say “push that button now.”  And after a couple of sessions, I had a decent website.  There were a few calls for help and enhancements but I was happy with the results and felt, at least for a while, I could manage on my own.  Plus I had help to call on if I got in trouble.

A few weeks later when I had an idea on how to expand my website to include book reviews, I didn’t call Barb. I did the work myself and sent her a note to check out my improvement.  Her response was a suggestion on how to do it to drastically reduce the maintenance needed.  It was a much better approach so I tore out all my work and implemented her suggestion.

About this time I was having a problem with the way WordPress works administratively. My first website had been a “wordpress.com” site and the website Barb helped me with was my current standalone site.  Not knowing any better, I’d used the same email address for both websites.  And even though I’d set up my Gravatar while creating my new website, WordPress had connected the Gravatar to my wordpress.com website.  WordPress decided that the first website I set up must be the primary website and, according to Barb, there was no way to fix that.  She offered a work-a-round which I added to my to-do list.  The wrong website was only a problem when I was leaving comments on other blogs so fixing it wasn’t my highest priority.

Then one day another solution occurred to me. I only had a problem if someone went to my old website.  What I needed was a way to direct them from my old website to my new one.

I knew how to do that. I changed the landing page on my old website from blog posts to a fixed landing page.  I put in a message saying that this was my old website and set up an area to click to go to my new website.  It was a trivial change to make in WordPress.  But I was thrilled with myself.  I had identified the problem and figured out how to use the commands tools at my disposal to solve it.  I was thinking like a programmer again.

You might not think that someone like me with extensive programming experience would think of using WordPress features as programming. But you would be wrong.  Having written code at the machine level, I knew that higher level languages like COBOL and C are removed from the code that device actually executes.  WordPress functions are just further removed from the machine code.

It’s the way of thinking that counts. Clearly define the problem.  Determine which commands (or features) will solve that problem.  Establish the order for those commands (or features).  Implement and test.  Very straightforward if you think like a programmer.

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Rediscovering Programming Using WordPress

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wcsac-logo-2016

When you need to add something new to your life sometimes you have to take chances. When you are a retired computer person who has completely lost touch with your former rapidly changing industry, re-entry can feel like stepping off of a cliff.

But my new goal of using my career in computers to encourage other women to join the field required that I update my technical knowledge. Fortunately I stumbled across the Sacramento WordPress Word Camp.  It had several advantages, it was close, it was inexpensive and I knew something about WordPress.

Still I was nervous. Few of the listed topics for the two day conference made any sense to me.  After all, my knowledge of WordPress was limited to building a basic website.  And based on what I’d been reading about the computer field, I was expecting the attendees to be mostly male and mostly millennials.

It’s not that I have anything against men or millennials but when you are a woman and too old to be part of the baby boomer generation, I was expecting to stand out like a sore thumb.

Was I pleasantly surprised!

When I showed up Saturday for day one of Word Camp Sacramento, I blended in nicely. The attendees and presenters were a very diverse group.  There was gender diversity, age diversity and race diversity.  Totally the opposite of what I was expecting.

The first presentation I attended was “Five Things You’ll Discover About Yourself As You Blog Consistently” by Chris Lema. Unbeknownst to me Chris is a well-known Word Press blogger and his excellent presentation solidified the “I belong here” feeling I was developing.

I wasn’t quite as comfortable with the next presentation. Jason Cooper’s intended audience for his talk on “Scaling WordPress with Load Testing” didn’t include me.  But it started my list of things to google.  And I had a context for those new words.  I knew what load testing was.  So I had some idea what Jason was talking about when he discussed H2Load and Apache Bench even if I didn’t know exactly what they did.

The rest of the two days was very similar. When Sallie Goetsch gave her presentation on “Falling in Love with Flexbox” I discovered the perfect modern example to use when describing the tools I built to support programmers back in the 1960s.  I was expecting Mark Tilly’s presentation on “Building A Cloud Service Into Your Plugin” to be way over my head technically.  And it was.  But he talked about the process of building and testing an application that runs in multiple environments.  It reinforced the idea that programming is a way of thinking.  The tools and languages have changed, the problems to be different but how you approach them, hasn’t changed in fifty years.

So thank you to the crew headed by Jennifer Bourn who set up a great two days. And to the sponsors who kept the price to attend affordable.  I learned a lot and had a great time.  And my impression was that so did everyone else.

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It is a book

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It’s a book!!!

Almost exactly three years ago I wrote the first words of what was to become Life Without Ceilings: A Woman’s Career in Computers.  Today it is a published book.  Check it out on Amazon.

It has been a long, hard and educational three years. And in some ways I’m a different person than I was three years ago.  As I came to the end of my sixties and approached my seventies I was definitely slowing down.  I was getting stuck in my ways and I hadn’t done much new in the last several years.  That definitely changed.  It’s been a long time since I’ve worked so hard and what I’ve learned could fill a book.  Or at least be the subject of an article.

In the beginning

I’d been toying with the idea of writing a memoir for years. Initially I’d belonged to a Memoir Group that met monthly and shared stories.  More recently I’d been taking a weekly “Memories to Memoirs” class.  The classwork added to my stack of stories but I had no idea how to organize them into a book.

Then two things happened.  The first was finding out that our teacher had an unpublished novel in her desk.  It preceded the novel she published.  The take away was that sometimes you have to write something to learn how to do it.  The second was I watched a program on PBS called 56-Up.  It was the latest installment of a project that had been going on for a half century.  The project was to interview a series of people every seven years, starting in the year they were seven.  The show I saw was about the participants at age 56.

I now had a way forward. I would write my story in seven year increments and in the process learn how to write a book.  Ah, the bliss of ignorance.

The first draft

The first thing to go was my idea that I would only include what I knew at the time of the story. The results were universally panned by the friends and family that I could get to read my early drafts.  Finally I gave in and began to write the story using all of my adult knowledge.  Then there was the quality of my writing.  My first critique group was the “Memories to Memoirs” class but our teacher had a firm rule.  No negative comments were allowed.  Others weren’t so restrained.  I remember one comment about a sentence being the most incredibly bad sentence ever seen.  The sentence did stay in the book for a long time, but eventually went away.  Slowly I got better.

My initial estimate was that I could finish the book in about eight months. But it was slow going; partially because it wasn’t a priority.  In July 2014 I let a friend talk me into making my work-in-progress her book club selection for November.  I now had a much needed first deadline and demonstrated that I could write a lot more than I had been doing.  Fortunately all of the book club members were good friends of mine and all of them dutifully read at least part of my slightly polished first draft.  We shared memories about our earlier lives rather than talking about the book.

I learned two things writing the first draft. The every seven years structure didn’t add to the story and had to be removed.  And there were things that were not in the first draft that needed to be in the story.  They weren’t in because I ran out of time.  So there had to be a second draft.  And in that second draft I could clean up some awful sentences.  How long could that take?

The second draft

I found another resource as I started the second draft. It turned out that one of my friends had an MFA and knew a lot about writing stories.  We spent months working together on the rewrite of the first part of my story.  I used what I learned to redo the rest of the book.  My friend also insisted that I needed to read more memoirs.  Studying published books in your genre was part of the education process.  The only recreational reading I was allowed in 2015 was book club selections.  All of the other reading I did that year was either memoirs or books on how to write.

Not only was I learning how to write, I was feeling comfortable doing it. As I rewrote sections I was appalled by some of my early writing.  And, more importantly, I knew how to fix things.  I struggled for a while with the organization of the story.  My story had the recommended three acts and it just didn’t work.  When I split the second act into two parts I had a story that hung together.  I was learning my craft.

The second draft was finished in early November 2015.  I knew it still needed polishing but it was much better than the first draft.

While a number of people had read sections of the first draft the only person who read the whole document was my sister Pat. Her comment was just what I needed.  “This is really good and you are a good writer. I’m sure I would have still found it interesting even if we weren’t related.”  I was now at a crossroads.  I had a book that was ready to be a family story.  Did I want to take it to the next step?

The fork in the road

Was there a market for my book? One of the things I had learned in late 2015 was that Women in Technology was a hot topic.  When I had retired in 2001 I thought the question of whether or not women belonged in technology was a settled topic.  I’d watched the percentage of women in computing grow over the course of my career and the number of women in computer management had also increased dramatically.  But in the 21st century things had changed and not for the better.  The number of women in the computer field had declined and apparently that decline had started before I retired.  Could I use my book to help mentor younger women still struggling to succeed in computing?

The first thing I had to do was get a professional review of my book. As 2015 was turning into 2016 I was struggling to figure out how to do that without spending a small fortune.  Finally I discovered a whole new job category – a writing coach.  This led me to a professional who would make reading my book a priority for a price I could afford.

And the answer was good. Yes this was more than just a family story.  But there was a lot of work still to do.  I don’t think there was a page in the document that didn’t have marks on it.  Some of those marks were “just” typos but whole sections needed rewriting.  Many areas needed more detail.  I had a busy couple of months but by late April, I was ready to turn the revised document over to beta readers.

Publishing

In mid-October 2015 I was introduced to the topic of publishing. So while I was looking for a writing coach I was also researching how to get my book published.  In a nutshell the choice came down to timing.

If I went with a regular publisher it would take me a while to find one and publisher schedules have long lead times.  I could easily be looking at late 2017 before my book was published.  If I self-published, I could get it published in late 2016.  It would cost me money up front but I’d make more with the sale of each book.  As near as I could tell, the marketing of the book would be mostly my responsibility regardless of how I published.

So I chose to self-publish.  I created my own publishing company and hired people who had published books before to help me.  That process is another story to be recounted someday.

Check Life Without Ceilings on Amazon.

 

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A Solitary Horse

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Grey after a brushing

I now have only one horse in my pasture. For the last several years McKenna, a Morgan mare belonging to a friend of a friend, has been a companion to my gelding Grey. On Saturday McKenna left. The decision for her to leave was made based on human needs and wants. The horses were not consulted.

Horses are herd animals and providing Grey with a “herd” even if it was only one other horse always seemed important to me. Eight years ago when my Appaloosa mare Spice died, I decided that I didn’t want to buy another horse. So I’ve provided Grey with company using a series of horses belonging to other people during that stretch of time. But these other horses brought extra work and extra expenses and I was finally ready to see how Grey would do by himself. After all some of my friends have only one horse in their pasture and those horses cope with the situation. And, unlike with some horses, Grey and McKenna weren’t buddies. So he wasn’t attached to her, she was just another horse.

With some experimenting last week and some planning, we were able to get McKenna loaded into the horse trailer before Grey realized what was happening. But as the trailer with her in it drove away he knew that she had left. And he started running around and screaming at the top of his lungs.

I opened the gate to the small pasture he had been placed in and gave him the full three and a half acres of pasture and yard to run around in. I also shut the dogs into the dog yard so they wouldn’t interfere.

The first 45 minutes were pretty intense. Grey was clearly upset as he kept calling out to McKenna and ran around the yard and pastures looking for her. Then he finally noticed one of the flakes of hay that I had strategically place in all of the pastures. He stopped to eat a bite. Then there was more running around and yelling but the hay had too much appeal. In less than an hour the drama was over. Grey was hanging out in the pasture eating and not caring that he was the only horse around.

He got a more attention than usual the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday. That included two baths. On Saturday he was sweaty from all of his running around on a very hot day. The bath on Sunday took off the layer of dirt from rolling while he was still wet from the Saturday bath. Sunday morning he seemed subdued.  I worried that he hadn’t slept well Saturday night but eventually I realized that he was just calm. Sharing a pasture with a dominant mare who wanted more than her share of the food was obviously more stressful than I realized.

With plans for Monday I was gone for most of the day. The lack of attention didn’t seem to be a problem for Grey. At night before going to bed I usually take out good night carrots. It is my way of checking on the horses at the end of the day. When I did good night carrots on Monday night Grey seemed happy just standing there and eating all of the carrots I had brought. I realized that from his point of view not having to compete for food and treats was well worth the price of being the only horse in the pasture.

My trying to provide horse companionship for Grey had created more work for me and more stress for him. If I’d realized that, I would have changed the situation earlier.

It makes you wonder though, how often people do that. They create a situation where they think they are doing something good for someone else and they are actually causing other people problems. In my case it was a horse I was creating problems for. But it could have easily been a person. Would I have had the common sense to have the conversation that could have easily resolved the situation?

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Women Programmers part 2

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halloween-pic-of-programmers-at-schwab

It is pretty well established that in the 1940s most, if not all, programmers were women. Hardware was the important part of computers and that field was dominated by men.  The programming part of the job was viewed as a minor clerical task.

Today, about seventy years later, the percentage of women programmers is small. Exact numbers seem hard to find.  According to an NPR article only about 18% of the Computer Science degrees earned today are earned by women.

It is tempting to draw a straight line between the dominance of women programmers in the 1940s and the paucity of women programmers today. But life is never that simple.  Again using the NPR statistics, the number of women receiving Computer Science degrees rose from about 15% in the mid-1960s to about 37% in the mid-1980s.

Did something happen in the 1960s?

The answer to that question is a resounding “yes”. For those of you who don’t know the history of the 1960s I would recommend When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Susan Collins.

My own career mirrored the rise of the importance of women in computers during these turbulent decades of the 20th century. When I became a programmer in 1966 women programmers were in the minority.  In my group, there were no women programming supervisors.

When I first became a programming supervisor in 1970 there was one other woman programming supervisor in a different area. She was about ten years older than me and unfortunately I never got to know her and learn her story.

By the early 1980s I had a significant number of women peers in computer management. My first woman boss was in 1989.  The picture at the top of this article from the mid-1980s on Halloween shows a group of programmers and their managers.  As you can see there was gender diversity in the group.

When I retired in 2001 I wasn’t aware of a decrease in the number of women in computing. I may have just not been paying attention as in the early 1990s I left management to return to the technical work that I loved.

Why did this happen?

And I have no theory about why the percentage of women receiving Computer Science degrees started to decrease in the 1980s. But I do know that a correct theory is unlikely to be developed if the increase in women programmers starting in the 1960s is ignored.

 

 

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Managing Martians

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managing-martians

Back to Women in STEM book reviews! This week’s book is Managing Martians by Donna Shirley with Danelle Morton.  Donna Shirley is not related to Dame Stephanie Shirley whose book Let IT Go was reviewed earlier in this series.

Managing Martians begins on July 4, 1997 with the arrival of the lander Pathfinder and the rover Sojourner Truth on Mars.  Shirley describes the importance of that day to her.  “I headed the team that had designed and built this revolutionary six-wheeled scientific laboratory [Sojourner Truth], a 25-pound robot about the size of a microwave oven that could do what humans could only dream of: explore the surface of Mars.”

This book tells the story of how a girl, born in 1941 and raised in a small town in Oklahoma, became the woman who could write that sentence. Early in her life she became interested in aviation.  She made her first solo flight in an airplane at the age of fifteen.  As a young person her goal in life was to become an aeronautical engineer.  Like many woman of her era, she was told that “Girls can’t be engineers.”  In her case it was how she was greeted by her college engineering advisor.  After she assured him that she had been accepted into the College of Engineering he did look for and find her student folder.

After a rocky start to her career, Shirley was hired by JPL’s aerodynamics group in 1966. It was the start of her thirty-one year effort to get to Mars.

Managing Martians provides an inside look at both the technical and the management details of the space program.

The sections of the book that describe the different types of rovers that were built and tested on Earth before the design of Sojourner Truth was decided upon is fascinating. The tradeoffs of function and weight are explained.  Weight (or more technically correct – mass) was a major factor in every decision that was made.  From how smart the rover would be to how much battery backup power it would have.

The issue of mass also impacted the lander Pathfinder.  The problems encountered during the testing of the material to provide the protection for the lander as it crashed into the surface of Mars were made more difficult by the need to keep the mass of the material to a minimum.

Shirley really shines during the sections that cover the management of space projects. Her approach to managing technical staff where they clearly knew more about the technology than she did was daring, trusting and successful.  As a technical person who has worked for more than one manager who seemed determined to undermine my ability to accomplish anything, I would have loved to have had Shirley for a boss.  She also brought women onto her teams and recounts one small planning session where she suddenly realized that everyone in the meeting was female.

She talks about the money constraints of space projects as NASA moved into a period of “Better, Faster, Cheaper” after the end of the Apollo moon landings. Her ability to manage these constraints allowed her to, as she put it, “bend the glass ceiling” and be promoted over some of her male peers.

Managing Martians is well worth reading both as a history of the time and as a management primer.

 

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Crisis Management and Book Publishing

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Some people are good in a crisis. They do their best work then.  I’m not one of those people.  I actually spend a lot of time avoiding crises.  But ten days ago my crisis avoidance planning failed and work on my blog came to a screeching halt.  You may have noticed that there was no blog post last week and that this one is late.

I’m in the middle of publishing a book. It’s my first book, so a lot of what is going on is new to me.  I’ve delegated the actual publication tasks to an experienced publishing project manager and her team.  All I have to do is make choices, review results and sign off on everything.  Before hiring the publishing team I made sure there was a well-thought-out plan that showed when I had work to do and when I didn’t.  During my down weeks I could devote all of my attention to marketing.

Part of my marketing activity is establishing this blog which will appeal to my target audience, people interested in the problem of getting more women into the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields. I am also working to become visible to other people and organizations involved in this work.  Neither of these activities is a short term effort.  Especially since I am starting from almost zero and have very little experience in marketing.  But I was making progress; more so on establishing a blog.

Then last month, during the times I wasn’t working on book publishing tasks, I made two decisions which should eventually help my marketing efforts but in the short run added more work. The first decision was to expand my social media platform to include LinkedIn.  The second was to enter into an online conversation about the history of women in computers.  Entering into this discussion led to another direction change as I found needed to use my blog as part of that conversation.

My first attempts in these two areas didn’t go as planned. It’s not that they didn’t work per se.  It was just that they worked in a totally unexpected way.  So I had to figure out new next steps.  More work to do.

Then my book reappeared in the form of my first print proof.

It should have been a moment of great excitement but I was swamped with too much to do and I couldn’t fully appreciate the moment. At first I tried to work the crisis.  Just plug ahead and you can fix things later.  Except I couldn’t do that with the book, there is no “later” when you are looking at a print proof.  So that work had to be done well.

I could pull back a little from LinkedIn but I had to be careful to not lose all of my momentum. And I tried to continue to write blog posts that supported my online conversation.  But I couldn’t.  It turned out that there were gaps in my knowledge.  Since my reason for entering into the online conversation was to fill in gaps in other people’s knowledge, I had to have my facts in place.  And I had no time to do the needed research.  Missing one week of blogging is marginally acceptable during a crisis.  Missing two weeks is not.

So you are getting a different type of blog post this week. I had made a firm decision not to write about the problems of publishing a book.  There are plenty of blogs that do that.  But it’s a topic I can write coherently about.  Next week I will be back to book reviews and my online conversation will just have to wait until the book is published and I have time to do some serious research.

 

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