How I Became a Computer Scientist

I began my tech career by tinkering with HTML.  It was nominally my “gap year” before college, but in fact it was my second year after graduating high school and I still was very lost and very depressed.  To pass the time, I made YouTube Disney fan videos and started a google Blogspot blog.  The tagline for “Bemusing Jo Bingo,” my blog, was “I am a feminist… but what does that even mean?”  Very embarrassing, I know. 

In the blog post edit feature, there was an option to edit in HTML.  At first, I only did this to embed YouTube videos (this was early enough that this wasn’t natively supported by the default mode).  Soon I found I could control the size of the video in pixels, or in the percentage of the width of the web page.  My eye began to wander to the rest of my blog posts… could I make this italic?  Bold?  And should I use <b> or should I use <strong>?  (I’m really dating myself here.)  I found myself taking an online course teaching me the anatomy of a web page, Hypertext Markup Language, and Cascading Style Sheets.  In short, I learned about structure vs. appearance.  HTML was the substance of a page: the actual text, what was a paragraph, what was a footer or title.  CSS was form: font, size, color.  The next year I started college and soon I entered a Web Design minor (to my disappointment, there was no Web major). 

In this Web minor, I learned a new concept of “language” that I’d never suspected before: computer language.  Computer languages are a way of talking to a computer and telling it what to do.  The newest languages I learned were JavaScript and Python.  I found them more versatile and powerful than HTML and CSS.  They had more rules, and way more words.  They could influence both structure and appearance, but I soon found my interest mainly lay in structure, in “backend.”  This was the action of a computer behind the scenes, before the web page was ever formed.  The logic behind every computation. 

After a particularly inspiring course titled “Introduction to Computer Programming,” I discovered that beyond the world of Web and the World Wide Web there was a discipline called “Computer Science.”  If web development was a fascinating book, Computer Science was the whole library.  My eyes widened and I quickly hastened to the necessary office to begin the Computer Science major as quickly as possible. 

As a Computer Science major, I learned about an even more generic concept than web page structure or computer language.  This was the “data structure.”  Here “data” can be understood as meaningful information, and “structure” can be understood as a useful and readable arrangement.  Essentially, a data structure was a way to read and manipulate information. 

Here I had found the heart of my passion.  This increasingly generic and conceptual understanding of computers and technology was what I craved.  How had a multi-thousand dollar MacBook been reduced to this mathematical concept expressed in a few lines of code?  Something that I could write – something that I could master?  Here I finally understood the allure of the atom to scientists.  I had found the simple building block that could power the largest cities.  I had found a nearly philosophical way to express very technical concepts.  In finding this structure and language to communicate and build the world, I found myself.  I was a computer scientist.    

Independence: A Morning

Yesterday I had my first guitar lesson, 27 days after the day I bought my first guitar. Of course, everything I had practiced from online tutorials had to be thrown out the window. I like my teacher. He gave me exercises, but the first exercise he gave me was this: finger independence.

In the finger independence exercise, you lay all fingers down on one string and slowly shift one finger one at a time to the next string. You are never to do two or three at once, even though you will find your fingers doing it. I found my fingers were not as dextrous as I had always been pleased and proud to consider them, and I’ve been enjoying struggling through the exercise this morning as I slowly woke up. I’m on my second coffee.

This exercise makes no sound. You do not pick, you do not strum. The strings are muted. This is simply an exercise in movement control of the left hand. I am trying to re-teach my hands to “think” independently, so that when called on, each individual finger can act adverse and contrary-wise to the other.

As the sky went from the deep dim blue of early morning to the light white of the usual Seattle day fog, I have been doing this exercise on and off. Slowly, in my mind, an idea was developing, though I did not know what it was yet.

“Are you practicing? Can I play music?” asked my husband after he woke up, a bit later than me because he is sick.

“I am practicing, but it doesn’t make sound,” I said. “Go ahead.”

With the music and my husband, the apartment began to wake up. My cats started leaping about. One even showed interest in my guitar for the first time, much to my horror. Coco, the one who had surgery and is recovering very well, was sulking on a blanket, miserable in her protective cone.

All the time I was thinking of my fingers as numbers, like I used to when I played cello years ago. “4,3,2,1” I whispered as I released each corresponding finger. “1,2,3,4.”

I put my second coffee in a pink mug with a gold handle and eyelashes painted on it. It was the first purchase I made for myself that had no use other than aesthetics. I still feel a little strange using such a leisurely commodity.

The idea awakened. I gained financial independence only months ago. This morning, slowly, I realized… I am back at square one, where even my fingers can become independent.

Announcement!!! <3

I am independently published! I have an essay, “Death is a Noun,” in an anthology “SLEEP, NAUSEA, ANXIETY & PAIN.” The editor is a colleague of mine, Lee Bullitt. We met at a class taught by the wonderful @SarahNumber4. You can find Lee on medium or on her website at www.leebullitt.com.

This is the first time I have ever been published, and it is a big milestone for me. I wrote “Death is a Noun” during that class, which was my very first workshopped writing class. It was also the first time I let others know I had a mental illness.

Lee has been working on the anthology for a while, so it was great to finally receive my copies in the mail, personally gift wrapped in red spotted gauze by Lee for me. If you want a copy, it is available to buy on Lee’s shop here: https://www.leebullitt.com/sleep-nausea-anxiety-pain. It even has a bar code, so it is very much real. I warn you, it is a limited edition, so if you are interested, act fast!

I still remember getting the email from Lee about the idea on May 8th, 2018. The title of the email was “Calling All Sad Girls.” It was very effective in getting my attention. The idea was to create an anthology we would be proud of which expresses the pain women feel across many spectrums. Mine, as you may guess, was my struggle with mental illness, specifically how it began when I was 18.

All my life I’ve dreamed of being published, but only recently did I mature enough to realize that was not my endgame. My new goal is simply to write often, and to make finished products I am proud of. Of course I will still seek to be published, and it feels damn good to finally be published, but what I really want is to look at a short story or essay or memoir or novel I have written and revised a thousand times and finally say, “It is finished. I am proud.”

For the fact is that “Death is a Noun,” even as it is published, still requires a lot of work to be truly done. I simply chose it as is because 1) Lee requested it and 2) I didn’t have the time to meet deadline. However I don’t mind having something rough “out there.” After all, these blog posts are very public, with my real name on them, and they are a bit rough; however I stand by them. Gone are the days when I am ashamed of anything I write. I never write anything I don’t mean anymore, except in my journal, which is safe for anything.

So, welcome. But in the meantime, any positive comments or congratulations are welcome, and “Hello, World”: I am a published author. Come at me!

Pink Coat in the Rain

Today I was walking to the dentist. It was raining. I was wearing a very opaque purple thick and frumpy NYU sweater with ripped jeans, my hair tied up. I was walking on concrete, which I never seem to get used to, especially in the rain. I might even reveal to you that despite the rain I was wearing flip flops – the dentist is really close and I overslept!

Usually, in a past New Jersey/New York life, I would look down and hustle forward in the rain, knowing I couldn’t see through my glasses anyway. But people are so unashamed of the water in the sky in Seattle. It rains every day. So I looked up.

There, in the distance, I saw it: a pastel pink puffy plastic coat waiting for the light to change at the opposite side of the street. “This is why I should always carry my new nikon with me!” I thought. Quick as I could, I took out my phone and switched to camera mode. I knew I didn’t have much time. The light changed: “walk.” Frantically, I started taking pictures as fast as I could (shutter mode what?). As she approached, for it was a “she,” I was more and more impressed. She was wearing very carefully maintained skinny jeans carefully folded up at the ankle to reveal – could it be? It was! The most stylish, brown, …suede boots. Suede? In Seattle? In this rain? Of course, I thought to myself, I have two leather purses.

She was getting close to me now. Would she notice my unabashed attention? Would I get the dynamic shot I was hoping for? I didn’t see her face, I was too nervous.

The moment was gone, she was gone. There was water droplets all over my phone. I hastily wiped it with my sweater and looked at what I got. Her face was careworn. Maybe she was on the way to the dentist too, or something equally unpleasant. She had not noticed me in any of the pictures I took.

I picked my favorite picture, and as soon as I got to the dentist and was told to wait (of course, sigh), I posted it on instagram, where you can see it if you are curious. It turns out, it was when she was closest, where you can really see the utter lack of joy in her face, the careful outfit, the crinkles in her pink coat, that I liked the shot the most. The bright optimistic light of the walk sign gave her no joy.

The dentist appointment was really painful. The anesthetic didn’t seem to work at one point, and after a minute or so of trying to endure the pain, I begged for the needle in my gums again.

I wish I could say I, walking home, my face swollen from the anesthetic, but relieved, and remembering the photograph I cherished, looked up in the rain, and noticed my surroundings, loving life. But instead I took a leaf from that woman’s book. I called my husband and discussed the terrible price of having my wisdom teeth removed, and barely noticed any walk signs, stop or go.

New Guitar

I’ll try to keep this short.

I bought a guitar. On impulse. I don’t know how to play the guitar. As a classical snob, I’ve always looked down on guitarists. But my broken cello remains broken for the time being, and ever since I’ve been itching to play music. Then my husband surprised me by taking me to Guitar Center.

He was actually there to pick up some electrical equipment, but my eyes filled with the guitars. Lines and grids and matrices of guitars, of all sorts and shapes and colors. Naturally I drifted to the acoustic section.

“Maybe I’ll get a cheap ukulele?” I tell my husband.

I find one cute ukulele, with a beautiful pattern.

“But what do you want this for?” my husband asked.

I thought. What was missing? Was this hope? “I want to make music, any music I want. I want us to start our band again,” I said.

“You want a guitar,” he said.

So I got a guitar. Because I’m a cellist, I picked one with an especially warm tone, almost all mahogany.

Moving to Seattle meant changing jobs, it meant changing careers, friends, food, standard of living, weather, everything. Might as well go with the tide. They say to avoid drowning, you follow the flow of the water.

“I want this one,” I said.

Missing New York

I tell myself it’s a waste of time to miss New York.

“Except for maybe bagels,” I say over a non-bagel breakfast to my husband.

Plus we got married in a Brooklyn book store. They always have the greatest authors visit there. Or the Manhattan book store where we had our second date. Of course that one is closing. What am I missing?

I don’t miss the subways. They have public transit in Seattle, too, but I have chosen to only go to places I can walk to (a privilege that was not feasible in New York). Those dirty, sweaty, creepy New York subways.

But what about that feeling of climbing the third flight of subway stairs out into the brisk cold of the city, on the way to Lincoln Center?

Or everything being a little old, a little broken? The dirty concrete. Surely I can live without those. And the air is certainly cleaner in Seattle.

I didn’t get to see Lion King on Broadway (no money). I didn’t get to go to Union Square for the Christmas Market (I’d moved). But what does that matter? Lion King will probably be open forever! And I live right by a better market that is open year round!

Is it me, or are the buildings not as tall? I used to wish I could see more sky. Now I see the sky… but it’s usually gray.

“This is a small town,” my husband says.

“It’s not a small town,” I say.

Comfort Blog

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a blog solely devoted to depicting comfort? Every morning you would drag yourself out of bed and debate whether you should make coffee or just die on the couch. Eventually you put the kettle on in preparation for the easiest coffee – french press. Then your favorite part of the morning begins. You walk to your ergonomic chair that cost you almost as much as your rent back in the day, sit down, feel your lower back begin to loosen, click the ergonomic mouse, and your computer wakes up – slowly, like you. As the monitor lights up, the rush of light propels you to open your favorite browser (Chrome, duh) and go to yourcomfortblog.com (is that a real website?). Gradually, the white changes to light pinks and blues and you see pictures of merchandise from your favorite movies (The Dark Crystal) and art featuring your favorite foods (cheese!). Then you get to the good part, the blurb. It reads like Virginia Woolf, but happy. It describes a big comfy t-shirt and a hot but not too hot cup of coffee made from thin air and some retro steam punk designed technologies that are still ergonomic (good, you like that). It describes the thoughts that go into writing and thinking and it all feels very meta the way a comforter feels very soft on the skin.

Your tea kettle clicks. Time to grind the coffee. Your morning visit with this paradise website is over. But never fear, because you have your light pink “Git it Gurl” shirt on over the fluffiest pajama pants you ever owned and you’re using your favorite light blue mug and you’re going to sit on your light blue couch and watch the steam come out of that Raven’s Brew coffee (which also sounds cool as a bonus) as the waves of puget sound rock in the far distance, outside where wind and rain exist.

But not inside.

Wouldn’t it be nice.

How to Think of a Computer

So we agree your smartphone is a computer. Did you know your flip phone was also a computer? Is your analog clock also a computer, or does that enter the machine territory?

I am going to try to talk about this in a way that requires no prior knowledge whatsoever.

This isn’t a technical blog (yet), but let’s introduce two definitions.

  1. A computer, according to Subrata Dasgupta’s “A Very Short Introduction to Computer Science” (which is an excellent book), is “the centerpiece of computing”, which is to say an organized system of programs.
  2. And a program, the interesting part of a computer for a Software Engineer, is (in my words) instructions to solve a problem in the form a computer can understand.

Sometimes those instructions are closer to the “10010101011” you see on cool t-shirts, and sometimes they are very close to plain english language.

Let’s go back to the analog clock. Your father had one. Maybe he still has one. It keeps track of time once you have told it where to start, right? How does it know that? Because it follows certain rules, like “after 60 seconds, move the minute arrow,” and those rules are translated (like a language) in the watch in physical cogs and wheels. When you use a watch, you notice is is 8:15 PM and you start the watch at that time. But without a software engineer solving the problem of “how do you tell time starting at an arbitrary time,” no one would know what to do with the cogs and wheels. That solution to that problem is the program.

That’s the argument that an analog watch is a computer. You may have noticed I entered dangerous territory here: now lots of things could be called computers, and lots of things could be called programs. It’s a Pandora’s box! That’s where the fun of being a computer scientist begins.

After all, the definitions I gave you were highly abstract. But there is power in abstraction! But you know what isn’t in abstraction? Concrete metal and wires and screens. That’s someone else’s job.

Because here’s the thing: as a Software and Data Engineer with a degree in Computer Science, people assume I am good with computers. Family members ask me for tech support. My dad wants me to resurrect his favorite video game that is out of print.

But what I do day to day is write programs. All I do is solve problems. Sure, I get my hands dirty with more machine-oriented problems, like overheating or the disorganization of the many machines a company uses, but my solution is, yet again,

  • instructions to solve a problem in the form a computer can understand.

So no Dad, I cannot write a game that no longer exists, not without a lot of connections, and no, I don’t necessarily know how to reroute the router (try googling it mom!). I don’t get my hands dirty actually touching wires. I’m not tech support. I’m not a gamer. I’m a computer scientist.

There’s a lot of beauty and poetry in what I do. I hope I have given you a glimpse of it.

Mugs

Mugs are very important to me.  As a child, I noticed they were more heat and cold resistant than glasses, and they always have that useful handle.  However my parents either bought mugs that were more tea cups – too thin – or there was their Starbucks mug collection, which was not so nice to look at.

So in my college years I began to buy cheap graphic mugs, things that said “I’m drinking this for your own protection,” or “I like a little coffee with my coffee.”  But these mugs still weren’t well-engineered, and honestly, not too funny.  So after college I began collecting mugs from my favorite shops as souvenirs, and only if they were well made – from the handmade ice cream shop, from the cafe, etc.  Although I had logos all over the place, I wasn’t yet happy.

Then as a wedding present, a friend of my husband’s gave us a handful of completely mismatching, handmade mugs.  The glaze reminded me of when I was really little, when an aunt of mine would take me to her kiln and show me her creations.  These mugs, though perhaps a little sloppily made, were nice and thick, well-designed, and the glaze was the real thing.  So I have started a new venture, that is of investing signigicant money (significant to me that is) in one beautiful, functional handmade mug at a time.

I have two so far. The aim is to eventually overwhelm the kitchen.

Wish me luck.

Measurements

A few years ago I paid for a lesson from a coffee professional.  She had a recipe she had perfected and she taught it to me.  When it was time to ladle out the coffee beans, I didn’t see a scoop.

“Where’s the scoop?” I asked her.

“You can just use your hands,” she said.

Now, this made it no less precise.  We were using a scale to measure exactly how many grams of coffee were going into this (it was the kalita wave technique, by the way).

So for the past two or three years, I have been using my hands.  Getting a handful, then controlling whether they poured out one by one or by the dozen.  My hand would get dirty.  I guess coffee is oilly.  I would have to wash it immediately afterward.

This Christmas my little sister got me a hand made wooden coffee scoop.  It was too cute not to use so I began measuring the grams, only using the scoop, and I realized that three slightly heaping scoops were almost exactly to the gram as much as the recipe required.

So for the past eight days I have been using the scoop, and I put away the scale.

This got me thinking.  It’s nice to work blind, but would it be as satisfying if I didn’t know scientifically that within a certain margin of error this was exactly how much coffee I wanted?  Yet I know, over time, I’m going to start using less, or more beans from scoop to scoop and I won’t go back and measure it later.  Plus, now I’m using it for the french press I got for Christmas, and that requires a completely different measurement.

I am a Computer Scientist.  That means I have a scientist’s brain but I like shortcuts.  Apparently it applies to coffee as well.  It doesn’t hurt that I am also an artist.  I like to improvise.  How can one ever reconcile these opposing forces?

I think the secret is to alternate.  Measure, plan.  Then throw it away.  Then take it out of the trash and compare.  Measure again.

In cooking, I learned from the very precise measurements of Maangchi, but most Koreans of the older generation (and my husband) don’t cook with measurements.  I started with Maangchi, memorized her recipes, and now I am adding flavors of my own.

After all – I want to be a astrophysicist.  After all that mathematics, they still take a picture of the sky, do they not?