Dilys joins AirPair

the 2013 hacker girl joins AirPair

My new career chapter begins with AirPair yesterday! After an incredible time at the Crunchies and a dream work at Codecademy, I am proud to join the AirPair team for an unique apprenticeship! I will be shadowing Igor Lebovic, previously about.com now an AirPair co-founder, focusing on Marketing and SEO internship, content creation and management  functions. There will be a lot of opportunities to write about two of my favorite subjects: technology and programming!

I’m blown away by how tactical and efficient AirPair’s SEO and marketing efforts are, for what looks on the outside like a normal engineering startup. No wonder why they were able to grow so big from nothing but an idea in 2013.

If you are looking for a marketing internship at an exciting startup company, talk to me! 

What does AirPair do?

AirPair  | Better Software, Faster.

AirPair is instant access to the world's best software engineers for real-time help via video chat and screen sharing. 

AirPair helps keep software teams un-stuck and up to date with the latest technologies and practices, with experts spanning Rails, Angular.js, JavaScript, Backbone.js, PHP, and many more!

Air Pair is also a Y Combinator Company.



- AirPair customers write about how they use AirPair to get expert programming services
- Read about Pivotal Labs and AirPair's philosophy on Pair Programming

Find AirPair on AngelList | Find AirPair on CrunchBase | AirPair on Twitter

Why AirPair? The AirPair Team

Before joining AirPair, I was already a "super user" in its early stages, racked up 5+ sessions with Edward Anderson on JavaScript, jQuery and Backbone.js. The past time as a trusting customer made joining AirPair an easy decision. This video below is one of our Backbone sessions.

AirPair has a strong sense of  hackerpreneur culture. Every team member is a developer with a strong business acumen and startup genes. We all growth hack in client service, content and business dev.

Jonathon founded multiple startups and is currently the product guardian angel, Igor was SVP of about.com and spearheads marketing & SEO, and Maksim was Business Dev for Pivotal Labs, and currently architects optimal operations and drives growth!

It's my first day, I already had my first standup meeting, huddles, worked in open space, used the valley's favorite productivity apps like like Trello and Hackpad. One thing I love about our productive team is that we constantly share helpful tips and hacks. You bet I wrote a few lines of JavaScript too!

What kind of work will I be doing?

AirPair's content is technical. AirPair.com serves developers who are experts and also those who seek expert help. Each session covers at least one technology, and a technical aspect of development (Pair Programming, Code Review, Code Mentoring or Problem Solving). Being a content creator in the marketing function requires me to handle technical information and turn it into useful resources for our users, with guidance from Igor of course. There will be a lot of chances to interact with expert developers too.

This is another chapter of my journey. Who knows where it will lead. The beginning of 2014 will be an interesting time. This journey starts with a short-term learning / interning period. It may leads to future gigs.

Code Shannon - A Hackbright Candidate Who Fundraised out of "nothing" an amazing $10,000 story

Today I met with Shannon Burns talking about fundraising for women learning to code. Shannon was coming to me for advice, little had she known that she's up for a surprise. We talked about her journey to learn code and applying for Hack Reactor and Hackbright, which she picked and will be going in February. Just as the Silicon Valley fires up about women in tech and the future of women in tech, Shannon shows us what is a possible and very personal solution for the big problem. 

Shannon's GoFundMe Profile $14,000 dollars to go or more

She showed me a community that she is building which is still in a BETA phase : http://www.hackingforwomen.com She wants to use herself as a guinea pig to start a campaign, crowdfunding her way to pay for Hackbright, which costs nearly half of her annual salary. For most women, and most people, that's a lofty price to pay before they even dream of a potentially big salary (ranging from 10%-100% of their current paycheck). It's a personal fundraising campaign, with lists of beginner resources, and a vision for a pay-it-forward using a crowdfunding model to support education for hackettes.

Upon successfully completing Hackbright, she pledges to contribute 10% of her first year salary to a scholarship pool for young women just like her present day self. She will personally select the scholarship recipient with the help of her advisors (donors).

It was so obvious to me that Shannon's project's success is conditioned on her own success and a creation of a trustworthy personal brand. Her story sounds familiar like many young women I have met: worked at a small attic-dwelling startup, then account manager at a popular on-demand ridesharing company, learn to code for 6 months on her own, hacking away JavaScript, and now a proud candidate for Hackbright,  and already building something for women. She has an inspirational story, but not yet a powerful personal brand (or does she). I asked to see her GoFundMe fundraising page to excavate real inspirational bits

"I just figured no body would look at that page", Shannon is still saying. Yet there is a

$10,000 donation from Suzanne on GoFundMe! Shannon's campaign is already a success. 

Actually she was so surprised, she said a lot of words and asked me to excuse her for swearing. She even refreshed the pages a few times. (The donation is dated 5 days ago, really came in as a surprise. Shannon still has to contact the donor). Channeling her inner artist, Shannon gives somewhat unusual kickstarter-like perks: drawing, mp3 playlist and adventures. For $10,000, You will have a vote in choosing the scholarship recipient (in addition to all previous reward levels.). Could the donor be amused by this dream girl or may be she is also inspired by her call-to-action "be the solution to the gender gap in the tech industry."

Shannon Burns: a list of unusual perks

I am so happy for her, and more importantly her personal crowdfunding model clearly is working: people want to contribute to the education of young women, and they want to contribute big. They want to trust this inspirational girl even before she delivers "flowers". 

She may not be a full time hard core full stack developer YET, and she will need to deliver some results ... early on. After talking her, Shannon has agreed to put a small amount of her pool into mini scholarships right away. These may be mini donations to Girl Develop It, Treehouse monthly subscriptions, learning communities that Shannon already associate with. I also advised her to be an informational hub and a go-to resource for women's crowdfunding effort (learning to code specifically). You can tweet at Shannon to get in touch, or better yet contribute to her campaign.

You can help too: Shannon is fundraising $25,000 dollars on Gofundme. And anything excessive of the tuition and living cost of not having a job, she pledges to inject into the scholarship pool. You can visit her page here.

I had to ask Shannon, what if you don't become a developer? Slightly offended, and saddened Shannon says "but my dream is to become a developer"and "I will donate 10% of my first year salary no matter what (referring to even if it is not a developer position)". And that was inspirational: this is Shannon's dream and journey, who are we to question her?

You can imagine this is day one of our discussion (we just met!), the future is unknown, but I am excited to see what Shannon does. She will keep all of us posted. Way to go Shannon! I was proud to share this moment with you.

App nation 2013 recap and productivity apps

Productivity Apps
These are my personal opinions on productivity apps. Please critique make suggestions! Would love to hear from you.


Task Management Productivity
NEW~ Shoots&Leaves reviewed: could it be the developer friendly todo / task management that hackers always wanted? 

An app that I always wanted: turns a photo snapshot of the moment into a reminder / clipboard text / todos even markdowns! This is got to be a developer favorite. I am still testing it but wrote my review already, because the hacker friendliness
My review: One of my productivity finds. I always take picture info/task for myself but they easily get lost in the cameraroll. I like this app for allowing me to upload to imgur right away or to Dropbox if I want to be private. I don't think I have to give it permission to access my cameraroll, a privacy plus of course. Most fun of all it allows templating, a mustache like coder friendly syntax that allows dynamically forming texts: Read {{title}} by EOD {{url}} . Or even markdown! Win. Still testing 5 star for now, working and not crashing
The name seems to be spin of the popular yet humorous grammar, writing and etiquette book Eats, Shoots & Leaves (do you know what it means? ;-)
Wunderlist
Fast speed yet powerful todo list management with recurring task scheduling (a big productivity boost), categorization, star/favoriting, reminder and clock. Easy to use across all Mac and Apple mobile platforms. Drag and drop features.
Asana
For embodying agile development practice, task prioritization and management with easy drag and drop and also reprioritization / reordering. Keyboard smart, can reduce mouse clicking.
Logistics Productivity
Fancy Hands +Fancy Hands
I like Fancy Hands because it is a subscription plan for a number of fixed requests each month. Say I pay $25 dollars for a 5 request plan, making it a merely $5 dollars per request. It is incredible! The staff is US based, and English-speaking, which can be very helpful in certain geo-specific tasks and tasks that require cultural backgrounds like passion for the super bowl.  The most important part is that I don't have to hire by the hour, or negotiate the rate / quote for each task. If I have time for that logistics, I didn't have to get a virtual assistant help in the first place.

Fancy Hands review - affordable efficient virtual assistants
Career Productivity
Levo resume
A women friendly and aesthetically pleasing free resume builder tool made by a classy virtual community online +Levo League  that aims to promote women's career successes! It's enjoyable to use.

Levo League Resume Builder Phone App
Social Network Productivity
Using private social media networks like Path +Path
I use Path because it is intimate. I can tone down my sharing filter instead of worrying intensely about PR and impact. It auto shares (given permission) some of my social data like geolocation, sleep time, status and views, saves me time. It allows me to share contents like music and books, saves a lot of explanations.

Path -  a private social network
Coding Productivity
AirPair +Air Pair
I use AirPair to level up after attending code school and attending hackathons. It allows me to meet one-on-one with an expert and get a high quality session tailored to my needs. Will write a guest blog post on airpair about it soon! I can imagine AirPair is also good for developers learning new technologies but already are busy with projects at hand or have their billable hours filled up. This is a quick efficient to get started.

AirPair - pair programming and coding for developer productivity
Mental Storage and Information Management Productivity
Evernote (link to premium only, normal signup use evernote.com)
I use Evernote to manage my forever growing knowledge and skill notes. As I study more and more coding, trying to stay on top of business and marketing, I need memory and storage. Evernote is lightweight and works everywhere. I use the premium plan for massive uploads and OTC recognition - an effort to digitize all my documents to reduce cluster. Evernote was famously described as the external brain. We definitely need one in this information age.
Same Day Delivery Services if you value your time
Department store shopping like Toys R Us Lowe's  - eBay Now
Mini food catering and satisfying tapioca / boba or Philz coffee cravings  promo code fpt2 for $10 delivery credit.


Reading and information consumption productivity
Pocket
Easy to use mobile apps and webpage views, can archive and favorite, tag at ease. Light weight, fast yet powerful. Bonus: smart reading features like Recommended Reading, Long Read vs Short Read Classification
Financial Management Productivity
BillGuard
I'm still testing this one out but so far I like  it's lighter weight than minted, I can use Credit Cards only features. Swipe and fast archive, action, labeling features. Quickly check if bills are reasonable. Automated smart engine tells you if others have flagged a particular transaction.

From the news
Fast Company Recaps the best apps of 2013
Fast Company Work Smart section












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Productivity Tip - Web Tech - Stumbling upon GMail right click menu

This is a short productivity tip: aside from the "?" key shortcut menu, GMail has this right click / ctrl click triggered mini menu. It's nice and easy. I like it.

Tool Tips - Stop Mac TextEdit from auto formatting changing double dashes to demash

Tool Tips - Stop Mac TextEdit from auto formatting changing double dashes to demash. Stop TextEdit autocorrecting.

Stop Mac TextEdit from replacing double dashes

There seems to be an easy solution. Check it out and let me know if it works for you! You just have to uncheck the Smart Dash option, and then reopen the file (using the one you already opened will still have sticky "smart dash").

This is useful because: engineering friend was getting annoyed at programming in TextEdit on Mac because of the auto formatting.

HTML and Coding for Bloggers - Embed widgets on your blog, examples MailChimp, Twitter

Love MailChimp, SoundCloud and other cool services? And you run a blog? Chances are you can embed anything like Twitter and MailChimp onto your blog. Take a look at this demo. Twitter allows you to embed twitter wall too, without needing to code a single line. Just care about the Twitter widget? Skip to the bottom of the page for a screenshot. You can reference the screenshot when locating the widget option in your twitter settings menu. 

Example
Tweets by @i_stanford

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