Love,
Rebecca Campbell

P.S. If you could try to use logic and reason as you go about fixing things, I'd really appreciate it. ]]> Rebecca Campbell 2013-03-02T13:18:00-08:00 http://www.nerdygirl.com/archive.aspx?id=432 Because we really do sit around talking about how awesome and funny Portland is. All the time. (But don't move here; you'll hate the rain.) I had started to come up with some oh-so-Portlandy examples for you, but then I saw this, which just says so much: The 30 most Portland things that have ever happened in Portland.

My "that's so Portland" list now seems a bit paltry and bicycle-centric in comparison, but here's what I had before I saw the other list:

• Moving by bike—it is always so fun to see a couch or bed being moved on one or more bike trailers.
• 24th and Meatballs—I haven't been, but the name alone prompted someone to say, "That's so Portland." Upon further investigation, it does seem pretty Portlandy. Vegan options available, and of course (of course!) you can get your meatballs delivered by bike.
• Hot tub rentals delivered by bike—seriously, we'll drag anything behind a bicycle.
• It's not all fun and games and bicycle delivery, though. Sometimes you have to sell your Morrissey shrine. (So sad the image is no longer available.)
• International Moustache Film Festival and Moustache Pageant—tickets are on sale now!

3D printing, you guys. It is so so cool!

Here's something that I think will be possible in the future: you are going out to a nice restaurant, but you've got no shoes to match your dress. You go to some web site (maybe Amazon or Zappos if they've adapted) and download a 3D model of some shoes. Your computer already has a 3D model of your foot, and some piece of software adjusts the model you've just downloaded to fit your foot. You click the print button and hop in the shower.

Many moons later, when your shoes wear out, you clean them up and toss them in a home recycling machine. Whatever material was used will be converted back to a raw material, ready to be printed again.

Of course, shoes are fun to think about, but think of the other things you can print. New sunglasses (frames at first, and lenses when the technology gets better), games and toys, photo frames. Jesse will be out in the garage printing engine parts. The possibilities are pretty limitless.

If we can get to the point where sustainable/recyclable materials are used (and I think we can (and by "we", I mean people who do this for a living)), imagine the environmental impact. How many stupid things did you buy on Amazon last year? Did you really need a 4' x 2' box with a mile of air-filled plastic to carry you a new lens cap for your camera? No, you didn't.

The home printers are mostly using plastic at this point. But there are metal, glass, and wood printers, too. Boeing is already printing airplane parts. I read that they hope to print whole aircraft wings in the future. How cool is that? The printed wings can be lighter because they won't need rivets or other connectors.

Another exciting thing is bio printing. As a skin graft recipient, I'm especially interested in the inkjet printers that make human skin. Scientists are working on emergency skin printers to treat burn victims or people in war zones. There are also people working to print human organs. That's right, instead of waiting for a donor to die and worrying about possible rejection from an organ transplant, your own cells will be used to print you a new heart.

I feel like we're already living in the future, but that's a whole different blog post. This 3D printing thing is just mind-bogglingly cool.

The success of the conference was, I think, entirely due to the Open Space format. In a nutshell, you show up on the first day, and there are zero sessions planned. Every attendee can come up with a session idea (or in some cases 4 or 5 session ideas), announce it to the group, and make it happen.

One thing that made this a great experience was the options I had during each 1-hour time slot. I did not want to wind up in any sessions where the discussion was around semantics, or where someone had strong opinions about The One Way To Do Agile. Frankly, the agile community can be pretty pedantic, and I haven't read all the literature. My interest in agility is not academic, it's very practical: how do I identify and solve problems in my workplace? But this was the pervasive attitude among the attendees and only a few sessions suggested that I was not the target audience. There were many developers at the conference (even other female developers—they exist!), so there were even some sessions about coding or related topics.

Look, options!

I also surprised myself by hosting a session. The reason I signed up for the conference to begin with is that there are aspects of managing a software team that don't come naturally to me, and I have no pattern for how to approach these problems. I wanted to talk to my peers about some of these challenges and perhaps feel less alone, so that's how Managers Who Hate Managing came about. It was great to find out that I'm not alone in my struggles and talk to other people who are in similar boats.

All in all, I couldn't be more pleased with the conference. I learned about some crazy ass things like mob programming (which we'll be trying at my office), and heard hundreds of ideas for improvements that people have made to their own work environments. Who knew that a conference I feared would be useless would give me new excitement about my job—even the parts I hate?

Slipshod, her shoe slipped
Oh, the ferns, the ferns! she cried
And toppled away

"Aren't children lovable because they're falling down all the time and have little bodies with the heads too big? Didn't Walt Disney know all about this when he did the seven dwarfs? And these funny little dogs that people have—they're lovable because they're so imperfect."

As so many things do lately, this reminded me of Theo, who was possibly the best cat ever. We lost him quite suddenly to cancer last fall. But Theo was the embodiment of lovable imperfections: he had crossed eyes and a very talkative nature, including ridiculously long meows as he announced his entry into the room. He was (as affectionately as humanly possible) our jerk faced cat, and we miss him terribly.