Little Women Love Technology Gifts Too

December 26, 2019/in Technology/by Ukela

Why Technology Gifts are for Girls Too (2021)

Little women love technology gifts too. This is especially true if we are developers, web designers, graphic artists or gamers. So if you have a little woman in your circle and feel as if you bombed in the Christmas gift category this year, Christmas is over but you can make up for it during the “after Christmas sales” or on Valentine’s Day!

We are all old enough to know that Christmas is not about the gifts. It is about togetherness and thankfulness. The reality is, however, that there is still a level of expectation around this holiday and if we are going to participate, we’d all like to feel good about our participation. If you do not feel good about it, all is not lost. This is the post that will get you back on track. Let’s try a little bit harder to match her up with the perfect gift.

Women and girls are often miscatergorized as far as what we truly like. Many assumptions are made and they are often not challenged. A good deal of the time, we are the ones buying the gifts, so the dialogue about our wishes may be overlooked or not discussed at all. This is an issue. As you will see later, the overlooking of the true wants and needs of women and young girls when it comes to technology, leads us all on an path of living, unfortunately, in an underserved community and world.

Technology girl

Love Tech but Often Overlooked

Quite a few of us love or loved technology at a young age but, sadly, were encouraged to go in different direction. Maybe we loved math but were shuttled into a helping field. Or we were quiet and loved science but were encouraged to speak out more and steered into an art field.

Forbes magazine has a blistering article about the subject. “Women are creating smartphones, website software and a variety of programming languages and are still representing a far smaller percentage of those working in IT than their male counterparts. Given that we know there is no “lady brain,” what could be driving this disparity?” Vigo, Forbes

Could it be that the next inventor of a ground-breaking technology is currently seven years old and is being encouraged against her interests? As I mentioned above, it only underserves the community around us for girls and women not to connect with our passion and gifts. Connecting with these technology skills could advance so many ills that plague our society, from medicine to environmental issues.

“We know that women’s and men’s brains are not different when it comes to mathematical or logical skills. Still, some of the best IT platforms widely used today are coming from countries like India where the awareness of the rights of women and girls is expanding within social and legal structures as much as within the field of IT.” Vigo, Forbes

That is encouraging. But how can we make it a worldwide trend?

Verbalizing our interest and/or love for technology can be difficult for a girl. It is nice to have our families behind us, supporting us and paying enough attention to us to know where our interests lie. Either at an early age or a more seasoned age, the time for girls and women in technology is right now.

Little Women Love Tech

Our Shopping Habits

Often, we love the same gifts as the guys. In fact, we upgrade our phones as much or more than guys. We want cutting edge technology too. We shop for tech items for ourselves and we buy tech items for ourselves. If we are too young to buy them, we are just as fascinated as the boys around us when encountered with the same devices online or in stores. And we also buy technology for others. Studies show that not only do we research what those around us like and want, but those same persons are not afraid to also let us know what they like and want. Sometimes we are more reserved, either by learned habit or bashfulness, and do not take that same approach. But I can tell you this, little women love technology too!

Women do not all want the same things. Perfume, clothing, shoes and makeup do not live at the top of all of our lists. Those things are nice, however, if boyfriend, dad or anyone in our circle acknowledges our interest in a drone or sees us doing complicated math or science problems and enjoying it. If so, that is a sure sign to begin shifting buying habits.

Christmas Redemption

So if you have a tech girl in your circle, here is your second chance! There are a little less than 2 months to make this happen for Valentine’s Day or you can catch the after Christmas markdowns. It would be great to find a way to ask about her technology interests, however, if you just want to be especially attentive over the next few days or weeks, the answer will be clear to you by then.

Little Women Love Technology gifts Too

Technology Gifts

Here are some examples of a computer that she may benefit from in order to excel in complicated math, science or work problems or research. Or she may want to take a break from it all and disappear into virtual reality. Finally, she may want to learn to fly a drone for the adventure or for the amazing photography. Little women love technology gifts too!

Gaming:

Oculus Go Standalone Virtual Reality Headset – 32GB

LHTC Vive Cosmos – PC

HTC VIVE Pro Virtual Reality System

Computers:

Dell OptiPlex Desktop Complete Computer Package with Windows

2018 Dell Alienware 17.3 Inch FHD Laptop Computer

Perhaps you’d like to buy her a drone…

DJI Mavic Pro 4K Quadcopter with Remote Controller, 2 Batteries, with 1-Year Warranty – Gray

SIMREX X11 Upgraded GPS Drone with 1080P HD Camera 2-Axis Self stabilizing Gimbal

If you see a gift or a talent in a little woman in your circle early on, or even if we are seasoned, a well thought out technology gift would be the best encouragement ever toward our passion and maybe our future career!

Also, if the little woman is a developer, check out this post on why she should be using a Mac.

Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

Image by Afishera from Pixabay

Image by Ulrike Mai from Pixabay

7 Fantastic Features of the MacBook Pro

December 25, 2019/in Business, Software, Technology/by Ukela

There are so many excellent features in my favorite laptop. Here are a few of them in “7 Fantastic Features of the MacBook Pro.”

MacBook Pro

Who is using the MacBook Pro?

MacBook Use Stats

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – OS Market Share

According to the statistics above, Mac users are about 17% of the population using computers. Coding on a MacBook Pro is popular. Programmers spend a lot of time on our computers. It is an experience that we want to be pleasurable and efficient. Below are “The 7 Fantastic Features of the MacBook Pro”.

Coding

You’ve made the decision to learn to code. It’s time to get busy coding; on a MacBook Pro. The actual task of sitting down at a computer to code is intimidating. It is less intimidating when you have the right hardware. A MacBook Pro laptop is the definition of “the right hardware”. It is sleek and performs tasks more efficiently than most computers. The experience of using an Apple machine cuts the intimidation in half. There are also many applications that work well on the Mac and are suitable for coding. Xcode is a great environment and we will discuss that. There are six other environments to code comfortably in on the MacBook Pro.

Let’s Talk About The Mac’s Xcode

In Xcode, you can program in C++. You can also build iOS apps. I have done both. There are other languages that you can code in as well. It is Apple’s offer for coding with an IDE. Also, this Apple machine is the only way that you can build iOS apps.

“Xcode makes it easy to get a huge head start on turning your existing iPad app into a native Mac app. Your Mac and iPad apps share the same project and source code, so any changes you make translates to both platforms. And your newly created Mac app runs natively, utilizing the same frameworks, resources, and even runtime environment as apps built just for Mac. Deliver your new Mac app to an engaged audience of over 100,000,000 active Mac users.”- Apple.com

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a Microsoft product but translates really well to the MacBook. Just learning to code, Visual Studio Code for Mac made coding easier for me to understand. I downloaded it to my Mac and have been using it for projects since that time. It is my favorite of the “7 Fantastic Features of the MacBook Pro”.

“VS Code helps you be instantly productive with syntax highlighting, bracket-matching, auto-indentation, box-selection, snippets, and more. Intuitive keyboard shortcuts, easy customization and community-contributed keyboard shortcut mappings let you navigate your code with ease. Visual Studio Code includes an interactive debugger, so you can step through source code, inspect variables, view call stacks, and execute commands in the console.” – code.visualstudio.com

The MacOS Terminal

The MacOS Terminal is practical and is mostly free of clutter. Therefore a programmer can get the job done faster and more efficiently.

“Terminal is a Mac command line interface. There are several advantages to using Terminal to accomplish some tasks — it’s usually quicker, for example.” –Igor Degtiarenko, MacPaw

The MacBook Features

The TechLead, an ex-Google, Ex-Facebook Software Engineer lead gives a solid explanation on the subject. He states that “Everyone knows what the MacBooks are. They are very reliable. The screen color is well tuned….[it’s high resolution] the build quality is nice; the trackpad works well and Macs are used by all industry engineers (in Silicon Valley at least)”.

Screen

Mac screens

What do we need to know about MacBook screens? Retina Display. This is the term that was coined by Apple and sums up the quality of its screens on its products. Macworld states, “The first and most important criterion is pixel density: the statistic that generally gives the best idea of a screen’s sharpness. When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 4, and with it the first Retina display, he described it as having a screen with so many pixels packed so closely together (it was rated as 326ppi – pixels per inch) that they were imperceptible to the human eye at a distance of 12 inches. You wouldn’t see individual pixels: you’d just see the image those pixels created.” -Macworld.co.uk (link above).

The Mac following is a following is because of this. You simply cannot see the pixels on the computer screen and pixel density is major when you are coding. I am sure all programmers want whatever code they have executed to be displayed on the best screen possible. Macs do not get it wrong.

Durability

Mac keyboard

“The MacBook’s unibody enclosure is made from a single block of aluminum, making the new MacBook fundamentally thinner, stronger and more robust with a fit and finish that we’ve never even dreamed of before.”-Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of Industrial Design.

This is also the favorite of the 7 Fantastic Features of the MacBook Pro according to most Youtube videos that feature it.

The manufacturing process , linked here with pictures, is amazing. The unibody design explains why the Macbook is so sleek in comparison to other computers. My Chromebook is rough and rigid. My Lenovo seems to be made of the same material and put together from multiple parts. They both remind me of having a cheese grater on my lap in the summer when I’m trying to code. Not good. The MacBook is smooth and cool. It is pleasurable to sit on my lap if I have that skirt or shorts on. Other manufacturers may not have considered that women who code don’t want a cheese graters on their laps. Apple did. Thank you.

Keyboard

Lit Mac Keyboard

It seems Apple thought of everything. The keyboard is also a part of the joyous experience while coding. I can see at night when I code because a light shines from beneath the letters I’m typing.

“A portion of the front edge is milled thin enough that a laser can be used to micro-perforate the metal to allow light from the sleep indicator LED to pass through the metal. When the sleep indicator is off, the metal appears to be solid. The environmentally-friendly LED backlit display also offers other advantages; it turns on instantly when the display is opened as there is no warm up time required by a conventional cold cathode fluorescent lamp backlight.” – Apple Insider

This light is a programmer’s friend. The makers of Macintosh knew this because they were computer programmers and were up all hours of the night programming…just like us.

Trackpad

Mac trackpad

The MacBook Pro’s Trackpad, also called the magic trackpad, is so responsive that it is like magic. The glass on metal trackpad earned a patent designed by Steve Jobs and Jony Ive in 2008.

“The Force Touch trackpad…When you press on the trackpad, the Taptic Engine fires up and shakes the surface of the trackpad. Your brain interprets the vibration and the pressure as a downward click, even though that’s not what’s actually happening. (The vibration from the Taptic Engine is from side to side, not up and down.) But what Apple has implemented—a series of force sensors underneath the trackpad surface and a Taptic Engine that can vibrate the surface on demand—is a remarkable simulation of the real thing.” – Jason Snell, Macworld

And now, after learning all of this, you know that an investment in a Macbook is the right choice if you are coding. Programmers around the world enjoy the experience of coding more because of Apple. It is not a fluke that most programmers use this hardware. It is a choice.

At the time of this writing, this MacBook Pro is almost half price, which is insane! You should now have an idea of the enormous value that you’re getting. But if not, I do and you’ll still be thanking me years from now. You’re welcome.

Buy Your MacBook Pro

Starter Mac:

Your Forever Mac:

Or if you need something in between:

Credits:

TechLead: YouTube video (linked)

Mac screens Image by Nick_H from Pixabay

Mac keyboard Durability Image by Tobias Heine from Pixabay

Lit Mac keyboard Image by Rogerio Rogeriomda from Pixabay

Trackpad of a MacBook Image by Free stock photos from www.rupixen.com from Pixabay

Tech-Ke Solutions

Learn SQL (2021)?

December 25, 2019/in Business, Software, Student, Technology/by Ukela

What is SQL?

SQL stands for structured query language. SQL is most students’ first experience with a database. My first experience was Access. Before Access, I had an Excel class. Excel spreadsheets were revolutionary in its time because it organized data when no other program could. I feel like I worked my way up to SQL. They are all methods, created by Microsoft, to organize data.

SQL is the most efficient way to organize complex data. It is a relational database. All of the information in the database is related. Information is divided into tables and rows. There can be hundreds of tables and rows that relate to one another. A great example is the database for a mid-sized college. There are thousands of students and these students have classes. The classes have grades attached. Students’ home addresses and phone numbers are also there. These are named and categorized a certain way in the database. There are tables of keys. We will find foreign keys. There are primary and composite keys. Also in the chart are surrogate keys. There are natural keys as well.

A very important task to learn with SQL is how to backup and restore. We also have to run or execute queries. These are two important skills to master. There are others of course. However, if freelancing, this is extremely important. A great deal of the requests for freelance help centers around restoration. An example is that a company’s database has been corrupted. They need the database restored without losing any of its data. This is preferable of course. However, if this was not properly handled by the original database administrator, it may not be possible. This is why it needs to be backed up properly the first time. Restores are not problematic afterward.

All That Data

Forbes Contributor Adrian Bridgewater writes the following. “Smart cars and Internet-connected machines are starting to produce huge volumes of time-stamped data. Companies need to collect and analyze [that] data.” “New software monitoring and measuring strategies have created enormous logs of events that need similar treatment. These trends account for the largest portion of data growth today. The data from these sources always has a core element of time that is crucial to any meaningful analysis. Many enterprises will realize they need a specific strategy for time series data to glean the full value of their business potential,” said InfluxData’s Kaplan.

SQL will handle the above analysis. The statement mentions “enormous logs of events” and that is SQL’s specialty. They will be a huge part of strategy revolved around data in the future.

Data Engineering

“A data engineer works with sets of data to advance data science goals. Unlike other roles, such as a data scientist, a data engineer is not generally as involved in overall strategic analysis. She is more deeply involved in working hands-on with the data sets.” ~ TechoPedia

Sometimes called a database Administrator or DBA, we usually use the programming language Python for scripting. We may also use R or Java. More coding is involved in data engineering. More calculation is involved in data science. I have taken a couple of programming classes, and it is encouraged to data engineers. We write the scripts for the data. SQL is the basis and programming is an essential part.

“Data engineers work with the life cycle of data sets to help make data useful to a project. Many are primarily interested in aggregating raw data and making it into useful, ordered and structured data formats.” ~Techoppedia

The Pay

The pay is solid. It is an attraction of the career. Glassdoor estimates the salary for data engineers in my area, the southest, at 70k-135k. One can work remotely or at the office. The freedom is great but the workdays can be long. Coding at a computer on a project is a marathon. It does not matter if it is to write a program for a database or a website. The end of the project is satisfying and it is a great relief. Afterward, you will move on to another project if you are freelancing. If working for a company and on salary, monitoring the build will be the job.

Freelancing and salary at a company are the main ways to earn a living using SQL. However, there is no set industry that we must stay in to use our SQL skills. We can work in marketing. Paper product companies need past, present and future (or predictive) data to grow. The same is true for the financial field. Market analysis is super competitive and the best tools must be used to get ahead and to stay ahead. Those tools include relational databases.

Growth in the Field

Keep learning and growing in the field. Mentors and advisors constantly remind us. SQL is always evolving and we have to evolve as well. It will take several classes and practice at home to master SQL. We work on many projects on our own and those of our employers to master the trade.

Growth in this field can take us many places. Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Data migration. Big data. Internet of things (IoT). These are all subsections of the field. And they are pretty large subsections.

What are the tools that data engineers work with to achieve data visualization and other hot terms for this field to get comfortable with. Linux. Hive. Spark. Hadoop. Red Hat. Ubuntu. Power BI. ETL. Presto. Phoenix. Drill. Spark SQL. Data Lake. Azure. Normalization. Query builder. When learning SQL, we should become familiar with these terms. Learning about these with create opportunities and open doors.

Always use a good solid computer for your programming journey. I recommend the following computers.

Alienware 17R4 Intel Core i7-7700HQ X4 2.8GHz 32GB 1TB+1TB SSD Win10, Silver (Renewed)

Alienware Computer

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 2 in 1 PC Tablet 12.3″ (2736×1824) Touchscreen, i5-8250U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD w/Fingerprint Type Cover, Surface Pen, Dock, Mouse, Backlit, Webcam, Fanless, Win 10 – Black

Surface Computer