Tag Archive for: Alienware

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

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