jennstrater

This is probably the question I get asked the most.  It’s usually not this blatant, but it’s often the motivation behind someone asking me, “Why are you starting a women’s group”?  If you haven’t been the only minority on an engineering team or user group, you may not understand the feeling.  Now I’m at a point in my career where I have grown some thicker skin, but at first, walking into a user group or a new office as the only woman was extremely intimidating.  It usually went one of two ways: I’d be asked if I was a recruiter (side note about how terrible the whole tech recruiting process is in the next post) or I’d be instantly tested to make sure that I was a “real” developer.  If I wasn't in the mood to deal with those kinds of questions and ignorance, I'd get frustrated and leave.  If I had gone into NYC for a meeting and left, I'd spend the whole train ride back to New Jersey sulking. I Almost Wasn’t a Software Engineer When I finally finished ...

If you saw me last week at Gr8Conf US, you may have seen me lugging around a giant new Motorola Nexus 6 with Google Fi.  It's the only phone currently available for the new wireless carrier by Google so I bought into it. I was super excited for everything Google Fi had to offer. Based on my usage for the last few years, I could have a bill as low as $30/month with Google Fi.  After 10+ years as a Verizon customer including the 1.5 years I spent as a call center customer service rep, I was ready to leave the big wireless carrier prices and irritating policies behind.  I was also excited to see the coolest new features from Android and finally get the chance to play around with Groovy for Android. After a week, I returned it and canceled the service and here's why. I started the week carrying two phones, but by the weekend I had switched to using the Fi Phone almost exclusively.  However, I found myself reaching for my old iPhone fairly frequently.  The firs...