It started out ironic, but then it wasn’t. #shameless #chairdancing

This. It enrages me. And don’t even get me started on what I spend on hair dye, when the Snook’s grey hairs simply give him additional gravitas.

Women who wear makeup earn more and are treated better. This has steep costs, in both money and time.
Source: How Outrageous Beauty Expectations Hold Women Back

• “Gravity Light is an innovative device that generates light from gravity.” What a cool idea! Hardware hacking FTW.
• The Fabric Store Pattern Feature: Vogue #V8884 Trenchcoat. I gasped when I saw it. LOVE.
• Team Tabs is beating Team Spaces, as it should. (I’d buy a Team Tabs myself, but damn, $27?! Maybe I’m actually on Team Tightarse.)

In my never-ending quest to Automate All the Things, I just discovered how to quickly share from The Old Reader straight to your WordPress blog’s post editor using the “Send to” menu below every post. They don’t have WordPress listed in the official documentation, but with some digging I found out the correct URL to use. It’s this:

http://www.yourblogsite.com/wp-admin/press-this.php?u=%{url}&t=%{title}

Just go into your Old Reader settings page and click the “Social” tab. Then plug that URL (replacing your domain, of course) into the form at the bottom of the page and save. Now when you invoke it, you’ll be taken straight to your Press This editing window with the relevant URL and title pre-populated!

The Apple Music Australia playlist creators are KILLING IT.

Whoa, love it! And there are two others coming too? TAKE MY MONEY, DISNEY.

Hmm. I dislike change for change’s sake, but I do see what they’re going for here. And they got rid of the clunky pagination that always tripped me up. I’ll give it a chance…

As of this morning, we’ve launched a site-wide redesign with three main goals: clean, attractive pages that highlight our best stories; a stronger emphasis on beautiful images; and intuitive navigation and search so you can find what you’re looking for quickly.
Source: Welcome to the Serious Eats Redesign. Here’s What’s New. | Serious Eats

Many thanks to my friend Bez for a tip-off on Twitter this morning:

Excited to see a @web_goddess mention in @TheAmpHour #257. “There can’t be two self replicating mitten projects, right?”

I had to go investigate. It turns out The Amp Hour is a weekly podcast about electronics from a guy in Sydney and a guy in Cleveland. In Episode #257 they talked to Fabienne Serrière of KnitYak (which I actually backed and mentioned on the blog a few times in the past). At one point, the Australian host Dave starts talking about steganographic knitting and basically quotes a bunch of stuff from my Ignite talk last March. It happens around the 42:15 mark if you want to listen yourself. Dave also made special mention of the mittens, which reminded me that I hadn’t actually moved that page over from my old web host. (It’s fixed now, which is why you can see it on the blog.)

Very cool! I tweeted at Fabienne and the Amp guys to thank them for the shout-out. If you haven’t seen my Ignite talk, here’s the video:

I’ve been going to Girl Geek Sydney events for six years now. The first was at Google back in 2009, and I went with my friends Tia and Issy. None of us really knew what to expect. I remember feeling apprehensive because I’d recently left development to work as a business analyst, and I was intimidated to be surrounded by so many smart and talented women. Back then I didn’t have a lot of women friends. (I had some women knitting friends, but most were older and not working in tech.) I was still in my Cool Girl Feminist phase. Most other women were either dumb and boring, or Competition For My Spot. I’m not proud of it.

So I started going to Girl Geek events, and then I started speaking at them, and then I started helping to organise them, and along the way things changed. I grew up a lot. Maybe not entirely due to GGDSyd, but it was a big part of it. Nowadays I’m not ashamed to say I have girl friends, and they are amazing people: Jody and Sera and Amy and Peggy and Daphne and Lucy and Donna and Georgi and so many more. I genuinely like helping the younger generation (women and men!) starting careers in tech. I am thrilled to see my peers building cool stuff, speaking at events, and winning awards. It’s not a zero sum game anymore – we can all be successful. And I stopped caring so much whether I looked the Cool Geek Girl part (I had a terrible habit of denigrating girly-girls mostly because I was desperately envious of them), and I discovered that you can wear dresses and Taylor Swift’s red lippie and still be taken seriously in tech (by the people who actually matter).

So that’s a very long preamble to the real point of this post, which is that last Tuesday we hosted the July meetup for Girl Geeks Sydney at the Canva offices – and it was honestly one of the proudest moments of my career. I was the emcee for the night, and it was like getting to introduce two friends that you just know are going to get along terrifically. The attendees seemed rapt to be there, and my fellow Canva women all crushed it with their phenomenal talks. Even my male colleagues were telling me  the next day how inspired they were.

I’m just going to end with an excerpt from a chat conversation I had with Jody a month ago, prompted by our wonderful friend Kelly:

So that’s my new mantra – saying nice things to people. To all the girl geeks I’ve met over the past six years: you are all awesome and smart and talented in different ways, and I think you’re super inspiring. I wouldn’t be where I am now without your examples. And to my colleagues at Canva: I feel lucky every day to get to work with you. Thanks for putting on a great night for all my friends. 🙂

AWShine Hack is an upcoming hackathon put on by AWS through their “Amazon Women Shine” and “AWS Startup Community” groups. It’s going to be held on September 5-6 in Sydney (and September 19-20 in Melbourne). While the hackathon is open to all, priority will be giving to women entrepreneurs and developers. Pretty cool! I’m participating as a Business Mentor for the Sydney event and I’ll be handing out some Canva swag on the day. You should register now!