Hacking Hardware and Talking Tech

The Speakers

Last Saturday and Sunday I went to Silicon Chef, a hardware hackathon for women. They provided each team with an Arduino kit, free t-shirts, food, lots of mentors, and tons of space at the startup Stripe, which has a very cool facility. Before giving us our Arduino kits and sending us off to hack away, they had several speakers.

The current mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee, is the first to create staff positions called Director of Innovation and Deputy Director of Education. Well, the Deputy Director of Education, who is a woman, presented a Mayor's Award to Hackbright for bringing more women into tech. Apparently it is not an award that is given out frequently, so that was very cool.

The other speakers were all awesome, but they kind of run together for me because I was so tired. But some of the topics they covered were about why manufacturing is so convenient in China (spoiler alert: it's not just cheap labor), how to create a product and then take it to market, and a slew of awesome products designed to get teen/pre-teen girls into tech.

Chaos and Unidentified Arduino Parts

After the speakers they distributed the Arduino kits and set us loose. Our team started going crazy with excitement and panic. We hadn't really discussed a strategy at all. Some people on our team really wanted to build something awesome. I just wanted to learn about hardware. Unfortunately, there wasn't really a way for us to accomplish these two opposing goals using only one Arduino. We were all trying to find out what the weird sensors and knobs and buttons and diodes were and how they worked, and we were disoriented/frantic as we tried to google the parts and find out what you could do with them. This did not work out very well and I spent a lot of the first day feeling kind of stressed and bummed out that I wasn't learning much. 

The next day I asked Liz if I could use one of the extra Arduinos to just go through the basic instructions in the book and really try to learn how hardware works. Luckily Liz is super awesome and all about learning, so she let me do it. I went around and told people to come hang out with me if they wanted to learn about the basics of hardware together. I worked partly on my own but had visitors come and go. Some people had been working on much more complicated stuff than I understood, but I was still able to teach them a lot about the basics that they didn't understand. I earned 20 points for Ravenclaw for teaching people about hardware!

The world's cutest seven-year-old girl came over and pretended to be a cat while I was hooking up a circuit from the instructions booklet. I talked to her for a while, which was awesome. Then her mom came over and we talked for a while. I guess when she was in college her advisors told her not to take computer science because it is really hard and uses a lot of math. She was a little devastated but luckily she realized that her advisors were racist, sexist pigs and she took programming classes anyway. She's a software engineer and she takes her awesome daughter to hackathons all the time. She tries not to pressure her daughter at all. She just asks for ideas on what to do and her daughter is super creative. A few weeks ago this woman and her friend and this little girl made a game based on the girl's design at a hackathon and they won $40,000 for it! I don't remember what she said the game did but I think it had something to do with animals. She gave me her contact info and she is going to send me some info on getting involved with organizations for young kids/girls that are all about getting them interested in tech.

Deep Learning: Can Computers Learn?

Every student at Hackbright is required to deliver a lightning talk - a five to ten minute talk about anything related to tech - sometime throughout the program. I signed up for the first time slot so that I could get it over with.

My tech talk was on Tuesday and my topic was Deep Learning, which is where you try to set up a program that acts more like a human brain than like a robot. So rather than writing a program that tells a computer how to recognize a human face, you build a virtual "neural network" and then give it a ton of faces and see if it learns how to recognize a human face on its own, much like a baby would. Google recently made a giant neural network and set it loose on youtube for three days to see what it would learn. They didn't tell it what to learn - they just gave it a way of strengthening and weakening connections between "neurons" as information comes in that confirms or contradicts previous information. After those three days, this neural net could recognize cat faces, among other things. This is what that program now considers to be the ideal cat face:

For a better explanation and more information on what Deep Learning really is, check out this article from Wired. 

The other two tech talks this week were about Captchas and about Project Loon, respectively. They were both super interesting and it has made me excited for everyone's tech talks in the next few weeks. We're basically learning about current events in the tech world while also getting practice giving short presentations. 

Next post will be about: Classes, Games, SQL, HTML, and Other Strange Concepts. Stay tuned!