Geek of the Week: Sarah Sharp, The Geekess
Sarah Sharp is a software engineer who hacks on Linux for a living. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she enjoys hiking and commuting to work on her bike. Her blog, "The Geekess", can be found at http://sarah.thesharps.us .
Do you mind if I call you a geek?
Of course. I might have a different definition of "geek" than you do. The word applies to many people, from gamers to computer programmers. To me, a geek is someone who is so interested in a particular subject that they learn it inside
out, start spouting off obscure vocabulary when asked about their hobby, and/or forget to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom in their concentration on the subject. I’m geeky about Linux, biking, gardening, and an old Disney cartoon
called Gargoyles.
What first attracted you to technical/computer/math stuff?
I was the "smart kid" from about the third grade onwards. In the third grade, I had to take a special reading class to catch up with my classmates. Once I learned how to read, I was fascinated with the worlds that authors created inside the books. When my family got a computer, I spent a lot of time playing games like Might and Magic IV, Myst, and Zork: The Grand Inquisitor. I loved escaping into a world and solving puzzles. When I discovered that I could potentially create a world by writing a software program, I became interested in computers and computer programming. I didn’t end up writing game software for a living, but I do spend a lot of my time puzzling over code.
What do you think of as your youngest "geek moment"?
When I was in 5th grade and my sister was in 1st grade, my mom walked in on us playing school. "2 plus what equals 4?" My mom loves to boast about me teaching algebra in fifth grade.
When and how did your technical interests get serious?
I was taking an intro computer science class, and I needed to compile my programs in a Unix-like environment. I was running Windows at the time, so my boyfriend set up Cygwin for me. After I’d gotten the hang of programming in a shell, he started pestering me to dual boot my computer so I could use Linux instead. Foolishly, I agreed.
Linux was hard to learn to use at first. I asked Jamey a lot of questions and fled to Windows when I got frustrated. I kept being drawn back because there’s so much you can do as a programmer in Linux that you can’t do in Windows. I got to the point where I could find answers to my problems with an internet search instead of asking my boyfriend. I was really proud that I could troubleshoot a completely different operating system on my own. I began to try to learn how Linux works and started poking at the guts of the OS, which is called the "kernel".
Eventually, I found out that a lot of Linux kernel developers live in Portland. The USB subsystem maintainer, Greg Kroah-Hartman, knew my mentor, Bart Massey. Greg asked me to work on a USB kernel project for him. That was the start of my Linux kernel hacking career, which is what I consider my "serious" technical interest.
You’re very involved with the Portland State Aerospace Society. How did you find out about PSAS, and when did you first get involved?
The Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) designs, builds, and launches open source amateur rockets. These aren’t your average hobby rockets. Our rocket is 14 feet tall, and we build the airframe from scratch. The Linux flight computer on board the rocket gathers sensor data, and automatically blows the parachutes at the apogee (very top) of the flight arch.
I first got involved in PSAS because my boyfriend, Jamey, dragged me along. PSAS is a highly technical group, and I was a little overwhelmed at first. I wasn’t quite sure how to jump in, so I decided to work on the "administrative"
aspects. I become the student club president, and ran introductory meetings and secured more funding for PSAS. The work gave me some time to listen in on the technical conversations and figure out how I could contribute.
What have you enjoyed about that experience? High points? Low points?
Launches are always the high points. In the summer of 2005, I went out to the eastern Oregon desert with PSAS. We were all geeked-out with our tent full of laptops, antennas, and ham radio equipment. The rocket was two miles away from the ground control tent, and I was on a recovery team on a hill overlooking the launch site. I heard the count down on my radio and stared at the rocket through my binoculars. The rocket shot off into the sky, and then I could see
the motor smoke curving under the sun. I held my breath, waiting for ground control to announce the parachute deployment.
I saw the rocket glint on its way down, and heard the frantic calls of, "Attempting to fire the main chute. Attempting to deploy the drogue chute." They were trying to force the rocket to eject its parachute. Something had gone wrong with the automatic parachute deployment system. I watched the rocket’s decent become faster and faster, and knew that it wasn’t going to work. Later, I walked through the scrub brush to the last known GPS coordinates and dug the rocket out of the sand. Our beautiful 14-foot rocket was now a crumpled 4-foot coffee table center piece. That was the low point.
However, the crash was an opportunity for me. PSAS decided to completely redesign the rocket from the ground up. This allowed me to ask questions and challenge past assumptions. I could listen to conversations about parts of the
rocket I was interested in, but had no way to contribute to. At that point, I started working on the new USB sensor nodes.
How do you hear about Ignite and when did you first get involved?
Ignite Portland is a crazy event where each person gives a talk for five minutes. They are allowed 20 slides, which auto-advance every 15 seconds. Needless to say, you can’t freeze in that kind of situation. There were 700 people at the last Ignite Portland, and they had to turn about a hundred people away because they had reached the fire code
limit.
I first heard about Ignite during a pdxgeekchix lunch. Pdxgeekchix is a group of geeky women who get together every month. One of the members was an organizer for Ignite Portland, and she said it would be cool if I gave a talk on rockets and the Portland State Aerospace Society.
You can watch the five-minute talk I gave at Ignite Portland 2 online. The slides are available (This link has been updated. - 5/2/2008 ) if you want to follow along. I was scared shitless, but I think it’s the best talk I’ve ever given.
How do you go about learning new things?
The internet knows everything… I usually type in something like "git tutorial" or "git documentation". I try to find the official site for software first, and see what it recommends. After I get a general background, I ask experts (like my husband or people from the rocketry group) for advice. I don’t tend to buy books, because they’re often outdated before they hit the shelves.
One of my biggest problems is that I tend to want to become an expert at something before I jump into it. When I feel unsure of my knowledge, I sometimes refrain from contributing to technical discussions because I want "the experts" to answer first. Another bad habit I have is doggedly trying to figure out something on my own, when I really need to admit to myself that I should ask for help.
I think a lot of women are afraid to look dumb in front of their technical peers, and that makes them not speak up. I sell my technical skills short when I don’t share my knowledge, and I lose valuable time when I don’t ask a question because I don’t want to sound dumb. When I’m afraid to ask questions, I remind myself that we’re all put on this earth to learn, and that the open source community is there to help.
Do you have any suggestions for other women in the industry or women who want to *get* into the industry?
Don’t be afraid to ask questions and get help. Find the mailing list, join the IRC channel, or join a club that’s working on something you’re interested in. Surround yourself with experts and use them to your advantage.
When you have a small piece of a technical project working, share it with the world. You’ll get lots of critiques, but you’ll learn from it. Don’t hoard the work until you have it "perfect". You may be going down the wrong path, and you
want to be told that early on.
I constantly have to remind myself that "Perfect is the enemy of good" and I should just produce some code and get it out for people to review. When someone is harsh or rude about my code, I look for the underlying improvements they
suggested and ignore the bad attitude. In the end, most people are just trying to make you produce the best project possible, but they may not have the social skills to express their opinion in a constructive manner.
Tell me about your blog. Why did you start one, and what do you want to do with it?
I had a blog hosted on Live Journal, but about a month ago I decided I wanted to host the blog myself. Part of that was because I wanted to target a slightly older audience, and I wanted something that looked more professional. Shortly
after I made that decision, Live Journal got bought by a Russian company, and they decided to stop giving people ad-free accounts. I wasn’t too keen on that, and I decided I wanted control of my own data. (More technical details of Sarah’s blog are mentioned below.)
I created my new blog for several reasons. I wanted a way to connect with my technical communities, family, and friends. I don’t want my blog entries to be boring things like "I cleaned my room today and, damn, what a pigsty!" I want to post about geeky things like open source software tutorials and announce progress on the projects I’m working on. I also want to post about the less technical aspects of my life; I want to share pictures from my travels, talk about the cool bike rides I want to go on, and post reviews of comic books or anything else I find interesting.
Luckily my blog is configured with tags. If you’re only interested in one subject, like "biking", you can change the URL so that you only see entries tagged with "biking": http://sarah.thesharps.us/tags/biking . I hope that allows me to post diverse topics without boring one particular group in my network.
Any other technical stuff you want to get involved in?
I think I have enough technical software stuff in my life right now. I’d love to go scuba diving more, or go on a long bicycle tour. Those don’t sound like technical things, but they’re really all about science. Scuba is all about working around the density of water and the crushing pressure that increases as you go down. Biking is all about the efficient transfer of energy to your wheels. Even my hobbies are geeky!
Do *you* have any questions for other women who are geeks?
Um, this is probably a silly question but… How do you find girl geeks to be friends with? I can participate in the "omg, did you see what she was wearing" kinds of conversations, but eventually I start to pine for someone who also
understands my geek side. Most of my friends end up being guys because it’s so hard to find girl geeks. So how do you seek out those introverted and oh-so-elusive girl geeks?
What kinds of things would you like to see on .51? What would an ideal "geekspace" be like for you?
I would like .51 to be a place where female geeks can connect, either online or arrange to meet offline. I’d also like it to be a place where people can post links to all things geeky. For instance, I’d love to post links to the female geek
groups I know about, like pdxgeekchix , Code ‘n Splode , and SYSTERS . I also hope there’s active forums. One of my first posts will be "What’s the alternative to a beering?" More on that topic whenever the forums are working. [Editor’s Note: this will eventually happen!]
I also think the interviews are a great idea. I’d love to be introduced to forms of geekiness that I know nothing about, like Civil Engineering, or being a mechanic, or even building cob structures. I hope that readers of this interview will think, "Huh, rockets are cool!" and go look at the PSAS website . Even cooler would be someone who looks at the site and thinks, "Hey, I bet I could make this site look prettier, and wouldn’t an RSS feed or a blog be nice? I wonder if they could use my help…"
Other than the things you’ve talked about here, what is the geekiest thing you do?
Well, you asked for it, so be prepared for tech talk.
I host my own blog. It’s running on my husband’s server, but I configured and set up the whole thing myself. The geekiest part is that the blog setup and entries are tracked by git, a content revision control system written by Linus
Torvalds. The remote repository has a post-update hook that’s is configured to change directories into a local copy of the repo (on the same machine) and automatically pull down the latest blog version whenever I push changes.
The end result is that I commit my changes, push to the remote repo, and refresh the browser page to see the changes on my blog. If I make a change I don’t like, all my previous entry revisions are still there. I love it because I can treat my blog exactly the same way I treat any other source code repository, and get the same fluid hacking feel. It beats the pants off of editing entries in a browser.
That’s the geekiest thing I do. I have *done* geekier things, like implement a Software-Defined Radio (SDR) telemetry system for PSAS’ amateur rocket. I just never finished that project , so I don’t mention it often.
I don’t want to end on a completely geeky note, but a stack of comic books is calling my name…
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