And then there's that scary violence thing

Success, fear, courage, support, questions. Things landing on my desk this week:

• "Thinking about Hillary: A Plea for Reason" by Michael Arnovitz, posted by a Facebook friend via DailyKos. Also on Medium. "...the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover."
• "She responds brilliantly, he regrets it." Another from a facebook friend, this one about a woman rebutting a sexual harasser online. Sadly, despite the gleeful title, it's clear he does not actually regret it. He blames her instead.
• "Feeling Sad About Tragedy". My young daughter's role model, youtube math goddess Vi Hart, posting about the massacre in Orlando, and on trying to navigate the dangers of being a visible, successful woman on the internet.
•  Kathy Sierra's 2014 Wired article (reposted to Systers listserv), "Trouble at the KoolAid Point" on harassment of successful women, and on widespread tech community support for that harassment. Hit close to home. Recent memories, though from a non-tech context. Really shook me.

Does success require navigating situations like these?

Read: Women in Tech by Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack

Well, that was an earful of rapid-fire advice. A fun read-- except for the bit about how women with kids cannot get tech jobs. That was not too encouraging.

Maybe I will read it again in a year or two.

(Amazing how quickly the book moved from Kickstarter to my local public library. Yay libraries. And Kickstarter.)

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One small possible retort to the with-kids issue:

http://www.mothercoders.org/

HBO Silicon Valley

Just binge-watched a DVD of "Silicon Valley", season one. Does that count as educational? From my corner of the woods, maybe it does.

AJAX rant

OK, so it's been 2.5 months since I made any forward progress on the FreeCodeCamp site.

Partly that's been because of my difficult background/domestic situation, which took a swerve in March. There is hope for a new era in July.

But also it's because of an incomprehensible (to me, based on FCCamp training to date) error: "XMLHttpRequest cannot load ... No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource."

I've spent the last couple of months googling and reading in my scraps of space time. And feeling really (irrationally) angry about being thrown suddenly into the deep end. Being expected to suddenly be able to read the Wikipedia API developer docs as if I had the background to understand. Let alone understand an error like that.  AJAX, JSONP, CORS... The only beginner's intro I found anywhere was buried in a single chapter in an O'Reilly Head First book (was it jQuery? HTML5? I can't remember. But it wasn't AJAX), and that was only an intro.

I finally found FFCampers discussing the problem here and here via Google, but the conversation was above my head. Annoyingly the discussion voices range from the successful-but-confused to the smugly-superior. No one seems to place any value on actually understanding, or helping someone else actually understand.

2.5 months later, I think I may have finally gained enough background info be able to read and understand the learn.jQuery.com AJAX tutorial and give the "Wikipedia Reader" project another try. But I remain very cranky.

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Found another grumpy FCCamper: "I have asked on Glitter, checked dozens of solutions including JSONP plugins, tried code that worked from other Freecodecampers on line, tried numerous Javascript, Ajax, JQuery, JSONP approaches, etc. I have spent more effort on overcoming CORS than on the rest of this curriculum combined." FCCamp replied with a cheery 'here, just use this code, it works,' but no explanation of the concepts involved.