Hello, and welcome to my blog!

I’m Louise, and I’m a (not-so-software) engineer based in Ottawa, Canada, working on improving my software development skills. I wanted to share some of my experiences and lessons learned, in the hope that you might find them useful – or at least, entertaining.

This blog is for you if:

• You’re also in the process of, or thinking about, switching careers to software development.
• You’re interested in ways that software development and skills/knowledge from other professional fields can complement each other.
• You like to have fun while reading about programming topics, and/or you are prone to Murphy’s Law like I am.

Although I’m an engineer, I currently work for a hospital in quality improvement, and before that I spent a decade working as a mechanical engineer in medical device manufacturing. Neither one of these involve much programming, so the last time I did any hard-core programming was for my master’s thesis, which was a wave energy simulator written in Fortran.

I’m now working on learning Ruby on my own, while still working full-time for the hospital. My dream is to get into software development.

What’s This Blog About?

Topics you can expect to see on this blog include:

• Updates, adventure tales, and useful lessons learned in programming, especially Ruby
• Productivity and tips for learning technical material
• Leadership and business: what makes great workplaces?
• How to work towards a software development job when you don’t have a Computer Science degree
• Book reviews related to tech, business, and/or productivity (I’m a bookaholic. My motto is, “there’s a book for that…”)
• Comics featuring Zap the computer, along with other illustrations. Because you’ve just gotta be able to laugh at yourself sometimes…

Welcome again to this space!