Being asked to put together a few words for International Women’s Day has provided me with a great opportunity to reflect upon who and what has led me to reach the position I’m in today, working as a software developer alongside the superb Research IT team here at the University of Bristol. Perhaps it’s somewhat of a cliche, but probably my parents were most influential, providing lots of early guidance in the direction of science and technology.
My father was a research chemist who worked for a major pharmaceutical firm of his day, authoring papers on penicillin amongst other topics. Although he left school at 15, he continued his education at night school, eventually gaining a first class degree in chemistry. He was unfailingly encouraging of all my educational efforts while I was growing up.
My mother was the daughter of two Polish academics, both agricultural scientists. A couple of her formative years were spent in Siberia following the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland at the start of WW2. My grandmother’s background made her the ideal candidate to be put in charge of the livestock in the little village where they were placed, and my mother used to describe how their hut was shared with pigs and other village animals, which were brought indoors in winter and overnight. It was maybe as a result of her experiences there that she was always vocal about the value of scientific knowledge when life gets ugly.
Although my mother worked in the pharmaceutical industry for a while before my brother and I were born, my childhood memories of her are as the physics lab technician at the local secondary school. She gave that job her all and did it exceptionally well, often going “above and beyond”. I recall electronics being introduced to the curriculum, something she didn’t know much about, and so she took herself off to local adult education classes to study it until she had a solid understanding of it. The value of that knowledge was not to be underestimated.
Returning to IT, my first experience of this was our family’s BBC Micro Model B computer. Although I say it belonged to the family, really it was the domain of my older brother and his school friends. However, I did get a reasonable number of opportunities to try out the various games available (Chuckie Egg was my favourite!) and the “music” of loading them up from cassette tape is forever etched on my memory.
I gained more substantial experience when I embarked on a degree at Leeds University in the early 1990s, where computer science formed a third of my course for the first two years (together with maths and music). We were taught to program – I recall that Pascal, SML and C++ were on the curriculum at that time – and the buzz of typing logical, structured words into a terminal, and seeing it doing something cool in response, is something which has stayed with me to this day. Although I focussed more on maths for a short while longer, the lure of programming was never far away, and I started my first job doing that shortly before 2000.
A good proportion of my career has been spent writing code for and working with various flavours of mobile devices, from Pocket PC, Palm Pilot and Symbian, through to Blackberry and then Android. I’ve been able to draw on that when working on the SAFER PREPARED project here at the University, where Prof Anastasios Sextos has developed methods to evaluate the safety of buildings in countries prone to earthquakes. With a series of questions coded into an Android application, it is quick and easy for field engineers to inspect and photograph a building, and to upload and store this information centrally; a straightforward scoring mechanism then provides guidance to the appropriate authorities on which areas are most in need of attention and support.