Posts from May 2014

Fun Friday: Things We Hate About Email

It’s been almost a month since we did a fun friday. I was talking with an old friend yesterday about how much we all hate email.

So I thought we could spend friday at AVC collectively hating on email.

Here are a few things I hate about email:

– There is no easy way for me to keep track of the emails I’ve sent where I really care about the response. These important responses get caught up in all of the other email and I often miss them.

– Calendar invites. I wrote an entire blog post hating on them. I particularly hate Calendar Invite Spam. But I dislike all calendar invites because the interaction should be in my calendar not in my inbox.

– Folders/Labels – I can’t be bothered to organize my email into folders/labels, and I never ever look at anything other than my primary inbox. Once an email goes into a folder/label, it is gone and the only way I will ever react to it is finding it with search.

– No Multitasking Support – I have to open up multiple tabs in gmail to do some tasks. It would be great if I could multitask in a single inbox view.

– Doing email on my phone. As much as I hate doing email on the web, it is worse on mobile. You have less screen real estate. Cutting and pasting is harder. Everything is harder.

So those are some, but not all, of my pet peeves about email. What are yours?

#email hacks#mobile#Web/Tech

Dream It And Code It

A few months ago, I posted about a student coding contest called Dream It Code It Win It. I attended the awards contest last night at The Great Hall at Cooper Union. I love that space. You feel the history when you walk into the room.

The majority of the event was a panel event which in my opinion was a waste of time. I wanted to see the students present their projects. Which sadly did not happen. But the students were invited up onto the stage to collect their awards.

In the high school category, almost half of the participants were women. That is a fantastic stat and hopefully a sign of things to come with women and coding.

I was super excited to see a team from The Academy For Software Engineering win one of the awards. That is a great accomplishment for a school that hasn’t yet completed its second year. Here is the team from AFSE getting its award.

afse students

 

It was also really fantastic that The Young Women’s Leadership Academy (an all girls high school in NYC) fielded a winning team. I’ve heard great things about that school.

Not surprisingly Stuyvesant High School had three winning teams. The Stuyvesant CS program has been around for almost twenty years and its leader Mike Zamansky is one of the unsung heroes of the NYC tech scene.

Mike sent me videos last night after the event for the three winning teams from Stuy. One of them is so good, I think it would easily get funded on AngelList. It’s called Cartwheels (great name) and here’s the video.

These kids eat at food carts every day, they dreamed of a better way, they built it, and they won it. That’s awesome.

#entrepreneurship#hacking education#NYC