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How to Talk to Doctors

Disclaimer: I am not and have never been a qualified medical professional, so this is informal, unqualified advice. If you have heart pains, shortness of breath, or feel unsafe in yourself or towards others, go straight to a medical professional and stop reading now. In a past life, I once turned up to a new job to find two shoulders sitting on my new desk. Thankfully this wasn't entirely unexpected, given I was an office manager for an orthopaedic surgeon. I quite enjoyed it as a job actually. The doctor I worked for was a middle aged Iraqi man who'd left after the first Gulf War. He'd just set up his own practice in New Zealand, and he worked twice as much as any of the other specialists in our building, which meant a lot of work for me. I picked up a variety of different skills [1] but by far the most useful has been learning how to talk to doctors. It can be incredibly frustrating to try and get medical help, especially for invisible illnesses. B...

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On the Himawari satellite

Adapted from this twitter thread, 13 November 2019
I had an "Ohhhh" moment just now when I realised why the Japanese weather satellites are called "Himawari". The Himawari series are weather satellites belonging to the Japanese Meteorological Agency. They provide their satellite …

How I accidentally helped create a Chinese torrent site

It was the early to mid 2000s. Video streaming was still establishing itself, and piracy and torrents were where you went for to pirate video. Before Crunchyroll went legit in 2009, non-Japanese speaking anime fans would have to wait for an American company to buy a show, translate it, then dub it.…

I Wanna Be The Very Best!

Originally published on Medium on 8 April 2018
How a Pokémon themed Slackbot helped me with motivation and learning… through the power of emoji! ✨
University Challenge NZ: the country cousin of the original UK edition
That’s me, admitting on national TV that I watch Eurovision. You see, I’m a very c…

Developing As A Developer

A version of this post was given as a talk to students from the University of Auckland Women in Computer Science group in August 2016.
I was so excited when I got my first job as a software engineer. I was going to write so much code! It was going to be great! Every day would look like this: (My ear…