I saw this dress a few weeks back at Joy and once I realized it had Delft in its name, I just knew I had to get it! I’m also currently in Delft (checking out wedding venues), so obviously I had to wear it here and finally blog about it.

The dress has a 50s style cut with a cool double strap neckline; you can’t really see it properly on that photo, but it definitely makes the dress more unique!

You can currently get the Hilarion Delft from the Joy Store for £59.

I recently bought two tees from TeeFury (La Petite Sorcière et Le Chat Noir and Big Friend) and it turns out the base design of both of those are featured in today’s TeeFury Battle!

I didn’t think another Le Chat Noir variation could beat my Kiki’s delivery Service one, but Toothless is so adorable:

Then there’s the My Neighbour Totoro inspired Toothless one as well (although this time I think my Bioshock version wins)

Like them? Both tees are only on TeeFury for the next 5 hours!

Miss Geeky Elsewhere:

• Interview at FutureBook Hack: I was a judge and mentor at FutureBook Hack and got interviewed about hackdays!
• Running the British 10K: This Sunday I’ll be running the British 10K! I’m kind of dreading it by now. I’m running better than I did last year, but I still haven’t managed to hit 10k yet (I did 5k last weekend… just). We’re raising money for Computer Aid, a great charity that refurbishes old computers for non-profits and schools.
• Why run an internal hackday: I wrote my first post on the FutureLearn blog about how and why we ran our first internal hackday.
• My slides from Ladies Who Code: A couple weeks back I gave a talk at Ladies Who Code about my win at #AgileHack. Here are the slides:

Interesting links

• Programming Sucks: read this.
• The Loneliness of the Female Coder: What’s it really like to be the lone woman in a software team? Two women chart their secret emotional lives in tech.
• How a password changed my life: The following events occurred between ☹ and ☺.
• Stich and Toothless: I still haven’t seen How To Train Your Dragon 2, but Stich and Toothless are adorable together:

• Why Your Startup’s Culture Is Secretly Awful: Interesting interview with Shanley Kane about startup culture.
• Artist’s Notebook – Ramsey Nasser: how would an Arabic programming language look like?
• Responsive Icons: This is such a cute idea.
• A Maintainable Style Guide: Good post explaining some of the issues with style guides

This is such a simple idea, but so handy! I need one of these:

Book on Book is a transparent acrylic book weight that will keep you book open to the page that you want. I’ve can so see my self using this, especially when you’re trying to eat food and read a book at the same time!

It’s available for ¥6,490 (~£47) from the Japanese online store BuddyTools.

I had seen this video a few weeks back, but it came up again in conversation this evening:

Ever since I found out that Brandon Sanderson would finish Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, I’ve been curious to see how his own series are. I still haven’t gotten around to actually finishing the Wheel of Time, mainly cause it feels like I need to start completely at the beginning (again).

I had already read one standalone novel from Sanderson, Elantris, but turns out it’s not completely a standalone… It’s part of an epic 36 book series, all set in the universe of Cosmere. Each book/series he writes is set on a unique world, but that world is set in the same Cosmere universe. All of the books share a single creation myth, a single cosmology and are connected by an overarching story.

Wow.

After hearing that I knew I had to get my hands on his series Mistborn…

If that’s not enough to convince you, here’s the description of the first book:

A thousand years ago evil came to the land and has ruled with an iron hand ever since. The sun shines fitfully under clouds of ash that float down endlessly from the constant eruption of volcanoes. A dark lord rules through the aristocratic families and ordinary folk are condemned to lives in servitude, sold as goods, labouring in the ash fields.

But now a troublemaker has arrived and there is rumour of revolt. A revolt that depends on criminal that no-one can trust and a young girl who must master Allomancy – the magic that lies in all metals.

The books are available on Amazon.co.uk for ~£24.

A couple of weeks back I attended PrimeConf, a conference celebrating great British technology and technologists. It was such an inspiring event; I don’t think there was any talk there that I didn’t walk away from thinking I didn’t learn something.

All the talks were recorded and are now online on the PrimeConf site. If you have the time, I’d recommend watching them all! If you don’t, here were my favourite talks:

Welcome To The No-man’s Land Of Technical Leadership – Mazz Mosley

The Makies Ongoing Story – Alice Taylor

Be Your Own Client And Be Happy – Pete Duncanson

This is sadly currently sold out, but I love love love the look of this swimsuit. As I’m not going on a beach holiday this year, I wouldn’t even have the chance to wear that soon, but it looks so cool!

The Wonder Woman swimsuit was available on Pinup Girl Clothing for $40: they don’t have it in stock right now, but you can sign up for the waiting list to get notified when they do!

I still love wandering around books shops and libraries. I always find it quite relaxing and calming to be completely surrounded by books, to be able to pick up any book that you see and spend a couple of minutes of getting lost inside a world you previously hadn’t known.

I’ve got some fond memories from Foyles’ flagship store on Charing Cross Road in London. I remember visiting the place on my first trip to London when I was 12/13 years old and discovering a ton of young adult fantasy and scifi books that seemed to be written specially for me. It’s sad to see that store closing, but thankfully they’re moving only a couple minutes down the road:

It’s event season! At least I definitely always feel as if May, June and July are the busiest months with a ton of events going on. I’ve been quite slack in writing up the stuff I’ve attended and will be trying to catch up with that this week.

One of the events I look forward to every year is RegentTweet, a shopping day for bloggers to discover the different stores on Regent Street. It’s in its fifth year now, and so far I’ve been lucky to attend 3 of them. They’re always a lot of fun, plus you end up with lots of cool goodies from the various stores!

The idea of the day is pretty straightforward: each blogger gets a set of cards detailing the time and activity at a certain store. Sometimes it’s to pick up a goodie bag, sometimes it’s a taster session of food and drinks, other times it’s a competition or presentation. I remember one of the first years where you could easily do all the cards/stores in one day. Now? So many companies are participating, you really need to choose which ones you want to go to!

The RegentTweet basecamp this year was Brasserie Zedel. It’s a lovely underground restaurant and cafe; I’ve walked past this place so often, but never realized how big the place actually is! We all started here to register and pick up our initial RegentTweet bag and info, plus a handy gadget charging bar had been set up to make sure you could tweet and cover the day. We also got lunch here at their main restaurant: a nice steak haché with pepper sauce and fries (see image below).

That wasn’t the only food and drinks that we got to enjoy though. Throughout the day there were various restaurants and cafes that were providing lovely refreshments for us. I love the chocolate dipped strawberries from Godiva; so pretty and so tasty!

I also enjoyed the coffee art session at illy’s. Again I had no idea there was an illy’s in Regent Street (it’s just north of Oxford Circus), but I’m so going to come back more often! We got to see various techniques on how they made their coffee art; my favourite was the elephant you can see below. And of course we were allowed to have the coffees afterwards. I’ve always liked their ice coffees, but this is the first time I had their Neve Fondente: espresso with hot milk and cacao power topped with a layer of cold frothed milk. It’s hot and cold at the same time!

Another highlight for me was visiting the United Nude store. I adore their shoes: they’re so unique and pretty, but somehow also quite geeky. We got to meet their creative director, Rem D Koolhaas, and actually see their 3D printers in action. We all were allowed to choose a 3D printed ring or bracelet that had been created in that store. So cool!

There were so many other things to do during the day, half of which I think i didn’t get around to. Here’s the RegentTweet video showing some of the highlights:

At the end of the day we ended up with a ton of gorgeous goodies! My favourites: a crease-free (!) white shirt from Brooks Brothers, an espresso cup from illy, a £50 voucher from Banana Republic (I’ll blog about the dress I bought with it later this week), lipstick and eye shadow from Kiki and peppercorn shower gel from Molton Brown

Like all the previous years, RegentTweet was a lot of fun! Thanks to Regent Street and Sister PR for organizing it and inviting me along. I can’t wait to see what next year’s one brings!