Kathy Sierra
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Kathy Sierra (born 1957) is an American programming
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and game developer.


Education and career

Sierra attended
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (California Polytechnic State University, Cal Poly"Cal Poly" may also refer to California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in Arcata, California or California State Polytechnic Univ ...
with a major in exercise physiology and spent 10 years working in the fitness industry. She changed careers after attending programming classes at
UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...
, later returning to teach a course on "new media interactivity" for UCLA Extension. She also led the new media team at Mind over Macintosh, a Los Angeles training center that provided training to advertising and entertainment corporations adapting digital technologies in the mid-1990s. She was the lead programmer on the computer games '' Terratopia'', a 1998 children's adventure game released by Virgin Sound & Vision, and ''All Dogs Go to Heaven'', a film-based game released as a free cereal premium by
MGM Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and abbreviated as MGM, is an American film, television production, distribution and media company owned by Amazon through MGM Holdings, founded on April 17, 1924 a ...
. She also worked as a master trainer for
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
, teaching Java instructors how to introduce new Java technologies and developing certification exams. In 1998, she founded the Java programmers' online community JavaRanch. She is the co-creator of the ''Head First'' series of books on technical (primarily computer) topics, along with her partner, Bert Bates. The series, which began with ''Head First Java'' in 2003, takes an unorthodox, visually intensive approach to the process of teaching programming. Sierra's books in the series have received three nominations for Product Excellence Jolt Awards, winning in 2005 for ''Head First Design Patterns'', and were recognized on
Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...
's yearly top 10 list for computer books from 2003 to 2005. In 2005 she coined the phrase "The Kool-Aid Point" to describe the point at which detractors emerge purely due to the popularity of a topic being promoted by others. Sierra says that her interest in cognitive science was motivated by her
epilepsy Epilepsy is a group of non-communicable neurological disorders characterized by recurrent epileptic seizures. Epileptic seizures can vary from brief and nearly undetectable periods to long periods of vigorous shaking due to abnormal electrical ...
, a condition for which she takes anti-seizure medication. "My interest in the brain began when I had my first grand mal
seizure An epileptic seizure, informally known as a seizure, is a period of symptoms due to abnormally excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. Outward effects vary from uncontrolled shaking movements involving much of the body with los ...
at the age of four," she wrote on her personal weblog. After years of being mostly absent from the open internet, in July 2013 she started the site "Serious Pony" including a blog, together with a Twitter account, although as of October 2014 the latter had been deleted due to ongoing harassment.


Harassment and withdrawal from online life

In March 2007, Sierra abruptly canceled her appearance at the O'Reilly ETech conference in
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due to threatening blog posts and emails, including death threats. Sierra's harassers posted doctored images of her face next to a noose or being strangled. The harassment increased after the threats were reported in the news. The hacker and self-professed "
Internet troll In slang, a troll is a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online (such as in social media, a newsgroup, a forum, a chat room, a online video game), or in real life, with the int ...
" Andrew Auernheimer, known as weev, told the ''New York Times'' that he was responsible for posting false information about Sierra online, along with her address and
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, a form of harassment known as doxing. Sierra gave up her technology career as a result of the harassment, withdrawing from most public-speaking events and no longer blogging. In her final post, she wrote that she did not want to be involved with the culture of the Blogosphere as long as such harassment was accepted. She later wrote, "I had no desire then to find out what comes after doxxing, especially not with a family".Sierra, quoted in The issue triggered public discussion on the concept of a
blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
gers' code of conduct. Some bloggers, including Robert Scoble, author of the technology blog ''Scobleizer'', temporarily suspended their blogs in a show of support for Sierra. One of the larger issues Scoble felt was highlighted by the incident was online hostility to women: "It's this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop," Scoble said " enever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man."


Selected publications

*''Mike Meyers' Java 2 Certification Passport'' (McGraw-Hill Osborne, 2001) *''Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide'' (McGraw-Hill Osborne, 2002) *''Head First EJB'' (O'Reilly Publishing, 2003) *''Head First Servlets and JSP'' (O'Reilly Publishing, 2004) *''Head First Design Patterns'' (O'Reilly Publishing, 2004) *''SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide'' (McGraw-Hill Osborne, 2005) *''Head First Java'' (O'Reilly Publishing, 2005) *''OCP Java SE 6 Programmer Practice Exams (Exam 310-065)'' (McGraw-Hill Osborne, 2010) *''OCA/OCP Java SE 7 Programmer I & II Study Guide (Exams 1Z0-803 & 1Z0-804) McGraw-Hill 2014 *''Badass: Making Users Awesome'' (O'Reilly Media, 2015) *''OCA Java SE 8 Programmer I Exam Guide (Exams 1Z0-808) 1st Edition'' McGraw-Hill 2017 *''OCP Java SE 8 Programmer II Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-809) 7th Edition'' McGraw-Hill 2018


References


External links

*Sierra'
Creating Passionate Users
weblog
The Java programmer's community JavaRanchKathy Sierra interview at The Web 2.0 Show
- Hosted by Adam Stacoviak and Josh Owens
Kathy Sierra interview at Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything
podcast
Badass — An Interview with Kathy Sierra
on the Society for Technical Communication's "Notebook" blog, with Nicky Bleiel {{DEFAULTSORT:Sierra, Kathy 1957 births California Polytechnic State University alumni American bloggers American technology writers Living people O'Reilly writers People from California People with epilepsy Victims of cyberbullying Video game developers Sun Microsystems people Women video game developers Women technology writers 21st-century American non-fiction writers American women bloggers 21st-century American women writers