Fresh Code

I woke up sort of panicked thinking I had overslept. At least I was wide awake. I was ready to get my day started and see if my patch and comment were acceptable so I was up, dressed and out the door. It was overcast and cool which was a really nice change. I grabbed some sweet cherry tomatoes and a few sprigs of purple basil out of the garden to eat on my way to the Max.

My neighbor Jessika barely made it to the train. I hadn’t seen her in several days so it was nice to start the week off by catching up with her on our short trip over the river. Each morning after I get off the Max I walk past Ground Kontrol arcade. I love how they have speakers outside that broadcast the sounds of a classic arcade. On the next block there is usually an older gentleman sitting outside. I say good morning to him each day and at first he would just ignore me but now he looks at me and says good morning. He hasn’t been there the last few times I have walked by though.

Our morning started out with a Vidyo meeting with Marina Zhurakhinskaya. She was talking to us about the Outreach Program for Women which is a bit of a misnomer this year because they are accepting applications from any of us Ascenders and also from any marginalized populations regardless of gender. This is a program I am very interested in applying for so I was really happy she came to talk to us. The class asked her some great questions so I pretty much found out all of the things I had been wondering about. The difficult part is deciding what project(s) to apply for. There are several interesting participating organizations and companies. Mozilla will be a participant and getting accepted with them would be a dream come true but I think it’s pretty competitive so that is probably not likely.

After our meeting with Marina we did our check-ins. Lots of people were dragging for various reasons but everyone was pleased to be having another catch up day. I showed Lukas my patch and comment and she felt it was ok to submit so I got that done and then helped my table neighbors with whatever they needed. Mostly I think they just needed to “talk to the bear“. I know for sure it helps me. The All Hands meeting was next and I was particularly interested to hear Bill Mills speak about Mozilla Open Source Science Projects. They put out a CFP for research projects to participate in a pilot study that will bring together the scientific and developer communities.

Lunch was SO good! Again 🙂  Today we had food from Kalé. It was also someone’s birthday so Katt ordered cake and vegan cinnamon rolls for everyone. I ate too much food! Again 🙂

After lunch we got back to our computers while Lukas and Kronda met one-on-one with students about what they needed to work on to meet the milestones set out for us. Not everyone got to meet today so that will continue tomorrow. I looked over the bug tracker trying to help some classmates find bugs to work on and also read more information on the OPW participants so that I can narrow things down. While I was reading I saw a familiar name pop up in our IRC channel. Sumana! It is indeed a small tech world it seems. Andrew and I had met Sumana at Pycon this year. Actually we met her at the airport while waiting to catch our plane back home. It’s kind of a funny story so I should write it down….

We were walking to our gate when we saw someone wave at us and say, “Hi! Did you go to Pycon?” We said that we had and she said she was gathering up Pycon attendees to sit together while we waited for our flights. How nice! So we made our introductions and Sumana told me where she worked and what she did there. I explained that I was a first time attendee and totally new to the community and that I didn’t really know anyone at all. Andrew explained that he was a Perl developer and that got a laugh just as it had each time he mentioned that during the conference. Anyway, we were having a great conversation with Sumana when someone caught her eye. I looked where she was looking and she said, “Is that Guido van Rossum?” I had only recently learned who he even was and had only seen him from tens of yards away so I had no clue. He was walking past us so Sumana got his attention and asked if he had attended Pycon. He got this really weird look on his face and then said, very quietly, “Yes”. She said, “Oh! Well we are gathering up Pycon people to sit together while we wait for our planes.” He sounded very unsure and asked, “Is it ok…..if I sit…..somewhere else?” Ha! Off he went to sit by himself. I quickly did an image search for Guido and showed her the picture. They looked nothing alike at all. Sumana said, “Oh, well I guess he just has a ‘Dutch guy’ look about him.”

Cut to us on our plane home. We were seated in a row of three, Andrew at the window and me in the center. In front of us was a row of two seats with no seat in front of Andrew. We were flying along for a while when Andrew leaned over and said, “That was Guido in the airport.” I asked how he knew and he said, “Because he’s sitting in front of you working on his laptop, sending email, and I can see his name.” He totally shoulder surfed!

Ok, back to my day! I was pretty happy to see Sumana in IRC because I had mentioned her to Carmen. Carmen is interested in an OPW project with Wikimedia so I encouraged her to let Sumana know. She did and I believe she now has some valuable resources as well as a person to contact at Wikimedia for more information. Carmen and Wikimedia seem like the perfect fit. I’m excited for her!

I spent the rest of my day bouncing around the interwebs kind of aimlessly trying to wrap my head around a concrete path to a decent OPW application while also helping anyone that needed it. Our day came to an end with our check-outs. It was sort of a misty rain outside so I had a really nice walk down to the Max. Jessica was getting on the same train so we got to have a nice conversation on the way home.

When I got home I went right to my computer so I could finally listen to Kronda’s interview on Less Than or Equal. It was so good! Wayne listened with me and loved it as well.

Jason and Alice are leaving for Arizona tomorrow so we went out to dinner with them since we won’t see them until this weekend. We went to the Bye and Bye. I love that place but wasn’t feeling very hungry (shocking I know!) so I just got a grilled cheese and only ate a little bit. It was nice to hang out with them though. We always laugh a lot.

Today I learned about bit rot when referring to a patch that has been submitted but not applied. If the patch sits too long without someone reviewing and applying it then the code it was to modify will most likely have changed which will require a partial or full rewrite of the patch and can even render the patch unusable. There is also a more standard use of the term bit rot but its existence is still debated.

Today we were able to come in even later, 10:30, but once again I was heading downtown with Andrew so I was early. I sat with him at CA for a while and talked a bit with one of his co-workers before heading off to class. Everyone slowly trickled in, had breakfast, checked out their computer and got situated at the table. We all worked, talked, and tried to catch up if behind until our instructors came in. A few people were missing which was not typical but I think the late start maybe threw off their timing. We did check-ins and Lukas vented about an issue she was having with some of the gift cards she purchased for our lunches. She was definitely frustrated but the things she was saying were SO funny!

Kronda made us an Etherpad with some handy Bash keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl-u deletes whatever you type on a line. I needed that! I read through our daily agenda and saw that we needed an FTP Client and would be using it to transfer our blog posts to a remote server so I grabbed Filezilla and got it installed. Once everyone got caught up, Kronda walked us through connecting to her server. She explained a bit about FTP and why we were using it. Once everyone understood what was going on we all began transferring our files to our directory on her server. Now we would have our blogs at our own URL. Nice! But we weren’t finished. We had to export our MySQL databases, edit them to reflect the new URL and then AirDrop them to her so she could deploy them on her server. Finally we had to reconfigure our wp-config.php file to reflect the changes in name and location. This went as planned for several of us, including me but others were having MySQL issues. I think most everyone got it figured out though and now we have live sites on Kronda’s server!

It was lunchtime. I could tell because I could smell the food and it smelled great! It was Mexican food but from a place we hadn’t eaten before. The name of the restaurant was grilled on the tortilla but I can’t remember what it was. Anyway I ate a lot of food and loved every bite!

Now that we were all well fed, it was time to make more progress toward picking and working on our first bug. We were to pair up and help each other find a bug to work on if we hadn’t already. We then had to read the entire bug, write up how we interpret what we need to do to fix it, make a list of what we will need (code, docs, communication channels, etc.), and then prepare but do not post a Bugzilla comment as a way to introduce ourselves as a contributor who wants to work on the bug.

My partner was just not finding a bug they wanted to work on. Not a single one interested them and they were quickly losing interest in the whole task. I was trying to help but we weren’t getting anywhere and I was just about to give up when I remembered a Mozilla product they had been very interested in during our first week of class. I suggested they look for bugs specific to that product. That seemed to be just the direction they needed because they got very excited and quickly found a bug to get started on. Whew!

I have three bugs that seem interesting to me. I asked Lukas some questions about bug 671705 and think it will be a good one to start with. Once we were all headed in the right direction it was time to check out. Everyone was happy it was Friday and also pay day. I, on the other hand, was pretty bummed this project is half-way over. Lukas has created something amazing and special. Now here we are in the middle of it but it will be over soon. Future Ascenders will have their own experience and it will be great but it won’t ever be just like this one. Peri and I think we should just show up in New Orleans and act like we are supposed to be there.

Andrew met me in front of my building and we took a long walk up to Seattle Coffee Gear to get a part he needed. They didn’t have it though so we wandered down 23rd while he figured out the best way to get us home from where we were. We stopped in at Lush and got a small gift for a friend who just had a baby and then I got a delicious iced coconut chai from Tea Chai Té. He figured out we needed to catch a bus and ride it all the way back down to the yellow line but it was a beautiful evening so I suggested we just walk. By the time we made it to the yellow line, the bus we would have taken was just arriving so that worked out perfectly. We got home just as Jason and Alice arrived to make and eat dinner with us. After dinner we watched the newish X-Men movie and it was pretty good. We were too full for popcorn which I didn’t even know was possible!

Today I learned some handy command line shortcuts.

Our instructors have been so busy teaching and helping us that they haven’t had much time for meeting with each other so they gave us the option of coming in later. Most of us wanted to come in early and get to work so they said we could but that they would not be available until they were done meeting at 10:00. I usually go downtown with Andrew on Thursday and Friday so I was going to be there anyhow. I showed up at my usual time and helped check out computers so anyone who came early could get to work. I finished up some commits and got everything pushed up to my Github repo and then added to my open pull request.

I decided to add my name to my index page for my blog posts since people might want to know who wrote them. I helped another student get started on some stuff they missed when they were absent the day before and then I chatted with another student until it was time to check in. Everyone seemed pretty ok considering it was the end of the week and we had really been ramping up our learning the last few days. Several took advantage of sleeping in and were really happy about that. Lukas showed us a great Mozilla bug search website and Planet Mozilla where blogs from the Mozilla community are aggregated. We all looked through them and tweeted about any we found particularly interesting.

We also did more catch up stuff for a bit and also updated Bash because of a newly discovered vulnerability. Kronda then talked to us about why it might be important for us to blog. She mentioned that some people make a living simply by blogging but that even if we aren’t being paid to do it, blogging can help with exposure. It’s also a place to show potential clients or employers what we know. I’m happy I will be able to look back and see how I progressed and I hope our blogs might help and encourage the upcoming Ascenders.

We took a break for lunch and today it was “food cart”/”get out of the office and find food”day. I went to Whole Foods and got a garbanzo salad and some fresh carrots for lunch and then headed back to the office to eat. Everyone ate and socialized for a while and then it was time to get back to work.

We spent the second half of the day installing VirtualBox and then building Firefox on a virtual machine. That went surprisingly well considering how most everything else we have done has had it’s bumps and hiccups. When everyone was caught up with that, Lukas wrote the next instructions on the whiteboard. We were to clone our Ascend repo to the virtual machine, apply the patch we made yesterday, run the modified version of Firefox, take a screen shot of the modification in action, and then push the image to our Github repo.

We didn’t get walked through any of this process so I had to figure out that the VM didn’t have Git. I had to install that and then try and remember the syntax for fetching a repository. Once I had the repo on the VM I had to search for how to apply a patch with Git (Adam helped me figure this out) and then build and run the patched version. It worked! Then I had to get a screenshot. I was trying to get a screenshot and it was just not working at all. Once again, Adam to the rescue! He told me to get an app called Skitch. I downloaded and opened it but couldn’t figure out exactly how to make it do what I wanted either. Grrr! Yup, I bothered Adam again and he quickly showed me how to use the timed screen snap feature to get just the screen shot I wanted.

While I was busy working away on the VM tasks my pull request was merged. Just in time for Lukas to inform the class that an update was made to our blog template so we all needed to add an author tag and our name to the header of each blog post. Well this was a handy lesson for sure because I had to revert my index page to the way it was before my pull request was merged and then update each blog post. I had 13 blog posts to change but they all needed the same thing added to them in the same place so I figured there must be a way to do this in Vim. I searched a bit and found it was pretty darned simple. But then of course I did or didn’t do something I don’t really understand and couldn’t save all of the files and I couldn’t quit some of the files even without saving and grrrrr again! I wanted to get them edited, committed, pushed, and submit a pull request before I left so I just closed the stupid tab the files were open in and edited them one by one. When I am not rushed I will mess with this feature and figure out what I screwed up.  It’s all done though!

I met Andrew at CA and we had a nice ride home. I told him all about my day and he gave me some handy Vim suggestions. It was BSD Pizza Night and this month Handsome Pizza was the place to meet. Dave showed up and then we walked over. We had our usual amazing pizza and the BSD nerds talked about whatever they talk about. I didn’t really care, I got myself a vegan coconut ice cream cone. Life is good.

Today I learned about Skitch. It’s free too!

I was soooooo tired this morning but I got up and took a shower. That helped a lot and I was also very excited and nervous about my upcoming coaching meeting. It also helped that it was raining and there were no Max issues this morning so I made it to class early, just the way I like it.

We did our check-ins and then went back to working on WordPress for those who were still struggling. I was done with that so I started looking through bugs and checking the clock. I knew I wouldn’t miss my coaching meeting but I was really anticipating it.

Once people got done with WordPress stuff and I believe building Firefox, Lukas started talking about bugs and how we could best search for them. She talked about what things we might consider when choosing a bug and then let us know that she wanted us picking a bug that was out of our comfort zone, one that we knew nothing about. I love this and it scares the shit out of me at the same time.

I picked bug 589320 because it sounds interesting. It’s some code that is no longer needed and needs to be audited and then removed if not needed. If I were to take on this bug I would first figure out where the code to be audited lives and read it over to see if I can understand it. I would also research the general functionality of printf() which is the code to be removed.

I picked bug 671705 because it references regular expressions and I definitely want to learn more about those. They are kind of intimidating so tackling a bug like this might help me make friends with them. I’d also begin researching where this code lives and try to figure out what it does. I would reach out to the mentor as well since this bug has one assigned.

I am interested in bug 797711 because it seems as though I might be able to write the JavaScript this needs. Again I would have to look through the testing code.

It was coaching time for me and lunchtime for everyone else. Katt, wonderful person that she is, didn’t want me to miss out on lunch and brought me a plate of food. I’m going to miss her when this project is over! Bridge. Cross. Later.

Anyway, my coaching experience isn’t something I will be writing about but I will say this: I am thrilled with the coach that I have been matched with and I very much look forward to our meetings.

Lunch/meeting was over and it was time to get back to the classroom. Barbara, had been working on a bug since late last week and had submitted a patch for it earlier this morning! She was nice enough to present to us her process. There were several questions asked and a bit of confusion about how the patch file was generated so that was discussed for a bit.

Everyone must have built Firefox at some point because we were about to play with it. Lukas showed us an old blog post she wrote when she was first learning to program.  I’m not sure if it was her intent but it was great, for me at least, to catch a glimpse of where she was and where she is now. I think, as a beginner, I tend to forget that we all have to start at the beginning, even our kick-ass instructors. Her post was about how she had messed with the code in a local build of Firefox and then could see the results when she ran her modified version. She showed us the Mozilla Cross-reference site which really simplifies searching the source code. She then showed us how to do these same things. First we messed with where new tabs are opened. We inserted some code in tabbrowser.xml that changed them from opening right of existing tabs to opening left. Then we ran our build to see the change we made. Nifty! Next we played with browser.dtd and changed one or some of the tooltip strings. We ran our build again and saw those changes as well. Finally we had to generate a patch file and push it up to github. I think this final step helped those who were still a bit confused about how that worked. I was unsure about generating my patch file because I had cloned a Mercurial repo. Lukas quickly told me how to do it though.

I was feeling kind of blah after class so Wayne picked me up. I wanted to take a nap but Jayde needed some math help so I did that instead. She had to figure out the area of several random shapes using the formula for the area of a triangle. She thought this was the dumbest thing ever. I suppose I thought so as well at her age but math will always be there just waiting for her to see how beautiful and amazing it is. I didn’t truly discover this until I studied calculus. It completely blew my mind to learn that the first derivative of position (with respect to time) is velocity, the second derivative is acceleration and the third is jerk. What?? Stupid, boring math can tell us stuff like THAT? Yes, yes you should go math now.

Today I learned that generating patch files with Git is pretty much the same as Mercurial.

I love being in the Ascend Project. It started out a bit rough for me mostly due to my massive insecurity but things are so much better now. I look forward to getting up each morning and heading down to the Mozilla office where I get to spend the day with a room full of awesome people. I like them more and more each day. Today we had an issue, the details not necessary, but it was wonderful to see us come together as a group and do the right thing, then brainstorm about how to avoid such issues in the future.

Kronda was back from her conference and we were all very happy to see her! Probably not as much as Lukas though because she was sick and needed to lay low. We spent our morning catching up on things before the All Hands meeting began. I was caught up so I looked over the agenda and it said to prepare to set up WordPress locally or prepare to build Firefox from source. I wanted to walk through the WordPress stuff with Kronda and the class so I worked on the prerequisites for building Firefox from base. I first wanted to get Virtualenv working so I did that and then stepped through getting things set up to build Firefox. That went really quickly. The All Hands meeting began so we all focused on that and then had a brief, private meeting before lunch.

Lunch was delicious again! Katt got us yummy lentil shepherd’s pie again. I ate quickly and then rushed down to the post office so I could mail my poor, injured friend some coffee. The forecast calls for rain tomorrow and it was beautiful today so I took advantage of that.

Lukas went home and Kronda took over. She had us get started on a tutorial for installing WordPress and it went really well! Until it didn’t. Adam and I got ours to a point where it should have been working but wasn’t. We tried this, and tried that. Kronda went from one of us to the next trying her best to help. At some point, someone noticed that the website we were using was different for some of us so it seems the author was changing things. Not very helpful! Kronda didn’t seem to get frustrated at all but she really wanted to figure out what was going on so I handed her my laptop so she could mess with a clean system and I took a bit of a break. She totally got in the zone and was digging away at the issue but didn’t quite figure it out before the day was done.

We all did our checkouts. Some people were really frustrated with all of the yak shaving but some of us were happy to have the experience since this is a common thing for a developer. Adam and Zeus got their systems working so Adam sent me copies of his config files but we couldn’t stay and sort things out. I will have to attack this problem in the morning.

I walked to the Max and must have just missed the Yellow line so I stood there for quite a long time waiting. Candida happened by because she had gotten slightly lost but had found her way again. We chatted for a bit before my train showed up and then my neighbor ended up being on the same train. She had a yak shaving day too!

 

 

Wayne made yummy meatball subs for dinner and it was a quiet night with just the seven of us. I am feeling really tired for some reason and it’s not even close to bed time. I hope I’m not coming down with something.

 

 

 

Today I learned that setting up WordPress locally is kind of a pain in the ass.

I tried to sleep in this morning but my eyes had other plans I guess. They wanted to be open even earlier than usual. I got up and headed straight for the computer because I wanted to tidy up my tutorial and look over the available bugs on Bugzilla. Little did I know that this would be a rabbit hole! It was a fun one though but the day really got away from me.

I worked on the wording of my tutorial and then figured I should step through it on a computer here at home and make sure it was clear. I decided to create a virtual environment for this install of Mozmill and to install the hotfix instead of just enabling it temporarily but other than that I followed my steps and it worked just fine. Since I had Mozmill installed I went ahead and installed the other three versions of Firefox and then read up a bit about setting up multiple profiles for each version. I decided to install Profile Manager because it sounds like the method of using a built in profile manager may be going away. Once all of that was done I started running some automated tests. Everything seems to work just fine.

Looking at bugs led me to be curious about the different products they were reported in which led me to reading a whole bunch of stuff about products I didn’t even know existed. This led me to look for the source code which led me to research the source code tree and figure out a tiny bit about how all of that works. This led me to getting Mercurial installed so I could clone the core repository and search through the code. Then I figured that since I had the source code I may as well build Firefox from source. Let me tell you, it takes a LONG time. Yeah, it’s still going….47 minutes so far. It’s done! 52 minutes and it finally finished. It runs too! That was very cool.

Today I learned that NASA’s Maven space craft is now orbiting Mars after nearly a year of traveling to get there.