Fresh Code

It was a beautiful, slightly foggy morning for my walk to the Max. Andrew didn’t go downtown this morning and Michael had to be at his conference pretty early so I walked alone.

After check in Lukas gave a talk and demo of Travis-CI. She had me create a pull request so she could show the live test build. After it started building she asked if I made an error in it so we could all see it fail. Doh! That was a great idea but I hadn’t done that. And then the build failed! I had been rushing and didn’t fix the date field in one of my blog posts. It’s in a markdown header and the date has to be correct. So it ended up being a good accident. I quickly fixed it and made another pull request. This time all was well and the site built successfully.

I decided to toggle ‘needs info’ on bug 589320 that I commented on weeks ago. Nothing had ever happened since I originally commented with what the diff would be in the code. I wasn’t sure if it would do any good so was very happy when I got a response. It was suggested that although the change was small, a patch should still be filed because it makes it easier to review and change. I quickly generated and filed a patch. It’s not a big or very important patch but it’s something! It was approved later in the day so I guess it gets landed at some point.

I talked with the code reviewer on the drama filled bug 671705. He still wants to commit my function to strings.js so I went ahead and filed a patch for that. He’s heading to the states in the morning so this may not get landed before Ascend ends. Oh well. He also wants me to open a bug for the other issue he kept trying to get me to fix even though it had nothing to do with the bug at all. I need to read and understand what this new issue is though before I do that.

We got to go out for lunch again today so of course I went back to Los Gorditos along with Peri, Yenni, and Barbara. It was just as good as the time before.

Throughout the day I helped quite a few people with various questions regarding Travis-CI. It’s new and some were pretty frustrated to get a build fail. I did my best to help and make this transition as easy as possible.

While I was helping I was trying to get some old blog posts uploaded. I had been pretty busy so ended up getting behind in uploading my posts to the Ascend site. I was still behind by one post so I spent the remainder of the day trying to get that written.

I headed home and Michael happened to be done for the day at his conference so he caught the train a few stops up. We walked home together talking about this and that. When we got home I suggested we take Michael to Handsome Pizza. Wayne and Andrew thought this was a great idea so we walked down there. They were SO busy! Matt told us it would be about an hour and a half before we could eat and then offered to call me when our pizzas would be just about ready. That sounded great to us and Andrew had a haircut appointment around the corner anyway. We walked back home and hung out until he called.

When we got back down there our pizza had just come out of the oven. Perfect timing! We started eating and soon Andrew joined us. The pizza was excellent as always and it was still early by the time we were done. We walked home and had time to watch a movie. I had just quoted Tucker and Dale vs Evil yesterday so when I saw it pop up on Netflix I suggested we watch it. It was just as funny the second time!

Today I learned that even long time professionals make mistakes and that’s ok. It’s how one handles things afterward that makes all the difference.

Today it was a bit cooler out and it was overcast. It’s nice to see the weather changing a bit. Andrew, Michael and I walked together to the Max. Michael is here for a conference and it was starting bright and early. I love that most of the tech conferences we go to start a bit later.

I couldn’t wait to get going this morning and honestly the day was kind of a blur so this is possibly completely out of order. I needed to write up a preliminary Best Practices document to add to the Ascend repo so I could finally submit a pull request and get Travis implemented on the mozilla/ascendproject repo. I kind of wrote up the basics of what I remembered having to fix in participant pages and got everything pushed up.

It was a busy day and before I knew it lunch was there. We were having amazing dumplings from The Dump Truck! I just love the curry potato filled ones. I ate a reasonable amount and then it was back to work for me. I had just a bit of time to work on stuff before a guest speaker was coming.

Lennon from Urban Airship came in to talk to us about the company and the two internship opportunities they were going to be providing for Ascenders! This is a really amazing opportunity. I loved what he had to say and love how it will be set up. It’s like the perfect landing spot for someone right out of this program. I had already applied to UA before Ascend and never even got a rejection email so I was thinking they didn’t want me before so why would they want me now? Anyway it was awesome to hear that they are willing to step up and take two of us on.

I was late for my coaching session with Dino! He was supposed to be here this week but had something unavoidable come up and will be here next week. We had a great session and I can’t wait to see him. He’s someone I’d totally hang out with and not just because of Ascend.

After coaching I came back to my computer and noticed a comment on my bug. I read it and, uh oh. Jim, who works here at Mozilla and has been a huge help to me, jumped on it and stuck up for me. He was really firm with the code reviewer. Like a lot more firm than I could ever imagine myself being. Yikes. I took my laptop so I could show Lukas and Kronda telling them that I have had a wonderful but short career here at Mozilla. Lukas read it first, commenting with “oh wow” here and there. Kronda read it and there was a bit of silence. Lukas said I shouldn’t worry about it at all and that we would just see how things went. Me worry??

At some point Lukas merged in my huge pull request and Travis was alive on Ascend! Woo! Lots of hard work that actually had a beneficial ending. It felt good to finally accomplish something useful. Here is our first successful build after merging my PR.

After school I headed down to meet Andrew. We’d be heading to the Portland Perl Monger’s meeting where Andrew would be giving his first talk. It was something about turning a CGI app into a Plack app. I don’t know what any of this means and none of it became any clearer during or  after. He did a great job though and didn’t seem nervous at all. Lots of questions were asked at the end so I guess that’s good.

After Andrew’s talk we headed over to Lucky Lab for some dinner and conversation. We had a nice time talking to everyone.

Today I learned how to highlight code blocks in markdown. Not too exciting or complicated I know but it’s all I’ve got at the moment.

I am definitely not a true Portlander because I should be lying and saying what horrible weather we are having but I can’t. Today was incredible! I was up early and out the door but Roberto and Frankie were still sleeping so I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye. I’ll see them again soon though since they plan on moving here!

I was excited to get to class. Well I’m always excited to get to class but I was extra excited today because we got our computers back and it would be business as usual. I really wanted to get back to working on Travis-CI and hopefully get a clean build. I wasn’t, however, looking forward to messaging my code reviewer but I knew I needed to rip off that band-aid and say something. Check-ins were mostly great but some people were not having the best of days.

We had about an hour to work on our bugs and such so I got busy and started chipping away at the errors I was getting. I FINALLY figured out the correct file path for images and blog posts and that was a huge step forward. I also messaged my code reviewer and he did take some time to look at the code. He also gave me a different path to go down for this bug so it may not be dead after all! I was stressing about there being a problem but this just might work out.

Kronda came in and went over more features of WordPress and I really appreciated it. She gave us all sorts of advice and showed us so many helpful things! She covered plugins, themes, spam, SEO and a lot more. It’s apparent I have barely scratched the surface of WordPress but Kronda is a wealth of information.

After Kronda’s talk we got back to our bugs. I just plodded along working on error after error until it was lunch time. Most everyone left but I was straggling and running one more rake test so I ended up meeting up with Kronda, Lukas and Katt by the elevators. The four of us went to Los Gorditos. I had vegan taquitos with potatoes and soy curls (a terrible name for a delicious food). The food was really, really good but the company was great.

Back to Travis! I was down to about 25 errors! I worked on them and made the penultimate fix! The last fix was one I needed to go over with Lukas since it was above the participants directory. Once that change was made I pushed to Github and…….fail! Grrr….now it was throwing a certificate error on the Moztrap site. I can’t control that one so I added an ignore in the Rakefile and ran another rake test. Holy shit it finally passed! Only 18 builds later it passed! Look at how beautiful this is.

Of course this is just on my Github repo so it still has to be merged in and there will be a tiny bit of configuration on the actual Ascend repo but it should work with not too much trouble. Now I need to write a best practices so participants will know how things should be formatted. Having Travis running will allow them to see if their pull requests can merge in without causing a build failure.

I wanted to start writing the best practices but it was time to do some more practice exercises for our talks. Katt was able to join us for this one! We had to pair up and write up a talk about our first pet or the lack thereof. This was intended to make it no pressure and about something fairly easy. We also had to record ourselves giving the talk and then watch it with our partner and critique it. Writing it up was not bad at all. Recording it was another story. I have a lot of work to do there. I have to find a way to be even a little comfortable with the way I look and sound. Lots of work there. Anyway, all in all it was a great day in class.

I headed home, had an uneventful ride home on the Max, walked part way home with my neighbor and then stopped to pet BowWow (a tiny dog with quite the adventurous life) and talk with Maggie and Eric his owners. As I got to our block I saw Wayne, Alice and Jason outside in front of our house with Lily and Ladybug. The dogs saw me and came running as fast as they could, both ridiculously happy to see me and very interested in the scent of BowWow on my hands. It was another one of those perfect movie moments. I swear my life is too good to be true.

I barely had time to put my stuff down and say hello to the rest of my family before we had to run to the airport and pick up our friend Michael. He lives in Massachusetts and was flying in for an optometrist conference. He hadn’t ever visited Portland before and was looking forward to checking it out. We met Josh and Michael in Lake Havasu and became pretty close to them. We’d love it if they moved here but they have since adopted two amazing little boys and are very settled where they are.

We came back home, gave Michael a quick, partial tour of the house before Alice walked over and then walked around the corner to the Thai place for dinner. Jayde didn’t want to join us since she’s not a fan of Thai but Natale, Wayne, Andrew, Alice, Michael, and I had a great dinner and laughed a lot. Michael was getting tired so we headed back home. As we were walking, Alice and Natale heard something. Alice saw something she thought was a bag so walked toward it but then it moved causing her to jump and scream, startling the rest of us. I suppose you had to be there but it was hilarious! Oh, it ended up being a cat.

Today I learned what emesis means and it turns out Alice doesn’t like when we talk about it during dinner. Naturally we talked about it a lot.

The weather remains beautiful so it’s a really nice walk to the Max. My neighbor was there today so we talked about code and testing as usual. Nobody ever jumps in on these conversations of ours. Weird.

I got to class early and Lukas was nice enough to allow me to push my changes up to Github before class got going. We weren’t going to be using our computers at all so I really appreciated that. Dia was flying in to hold an all day workshop for us in order to help us tell our story. We have presentations to give next week so this help is SO appreciated! It also made me really nervous. I was just thinking about what we might have to do and hoped I’d be able to do it.

We began our morning with check-ins and I think at least a few others were nervous as well. We’ve kind of fallen into a nice routine and today would be completely different. The tables were pushed to the back of the room and we had all of the chairs in a big circle. It sort of forced us all to be very present which I thought was great.

I could go into great detail about the workshop but it’s really something to be experienced more than documented. We did spend half the day doing theater type activities which I had never done before. They were really fun and interesting and I laughed a LOT. Some of them seemed ridiculous while we were doing them but when Dia explained the purpose it totally made sense.

We broke for lunch and it was awesome! I think it was from Pastini Pastaria. So many carbohydrates. Yum! I of course ate too much. I think a lot of us did because it seemed many of us were pretty sleepy after we ate.

We got right back into our workshop but Dia was changing gears. Now it was time to sort of build the scaffolding of whatever our talks would be. We pretty much all vapor locked at this point. The contrast was fascinating and probably a bit disturbing to Dia. We were all very unclear about what we were supposed to be talking about and needed some clarification. She tried to talk us all down off the ledge but it wasn’t working so off she went to get Kronda and Lukas to come and give us the details we felt we needed. Once we had a better idea of what to expect we were able to move through the exercise. Whew! I didn’t end up figuring out what I am going to talk about but I have to do it so something will reveal itself. Probably.

The day was done, check-outs were extremely varied. Some loved what we did and some were totally stressed out by the day but I think it was excellent for everyone either way. It was dinner night so Carmen headed home with me. Wayne had a giant pot of chili simmering so I started making corn bread. People started to show up and it ended up being a pretty large group of us. We had Carmen, Yenni, Jen, Kronda, Jess, Sarah, Roberto, Frankie, Spencer, John, Glenn, Alice, Jason, Brigetta, Chris, Lauren, Sean, and the five of us.

Everyone was eating, talking, laughing and enjoying each other. It was Chris’ birthday so we sang him Somber Birthday. It’s accidentally become a tradition. At one point I had one of those movie moments where I sort of sat back and looked around the table at everyone and was just so incredibly happy to be surrounded with such a varied group of wonderful people. I am so, so lucky!

People filtered out here and there while the rest of us sat at the table and talked. I have no idea how the subject came up but Jess was nice enough to share with us that Kronda has, I’m pretty sure the word ‘several’ was used here with an emphasis on several, journals/scrapbooks dedicated to Xena: Warrior Princess! Finally some Kronda dirt!

It was a really great night and as always it was over too quickly. I offered to drive Kronda, Jess and their bikes home but they laughed and reminded me it was only about 2 miles away. Wayne and I drove Carmen home and as we returned were able to again take in the beauty of downtown Portland at night. The buildings, and lights, and river, and bridges. It’s breathtaking every time.

Today I learned what a pannier is. That Jess and her fancy words! So fancy.

First thing this morning I saw a message from my code reviewer. He mentioned there would be an Automation meeting just about the time I get to class and sent me the link to join. After my many frustrations yesterday I was very ready to get back to Mozilla to see if I might have better luck with the CI configuration on a newer computer and I definitely wanted to join the meeting.

I rode up the elevator with Katt and she set me up for the meeting right away. She’s really great! I was kind of nervous to join in because it was a Vidyo meeting but I have to get past these sorts of stresses. Meeting stuff was happening, words were being said. They were talking about projects I didn’t know about but I didn’t feel completely lost or anything. I read over the wiki while they were talking and saw that they were announcing Virginia and me as new contributors! I was hoping Virginia would get to the office in time to join the meeting so we could both say hello but she didn’t.

The meeting was actually pretty interesting. There was some back and forth about landing patches and whether they had to be submitted for review if they were pretty small. The lead guy said yes, all patches that touch a certain part of the code have to be reviewed by him. A patch from Friday was not given to him to review and the person who landed it said he didn’t want to keep the contributor (one of our Ascenders! Yay!) waiting. The lead guy said he would have landed it today but the other guy said some things take up to six months and he wasn’t happy about that. There was a bit of tension there but it was all very polite in the end.

I headed to the classroom, we all checked in and I got right to work on Travis. I had to install the Ruby virtual environment, rbenv, and several other things. It didn’t take me too long though and I was running a rake test! Sure enough, it spat out the same amount of errors as the Github run so something is definitely up with my computer at home. I suspected Nokogiri, libxml2, and libxslt but I’d have to figure that out later.

K needed just a bit of help today so I got her squared away and then completely immersed myself in setting up CI. I started the day with 197 errors and just kept chipping away at them and chipping away. I also sent my code reviewer a comment on my bug and he got back to me with more confusing statements. I was getting fairly frustrated about that but I was too busy doing other stuff. The All Hands meeting started and I moved away from the desk so I could continue working while the meeting was taking place. They mentioned Ascend and that two of our cohort had landed patches! It’s nice to see that people are excited about what Lukas is doing. Before I knew it, it was lunchtime. We had to leave early because the employee only meeting was taking place directly after All Hands.

Amanda and I went to the food carts and got Ethiopian. I am pretty sure I could eat that ever day. We wandered over to a nearby park to sit in the warm sun and eat. As we were eating and talking, several other classmates came and sat with us and we talked about all sorts of stuff. I was really wanting to get back so I could keep working so I headed back with Amanda. Unfortunately the meeting was still going on so we had to stand in the hallway for quite some time. Finally we could go back in! I sat back down and worked and worked and then I took a look at my bug comments and got frustrated again. I decided to ask a Mozilla employee there in the office if he would look stuff over and see if I was mistaken in my thinking. He looked over the code and the comments and said he also felt that my code reviewer was mistaken. I’m so new though that I really don’t know. I keep feeling like it’s just something I am missing or don’t understand but it’s not terribly complicated JavaScript so it was kind of vindicating to hear that he agreed. I sent off another comment to the reviewer and he replied while we were still looking over the code. He suggested that a previous bug be reverted so that my new function could be implemented but that made no sense. The change to the previous bug was good and should stand. I wrote back and said that the previous bug fix was clearly the proper thing to do, reverting it was not what should happen and that I would be happy to just work on another bug if he felt my function was really not needed any longer. I submitted my comment and buried myself back in the CI task.

The day just flew by! I barely spoke to anyone and probably owe many apologies for that but I was in a zone. I couldn’t believe it was time to check out already! Everyone went around and talked about their struggles. It seems a lot of us had them today. Lukas said that it feels frustrating but it’s actually progress. She’s been where we are many, many times so I believe her. It helped to hear it too so maybe that’s why I believe her 🙂 Anyway, I was rushing to run another rake test before I had to turn in the computer. I managed to get rid of a few more errors so that was good. I just couldn’t figure out why I was getting internal path errors though. Ugh, I had been working on it for days. I asked Lukas if she would take a look and in about 1.3 seconds she said it wasn’t working because the internal file paths were in fact incorrect. Huh? She said that internally it had to have _posts in the path. Holy shit! Days of working on this and I that never occurred to me! I felt really dumb but she didn’t make me feel dumb at all so I immediately let that negative feeling go. And besides, I had made a ton of progress on the other errors so it wasn’t like I was wasting my time. I had them down to 54 by the time I closed the laptop.

I was getting ready to leave and Jim, the helpful employee asked if anything came of my latest bug comment. It had and it was just as confusing and frustrating so I asked if he would look at the reply. It was mostly just that I wanted company for my misery and he was nice enough to oblige. He took a look and seemed frustrated as well. He said he really had to get going but wanted the bug number so he could look the whole thing over tomorrow and see if there was something we were both missing. What a nice guy!

I went downstairs and saw that Wayne had messaged asking if I was nearly home. I called him and he offered to come pick me up so I took the opportunity to sit on a bench outside and read a bit. The evening was so incredibly beautiful! I was immersed in my book when I noticed someone sit down just a bit too close to me than a stranger should. I looked over and it was Katt. She had her book of poems and read some to me while I waited for my ride. Wayne, Roberto and Frankie showed up and we offered Katt a ride home. She lives up on a hill in a great place with an awesome view of Mt. Hood!

We headed home, Wayne took a wrong turn and we ended up on a small adventure! But we found a Freddy’s so we could stop and get the few things we needed for dinner. We got home, I headed directly upstairs to pay some bills and then tried to figure out what is wrong with my old computer so I could run tests from home. Naturally I was in such a rush to get through a test run at Mozilla that I completely forgot to push my changes up to Github! Grrrr! Nonetheless, I shaved a LOT of yaks until dinner was ready. Wayne made some boxed vegan mac n’ cheese and mixed vegetables to go with some of my homemade sourdough bread. Mmmmm a craptasticly (that should be a word) wonderful comfort food dinner. I thought I’d hate the vegan mac n’ cheese but it was actually really good which is probably a horrible thing because I’ll definitely buy it again.

After dinner I showed Andrew the bug I was working on and tried to talk through the code while he corrected or clarified anything I was not completely clear on. I think I have a pretty good handle on things but it will be interesting to see if Jim uncovers something I have been missing. I’m new so I keep leaning toward that being the problem.

Today I learned that it’s so easy to overlook the most simple things. _posts…of course!

I woke up thinking about Travis and why it wouldn’t build. I brushed my teeth but that’s about it and headed down to my computer. I poured a cup of iced coffee and planted myself on the couch. Jekyll should not be throwing ASCII errors because, according to the documentation, the default encoding is supposed to be utf-8. I figured I’d try setting the encoding explicitly in the config file and see if that helped. It sure did! Jekyll was building, HTML-proofer started aaaaaaand… It found 196 failures! Yikes! I tweaked the Rakefile and got the errors down to 35 and started working on those.

I made a running list of errors and fixes:

Initially 196 failures
Fixed mailto error
35 errors
Fixed invalid url
34 errors
Fixed image alt text
10 errors
Fixed more image alt text
6 errors
Fixed yaml syntax on participant index.html
5 errors
Fixed missing / in url
5 errors
Fixed 404 which was apparent after fixing missing /
4 errors
Fixed spaces in file names
2 errors
Fixed missing index page in participant directory
1 error!
Changed path to image from external link to absolute path. Some sort of permissions error on this dir or file. Not sure.
0 errors!

So that was all good and fine. I don’t even know how many commits I made during this process. Anyway, I pushed the test branch up to Github and then got the repo set up with a .travis.yml file so Travis would know to run the automated tests. Failed! But it was nearly time to go pick up Roberto and Frankie from the airport! We hadn’t seen them in over two years so we were really looking forward to their visit. They are interested in possibly moving to Portland and we are very happy to show them around. I got dressed and off we went to my favorite airport.

We came back to the house and gave them the tour. They had a long travel day and we were all pretty hungry. The weather was incredible again so we decided to walk over to a nearby Ethiopian restaurant. Dinner was great and we all ate too much. We walked back home and by this time I had some sourdough that needed some attention. I got the dough kneaded and rising and then came right back to my computer.

I went back to my computer and tried to get Travis to run tests. That took some tweaking of the config file and then finally after a few failed builds it was building and then running tests! And it found 110 failures! Different failures than on my local machine. Huh…I checked config files, data files, application versions….same, same, same. I have no idea what is going on between my home computer and the Github server but something is definitely wrong. I looked and looked and searched and searched but I wasn’t able to figure out what the difference is. There isn’t a ton of documentation so I emailed the author of HTML-proofer to see if they had any ideas. Now I wait….and think and see if I can figure it out.

Today I learned that I can execute a webhook from the Github site to trigger a Travis build.

It’s Friday and that brings us to the end of yet another week of Ascend. That only leaves two more weeks and I don’t like that at all! The weather was amazing today though. I keep hearing how unusual it is but I haven’t known any different since we have moved here. I suppose I will be in for a rude awakening when things go back to normal.

The morning began as usual with breakfast and conversation. We moved into the room and everyone got to work on their various tasks before check-in. Lukas and Kronda came in for check-ins and gave us a friendly reminder to be on time for check-in and to close laptops and ignore phones when it’s check-in time or we have a speaker. It’s so easy to be distracted by the gadgets so it was a great reminder for me. During check-in one of the students (I won’t name 😉 was talking about how they feel just a bit rebellious about the “laptops down” rule because of some past experiences in school and then said to Lukas, “It’s not you. It’s the baggage.” I really love spending my day with these funny, intelligent people.

Lukas talked about how we can level up by always communicating via our blog posts, progress reports, tweets, Etherpads and so on; Staying busy by finding things to do. Even small things like reviewing git commands or running Mozmill tests for practice; Taking risks because this is the time to do it. We are in a safe place to learn and breaking things is normal and fixing them helps us learn; Claiming our space by being a voice in the movement. We are already a part of things so we need to think about how we will continue to contribute and carry on our legacy. It was a great talk!

K had asked me if I would help her get caught up on some things she was having issues with so I worked with her pretty much until lunchtime. She was able to get a LOT accomplished. I think she just needed another set of eyes because she moved right along and made sure to take notes as we went. I think by the end of the day she was all caught up.

Lunch was out today and what a perfect day for that. I decided on the salad place again because it was so good. K went with me and we took our food back to the office. We didn’t spend too much time eating before heading back to our laptops. I poked around looking for a new bug I might get started on and worked on trying to get a better error message from a test I’ve been running for my bug but that didn’t really go anywhere and I’m not too sure what exactly it has to do with my bug. I guess I will have to wait on that one too.

I also did a bit of poking around, gathering up resources and information for my potential talk. I emailed Katt with some questions about what sort of use a contributor has of the Mozilla open space. I did some research about logos I might be able to use on my slides. I’ve never done anything like this before so it feels scary and a bit overwhelming. I just keep telling myself I only have to prepare something. I don’t actually have to present.

The day flew by and here we were checking out. It’s so interesting to hear others talk about their bugs. They sound SO ridiculously complicated! I’m thinking, “Wow! Here we knew nothing coming into this four weeks ago and now these people are talking about things I don’t understand at all.” Is that how mine sounds?? Lukas mentioned that one of the students typed a set of empty curly braces in the markdown header of a blog post and it took down the Ascend site. She said she should probably get some continuous integration set up on the site to keep that from happening in the future. I mentioned I had set up Travis-CI on a site before and she said she would welcome a pull request. Fun!

Andrew met me at Mozilla so we could head home together. We made a quick stop at a spice shop for some smoked paprika and then we headed to the Max. David happened to be on the same train so I said he should come nerd talk with us. He started telling me about his bug and wow definitely more words I didn’t understand at all. I totally get the issue he is working on but I wouldn’t have a clue where to begin. Go him! We have some really intelligent people in our class.

I got home and jumped right on my computer so I could get started setting up Travis for the Ascend site. The docs recommended using HTML-proofer to test links, images, and scripts. Sounded great to me! First I had to figure out how to get Jekyll running. I had struggled with it a week or so ago and I just couldn’t get it but it wasn’t critical so I gave up. Well now I had a reason to make it work so I searched and searched and found the answer! Once I had Jekyll running I configured HTML-proofer and ran it. It wouldn’t build….there were errors related to ASCII and when I opened one of the files I could see there were some weird characters. Maybe smart quotes?? Anyway it was late and I was so tired. It would keep until tomorrow.

Today I learned that Mozilla has a TON of different logos!

I rode in on the Max with Andrew this morning and hung out at CA for a while. I tried to get irssinotifier set up on my phone but I couldn’t finish before I had to head to class. For once I wasn’t the first one there! I made a small breakfast and had my tea while we all talked about this and that. Our computers were brought out so we grabbed them and got to work. We did a short exercise with bash command line flash cards. I’m feeling pretty comfortable on the command line but could use more practice searching for things. Do I use grep? ack? find? What other commands are there?

Lukas and Kronda were finishing up the final one-on-ones and I was first up so I headed in to the office to meet with them. They said I was on track and asked a bit about my bug and that was about it. Back to work I went. Carmen had some questions so we worked together here and there and she definitely made forward progress.

I wrote a comment on my bug regarding changing the logic in a JavaScript file that, from what I can understand, doesn’t actually need to be changed. I went ahead and added my function to the file I was modifying and made a patch file. I ran some Mozmill tests and the one in particular I was to focus on failed but I’m not sure why since my changes don’t mess with anything.

I set that mess aside while waiting to hear from my reviewer but he seemed to be afk all day. I uploaded a couple of blog posts and edited a couple, pushed them and submitted a pull request. This has become very routine and comfortable. Now that I’ve said that, Git will probably blow up.

Lunch was yummy sweet potato and kale soup with some really good bread. The weather is cooler so it was perfect. I ate lunch pretty quickly and then went back to my computer. I finally activated my Safari Books membership that Mozilla was so kind to give me. I had just been so busy I didn’t have time to activate it sooner. I had just logged in and it was time for Kronda to give a talk titled, “Stop Crying in the Bathroom and Start Your Own Business”. It was great! She made so many good points about why it’s so freeing to be your own boss. She also covered the down sides like possibly not having a steady pay check and having to be able to promote yourself.

So yesterday I was given a challenge, which I accepted, to approach the organizer of Portland Linux/Unix Group (PLUG) and ask about speaking. Since I’ve been a regular at this meeting, I know the crowd is friendly and I know the organizer so I wasn’t completely freaked out about asking. The meeting was tonight so I’d have to figure it out soon. I was thinking about this when I got an email from a friend inviting me to participate as a panelist in a moderated discussion about personal eating choices. I’ve never been asked to sit on a panel before but I have some pretty strong feelings about why I eat the way I eat so it could be fun and interesting. It also sounds terrifying!

I went back to running tests and trying to figure out why they were failing. I copied the error I was getting and saved it in a text file so I could refer to it later and then I finished getting irssinotifier working on my phone. Once that was happy I tried to set up the Mozilla IRC server on Irssi but of course that had to give me issues. That was just the way my day went.

It was getting close to the end of the day so I filled out a progress report and then we did checkouts. Maybe it’s just my bias but it seemed like lots of struggling went on today. Enough that Lukas said Ascend was getting renamed to “Drink and Cry Your Way to a Patch in Six Short Weeks”. In spite of our struggles, everyone was pretty light-hearted.

I stuck around a while after class waiting for Andrew so we could walk over to the PLUG meeting. It was beautiful out so our walk was extra nice. We stopped at East Side Deli and each got half a sandwich to have for dinner. We made our way over to Portland State University where the meeting was being held. We were early enough to eat our food before the meeting started. Jennifer Davidson was giving a talk about diversity in tech. Yenni and Candida showed up just as the meeting was getting started so three of us Ascenders were there. Jennifer’s talk was SO good! The audience was quite engaged and heavily participated in many discussions and had a lot of questions and comments. It was one of the best PLUG meetings I have been to and Jennifer gave a shout out to Ascend! After the meeting I asked the organizer about whether I could speak and he said, “Sure! How’s November 6th for you?” Uh………

Andrew made our way home and the night was just as beautiful as the early evening. We had a really nice walk and ride home and still had time for an episode of Dr. Who with Wayne.

Today I learned about virtualenv-burrito. Ridiculously handy for setting up virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper all at once.

 

The weather was cool but beautiful and it was nice to see the signs of fall in the trees along our street. My neighbor didn’t make the Max today so I read a bit of my book on the ride. The man that sits outside was there today so I said good morning as I walked by. He said something back that sounded grumpy but I have no idea what.

Everyone filtered in and made breakfast or coffee or both. Everyone seems so comfortable with each other now. We just sort of have this nice flow as a group. I hope we can keep up some contact after this is over. Maybe a monthly Ascend Alumni meeting.

We all got to work on our stuff to do and it’s now different for each one of us. Some are still working on catch up things and anyone who is ahead seems more than happy to jump in and help them. Some people are working with headphones so they can concentrate. I do fine without anything and actually like the distraction of helping someone otherwise I might not budge. I posted a comment on my bug with the question I had from yesterday about the attribute being deprecated and then looked over the code I was supposed to modify. My reviewer commented back and said I had made a good catch on the deprecation. I followed up with another comment and question about my function name. I don’t expect this sort of quick response on all bugs but it sure feels wonderful to be taken seriously as a new contributor.

Mike Hoye had a Vidyo meeting with us to tell us about what the barriers to participation in open source contribution at Mozilla might be. He also spoke about his role in making things better and easier for people. He made several great points that I will paraphrase here. The social aspect is a challenge. Telling people to read the manual that you haven’t yourself read is functionally equal to telling them to fuck off. People volunteer to not only grow their own skills but to be a part of a community that they feel is doing something important. If someone’s effort goes unnoticed they won’t come back. Mozilla has tried, without sacrificing technical quality, to be more welcoming and responsive to volunteer contributors. The long term goal is to get the organization to recognize that Bugzilla is a social network. All of us have now seen under the hood. It’s a lot less about the technology and a lot more about working with the people.

Mike also talked about what works best for fixing a bug. He said that one of the things that makes any relationship work is communication. A bug will be assigned when a patch is filed. The person working on the bug should maintain contact weekly to, at the very least, say you are still working on the bug. Radio silence of two weeks is a sign that a contributor is not working on the bug. Rapid small iterations are very valuable. We have to work up to a “big bang” patch and it typically takes years but one can get there. Sometimes code reviews may seem nit picky but the code has to maintain a certain formatting standard from now until forever.

It was a great meeting and it went until just about 12:00. I had my coaching meeting then so I grabbed a quick lunch. I have to say again how wonderful it was! Vegan meatball sliders and a really good kale salad from 24th and Meatballs. Another place I have never heard of. So many of those in Portland I guess.

I had an awesome coaching meeting and was really happy to hear that my coach was going to be in Portland next week and for the remainder of Ascend! Meeting finished and lunch done so it was back to work. I had a notification in IRC and it was my reviewer, whimboo. He had seen my comment/question and messages so we could talk about it. I was kind of….ok very….stuck on my function name and keeping it more descriptive. I explained my reasoning and he agreed! It gets to be escapeRegEx(). I’m pretty happy about that. I showed him my re-worked function and he had some suggestions. I took note of them so I wouldn’t forget. Virginia messaged in IRC and it turns out he is her reviewer too! We all talked a bit about Ascend and he showed us pictures of Germany where he lives and then Virginia had some questions about her bug. It looked like things were getting complicated but I think she worked stuff out with him. He is really nice and very helpful.

I took a break from my bug to fix up a couple of blog post that had some formatting issues and then submitted a pull request. I was hurrying, which is really never a good idea by the way, so didn’t check my changes locally before pushing them up to my Github repo.

This brought us to the end of another day. They seem to fly by now and I don’t like it at all. I probably haven’t mentioned this at all but I don’t want this project to be over so soon! We all filled out our individual Etherpad progress reports and then checked out with the status of our bugs or progress toward obtaining one to work on. Some of us are frustrated and some of us are doing ok but all of us students are looking forward to coming back to it tomorrow. Lukas and Kronda are probably looking forward to a vacation!

Wayne was working in the back garden when I got home and Andrew was still working. I saw that Lukas merged in my pull request so I jumped on my computer to see my post all fixed up……except it wasn’t. Dammit! Don’t be in such a hurry that you skip checking things locally. It would have only taken me an extra few seconds.

Today I learned about Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen. Fascinating!