Fresh Code

I can’t believe we’ve reached out halfway point already! I really thought the Ascend Project flew by but this one is going by even faster. I had submitted my PR the day before so I went on the hunt for +1s. Jhenna was on vacation so Brett came and sat at her desk. That was a mistake on his part because I took the opportunity to ask him for a code review. He was super nice though and agreed to look it over. He and Mele reviewed it and had about 15 comments and corrections. They were all related to wording and formatting which I had anticipated. I was very happy that my code was all fine but wow, I made some really silly documentation errors. I guess I’m just not looking at it as critically because it doesn’t cause my tests to fail. I’ll have to work on that though and I am SO thankful that they both have great eyes and easily saw things that needed to be fixed. Some of them were as simple and inconspicuous as a missing full stop.

I fixed as many things as I could until it was time for our team lunch. Mele picked Los Gorditos and I promise I had nothing to do with it! Yeah, I may have mentioned how much I like it once or twice but that’s it! 🙂 We were supposed to be having some horrible rain storm but fool me sixteen times Portland. Not this time though! It was beautiful out! The sun was shining and the sky was blue. Wow, this place is the best. Anyway, I decided to try something a bit different this time so I ordered some soy curl tacos and added potatoes to them. They were delicious! I asked Mele some questions about the next ticket I would be working on and we all talked about programming languages.

When we got back to the office I only had about an hour left before I would be at my 40 hour maximum for the week so I bugged Brett again and asked if he would mind looking over my PR once I pushed up the changes they requested. He was happy to comply and so was Mele. I got my two +1s and was able to merge! My merge made Amanda’s PR conflict though and she was kind of unsure about what to do so I helped her fix a really simple merge conflict and she was good to go as well.

Next week is a short week so Amanda and I asked if we could work extra hours or days to make up the time and we can as long as we don’t work on Christmas day or the days the office is required to be closed. That works out well for me because I can work nights and weekends.

I wished everyone a great weekend and headed off to the bank and then to meet Andrew so we could go home. As I was walking I saw the Snow Peak store and thought I might be able to get a gift for Andrew’s brother Abraham. Andrew’s siblings decided to do a Sibling Santa something or other and Andrew drew Abe. This meant I would have to figure out what to get, buy it, and get it mailed because Andrew would never get around to it. I told the salesperson that I had to buy for someone who had no wish list or suggestions. He immediately said, “Blow torch!” Hmm…that sounded intriguing. He asked if I would like him to demonstrate it. Uh, yeah! He lit it up and it was awesome! It was loud and had a huge flame. Abe would most certainly injure himself or someone else with it. Sold! I also grabbed some of their carry-on chopsticks.

I stopped by the bank and then grabbed Andrew. We had a nice trek home talking about I don’t even know what. When we got home I quickly logged on to my work laptop and pulled in the latest changes to my repo just so I would be totally up to date and then moved to my laptop and checked out the new Treehouse series on regular expressions in Python. I really want to improve my regex skills of which I currently have none.

Wayne and I offered to drive Alice and Jason to the airport for their trip to Arizona. They would be picking up Alice’s mother who has recently been diagnosed with dementia. She will be living with them until they have a spot for her at a very nice assisted living place nearby. After they were dropped off I asked Wayne if we could have mac n’ cheese and mixed vegetables for dinner. It’s one of my favorite comfort food meals and Earth Balance makes a great boxed mac n’ cheese now. We have only been able to find it at Food Fight so we headed over there. We also got some really good sourdough rye bread that is made here in Portland. Dinner was excellent!

Jayde and Estelle were actually going to have a sleepover at our house. This was kind of a big deal because Estelle has anxiety and doesn’t really stay at other people’s houses. She finally felt comfortable enough here to give it a try. The girls decided to have a movie night with popcorn and pie. We were out of popcorn though so Wayne and I ran to New Seasons and grabbed some for them. They made a huge bowl of popcorn and shared with us. We watched the newer Freaky Friday and the girls both went to bed before it was even over.

Today I learned a lot about sugar.

I fiiiiiiiinally submitted a PR for this ticket I have been working on seemingly forever. This one was definitely a challenge and I learned a ton! I hope I can retain some of it.

The previous thing I worked on was adding device channel support. The one I just submitted a PR for was to add channel lookup and listing. The purpose is so a UA customer can get a list of all channel IDs associated with their app and additionally do a channel lookup on a known channel ID and get back device metadata.  I kinda sorta but not really had some other code to work from but I had to figure out a lot of it since it was adding new features. I also had to add documentation which is really hard! I also had to add tests and there were no tests at all to base these off of so I totally had to figure them out myself. It really helped me get a much better understanding of how it all worked though.

Anyway, I got my code pushed up for review and I am sure I will have a ton of things to change and fix before it gets merged in but it felt great to get it most of the way there.

I met Andrew for lunch downtown, yeah, yeah don’t ask where, and then came home to work. I had most everything done for my ticket but my tests were failing. I was able to get them all happy though with a lot of trial, error and thinking.

It was BSD Pizza Night and we were going to Dove Vivi. None of us had been there before but Mele said it was deep dish and was one of her favorites. There were six of us but we didn’t have to wait long for a table. Wayne, Andrew and I ordered a beet and walnut salad and their vegan corn, caramelized onion and cashew cheese pizza. The food was amazing! We will definitely go back but not for a while because I only had two pieces of pizza and will most likely be full for about a week.

It was pouring rain when we left for home. I just love it. The city is beautiful in a whole different way when it’s raining.

Today I learned how to use Mock for unit tests. Interesting but I haven’t figured out how to do any testing for exceptions with it. Tomorrow is another day.

 

 

Today was soooooooo much better than yesterday. Andrew had helped me out and although I didn’t completely understand what he did I knew I would be able to look it over and figure it out. I got to UA early and got right to work looking over the documentation so I could figure out what I would need to add in for examples.

I spent most of my time before lunch reading stuff over and writing some documentation and examples. I needed to have Adam look over my code to see if he liked the format it was in but I hadn’t seen him around and he wasn’t on Slack.

Lunch was catered today. It was a taco bar from somewhere delicious and I ate far too much food! It was totally worth it though. After lunch Amanda asked Helen to come and show us how she does function diagrams. I’m not sure that’s what she calls them exactly but that kind of idea. She used a simple push as an example and we stepped through all of the classes and methods that the function call touched so we could follow the path. It made complete sense and I was glad to know I did already understand how that worked.

After lunch I saw Adam online and asked him to come see me when he had time. I read all kinds of stuff about python decorators, classes and methods until Adam came and looked at the code. He gave me some suggestions and showed me some things to change. I made his changes but stuff was broken so I worked on things the best I could and got closer and closer but things were still not working quite right. I’d ask Andrew to look it over later.

Robert was downtown and waiting for me so we could go to Teavana. Starbucks owns it, Robert works for Sarbucks and gets a discount so he offered to go there with me so I could get some stuff. On our walk over to Pioneer Square Mall I realized we were right by the Mozilla office so I asked if Robert wanted to see the space. He did and I was glad because I wanted to say hello to Katt. We wandered upstairs and the office was all decorated for Christmas. We chatted with Katt for a while and she showed us where us OP interns would be sitting. Her parents had sent her a huge box with a bed topper in it and she needed to get it home somehow. Since Wayne was going to come pick up Robert and I, I asked him if he would mind taking her home as well. He’s said he’d be happy to. He’s so good to me and everyone.

The three of us walked over to the mall and I picked out some white earl grey. That was a new one to me! It smells really good. We didn’t stick around there long. I called Wayne to let him know we were on our way back to Mozilla so he could come and get us. We didn’t have to wait too long for him. We dropped Katt off and headed back to our house. Wayne made dinner while Andrew looked at my code, showed me what I was doing wrong, helped me fix it and then sat patiently with me while I talked my way through the whole process of what was happening when I called a particular function. He corrected me when I got confused and explained things I didn’t know and I got all the way through it! And I understand it! That felt amazing and seriously it’s not nearly as complicated as I was making it out to be.

Today I learned that http responses are just bytes that get decoded into strings and then the strings can be parsed into various data structures.

I was late yet again so Wayne drove me to work. I have to stop doing that! I got all set up and started working through my ticket again. We had a team meeting in the morning and after that I asked Mele to help clarify some things about my ticket. She got me moving forward again and I was able to get pretty far. I was trying to get a listing of all channels and their metadata associated with an app. I was getting the data returned but the code I wrote to parse it was just not working and I couldn’t figure it out. Meanwhile I was able to help Amanda figure out her blocking points. Oh well at least I was doing something. I feel like I have such a short time there and I want to accomplish as much as I can.

I stopped for lunch and ate with Ivy, the new office manager. She’s been in Portland for 12 years but says she misses the snow. That’s not something one hears a lot. It was nice having her company for lunch but it was back to work time!

I sat and struggled with my code for pretty much the remainder of the day but finally asked Mele and Jhenna for some help. It was late in the day though so they both gave it a look and said we could come back to it the next day.

Wayne picked me up and we headed to New Seasons to get some things for dinner. We were having bowtie pasta with pesto sauce, sauteed veggies, salad and bread. When I got home the tree was all lit up, the entry way was filled with Christmas lights, a fire was going and the house smelled like the tree. It was SO good to be home! Soon everyone started showing up for dinner. We had the six of us, Taylor, Delaney, Roberto, Frankie, Spencer, John, Alice and Jason.

Andrew sat with me so I could ask him where I might be going wrong with my code. He doesn’t know anything about the library I am working on nor is he a Python programmer but he could figure it out in minutes. Yeah…..I definitely had a love/hate feeling about this! It made everything feel so daunting but he assured me that with practice and time I would also understand things as quickly and clearly. I sure hope so. I’ll have to sit and study what he did because I still don’t understand it. Bleh.

Today I learned a lot about JSON objects.

I just could not get it together this morning and made myself late for the MAX. Wayne, the always wonderful one, drove me to work. I love him so much! I was pretty excited to get there because today I would graduate to having my own desk! The drive to work was a breeze thanks to someone having an accident just before our freeway entrance (I hope everyone was ok!) so I was at work in no time. Of course as soon as we got there I realized I left my badge in my jacket at home! Argh! I need it to unlock the elevator. Well crap. I went to the front desk and the woman was so nice and gave me a temp.

I went upstairs and got all set up at my desk. Wow, it’s so nice. It’s a powered desk like Andrew’s so can be raised and lowered for standing and sitting and it has a huge monitor. I didn’t know what to do with all of the desktop space!

Once I was all set up I grabbed the Amazon Kindle Fire so I could test my new code. I sent a regular push and the debugger said it was successful but it never showed up on the device. Huh…I asked Mele about it so she showed me how to look up the push ID in the dashboard. It showed that it was sent but showed an error. Ah! I was using an internal testing app called Unicorn and it wasn’t set up to accept Amazon pushes. Mele got someone from the mobile team to set that up and my push went through! Next I needed to send a rich push. That’s a push with more features. A regular push just shows up as an alert outside of an app but a rich push might contain an image, sound, external link and so forth and will show up in an application’s inbox. I wrote a script to send the push and it said it was successful but again it wasn’t showing up anywhere. Mele looked and said it wasn’t being sent with all of the complex attributes. Huh….she quickly looked up the proper syntax for sending a rich push and I hadn’t set it as a sub-section of blah.notification. I fixed that and viola! There was my rich push! It was so cool to write so much code that implemented a completely new feature on a completely new device type and it freakin’ worked! Maybe I do kinda know what I am doing sorta. Really super cool. Now I just had to beg for +1s so I could merge it in to master. I asked in Slack and got crickets. Hmm.

Helen from the mobile team was back from vacation and hadn’t met Amanda and I yet so asked if we wanted to meet for lunch. I thought that would be great so we met in the kitchen and talked about work stuff. Another mobile team member, Ryan, sat with us as well. I took the opportunity to ask them for +1s. I’m totally not above begging. They gave me some handy suggestions about where to ask since neither of them were Python people so that was good. I also saw Adam and asked him in passing if he would review my PR. He said he would so I was probably set.

Wayne and Jordan were picking me up at 13:00 so I could run to the bank and help Jordan get his final Arizona paycheck cashed. Our bank is the best and took care of it for us even though they don’t typically do that. Thank you Albina Community Bank! They dropped me off at Los Gorditos. Hey, it’s been like two weeks since I ate there so shut it! I had a great lunch and walked back up to UA. Wayne had brought my badge for me so I was able to return my temp badge. Must not forget badge! I made a fresh cup of tea and when I got back to my desk I had my two +1s! Yay, code merged!

I spent the remainder of the day reading and reading and trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do for my next ticket. I will need to go over it with Mele tomorrow. Wayne and Jordan came back yet again and picked me up. It’s so nice walking in our door and smelling our Christmas tree!

Today I learned that even the best coders are just figuring it out as they go.

The five of us were up and out of the house fairly early so we could have an early Christmas with Dave, Alena, Tiberias, Rialla and Anya before everyone but Dave headed to Arizona for the holidays. I had ordered their gifts from their Amazon wishlists but of course they weren’t showing up until the Monday after! The kids were all waiting in the front window for us and were so excited we were there. We did presents right away because who wants to make a small child wait for the best part?! Not me. We got Tiberias some cool wooden castle blocks and Wayne spend a long time hoarding them and building a castle.

Andrew and Dave spent most of the time looking for computer parts in Dave’s various boxes for the home server Andrew is going to build. Alena made us yummy strawberry pancakes and Field Roast sausages. Natale, Jayde and I played with the kids and I read a bit of a book Alena got for both Andrew and I, Hacking Vim 7.2. It’s very interesting so far!

When we got home Frankie and Roberto’s car was out front and Delaney was just parking. Delaney was stopping by to use the computer and Roberto was there to do Lauren’s hair for her company Christmas party. Andrew, Wayne, and I had a going away gathering to go to at The Sweet Hereafter. Our friend Dawn was selling her house and car, quitting her job and moving to London to get a PhD. She’s been the community manager at Puppet Labs since we’ve known her and was just about the only person we knew in Portland prior to moving here and barely at that. Andrew and I had met her at a conference and she mentioned living in Portland and being vegan so naturally I threw myself at her and begged her to be my friend. Maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but close! We did get together right after we moved here and a couple of other times but she was SO busy at Puppet flying all over the world.

We invited Delaney and Jordan to go with us since Dawn’s invitation said anyone and everyone was welcome……

Interrupting the story to mention this funny conversation in the car when the spelling of orangutan somehow came up:

Delaney “Isn’t that some kind of drink for astronauts?”

All of us pause and are trying to wrap our brains around this.

Wayne “No that’s orange Tang”

Maybe you had to be there. Aaaaaaanyway…….

…….She had quite a large table of people and not any room for extras but a couple were leaving and gave us their spots. We gathered around, ordered some drinks and talked about her exciting upcoming adventure for a while. More people showed up so we gave them our spots and took a table in a different room where it was a lot more quiet. I ordered a slice of their Red Velvet cake to share with everyone and we sat and enjoyed our drinks. We were going to wait on dinner and see what was available at our next event. This wasn’t the best idea in retrospect. Sheri from PDX Code Guild was there and came to join us once she wished Dawn well. We talked for quite some time but then it was time for us to head to the Urban Airship holiday party.

This was going to be interesting because I’d only been there two weeks, barely knew anyone and was bringing my two husbands. We’ve been together going on nineteen years now and I never think about us being unusual until I have to come out to new people. It’s always fascinating to see how people react. I was in for a ton of fascination since there would be a lot of coming out 🙂

Delaney and Jordan were going to drop us off at the event and then pick us up later. The event was being held at the Ecotrust Building. I’d been there before with Andrew but just to check out what Patagonia had to offer. We headed upstairs and immediately saw Adam and his wife. I introduced Wayne and Andrew and then the awkward happened. I’d say stunned was the look we got and Adam’s wife looked as though she wanted to run away. Oh well, off to freak out the next unsuspecting person. Thankfully nobody else seemed too shocked so that was good. About this time, Jordan messaged to say that he and Delaney just left the car parked where they dropped us off and were going to wander around downtown until we were done. That would be perfect. We mingled some more and I was able to introduce my guys to Mele and her husband, Jhenna and her girlfriend and Barbie and her husband.

We were about done and were hungry so decided to go find food. Luckily there was a Hotlips Pizza place right downstairs. We ordered a pizza and had half one type and half another. It was not bad at all. As we were eating, a couple of other guys from UA ordered some pizza as well. They looked around for a table and since one of them recognized me they came and sat with us. Andrew and Andre. Yeah names were fun 🙂 Andre is in product management and Andrew I can’t remember what Andrew said he did but he’s in the same area as CE so the same area as me which is why we had seen each other. We joked about how Amanda and I have to sit in the little glass room as though we are under quarantine. I told them we call it the fish tank and that we get real desks on Monday. We talked about all sorts of fun stuff going on at UA, laughed a lot and really had a nice time. They were going to head back up to the party and we were ready to go home so we wished them well.

Jordan and Delaney were done as well so the timing was perfect. We waited a few minutes for them to walk back to the car and we headed home. It was a pretty good night!

Today I learned about a ‘fork bomb’. It’s a way to crash a server and is usually an accident. One forks a process which then forks other processes that fork other processes and so on until this kills the server.

My long work day yesterday put me really close to my maximum 40 hours for the week so no matter what I was going to have to leave early. I had a tech team lunch and then a presentation afterward but had gotten in at 08:00 so I was going to have to take a long break before lunch. I suppose it would have been more of a break if I had left the building but that’s my fault.

I had submitted my PR the night before and asked on Slack if anyone was willing to look it over and give me comments but my request got lost in a flurry of messages. It was Phil’s last day as an intern from PSU. He’d been there for five months and had done a lot of work on the Java library. Not too many people use Java there at UA so it had been difficult for him to get the required two +1s on his pull requests so they could be merged. Everyone was scrambling to get this done before he left for good. I asked on Slack if anyone had an Amazon device I could borrow for some testing and we found a Kindle Fire but it was not charged at all. It seemed I wasn’t going to get much done this day. I read through the other tickets and tried to pick my next one.

We headed off to lunch with the tech team. Phil picked Mio Sushi. I hadn’t been there but I seemed to remember that most sushi places had tempura vegetables so I wasn’t too worried about finding food. Sure enough it was on the menu. They were playing Christmas music so I figured this would be the year I lost LDB but I didn’t! We had a nice, LDB free lunch and then rushed back to the office for Phil’s presentation.

Everyone filed into a conference room and Phil showed us what he had been working on while at UA. Java looks so complicated! There were a lot of files and tons of code. I’m thankful I’m working on the Python library 🙂

After the meeting it was time for me to leave so I met Andrew at Collective Agency and we headed home. It was such a beautiful day! The sky was clear and it was warm. We had a nice walk home. As soon as I got home Wayne and I headed out to Target to get some gifts for our Nieces and Nephew. We were having early Christmas since they will be leaving soon to spend the holiday in Arizona. I had ordered them some gifts but somehow messed up the shipping and they wouldn’t arrive in time. We went to a couple of stores and found what we needed. When we were getting ready to walk out of Target it was raining pretty hard. Still being somewhat new to Portland I was not expecting that! It was nice though.

We stopped at New Seasons and grabbed some stuff for dinner. We decided on ravioli, salad and bread. Jason and Alice stopped by to say hello so we talked for a while as Wayne made dinner and Jayde and her friend Estelle made some sort of variation of a chocolate chip cookie. They rolled out the dough and used cookie cutters and then decorated them with chocolate chips. I was really wanting regular chocolate chip cookies so I guess I will have to make them myself.

After dinner we watched Nightcrawler. I fell asleep and missed most of it so will have to watch it again.

Today I learned that I’m glad I’m not a Java programmer.

 

Thursday’s are optional work from home days at UA and the weather was reporting a huge rainy awful storm coming. I still remember getting stuck downtown for several hours during a snowstorm in February so I figured I should just stay safe at home. Andrew decided to stay home as well.

I was already up and dressed so ended up being able to start work an hour earlier than usual. Other people were already on Slack so I mentioned my plans and Mele said that was fine. I got to work finishing up my ticket so I could get it submitted and reviewed. I was adding some code, writing tests, updating documentation and sending test push requests. This took me until lunchtime but I finally pushed it up and submitted a pull request. I immediately got comments from Mele with some things to fix up. Mostly small except for missing completely that I was to add another device type to the library. Oooops!

Well I’m learning anyway. I got busy fixing up the stuff I missed and then looked over the current device types to see how to implement the new one. I made some progress but could not figure out how to write the payload function for the device. Each device has its own unique set of keyword arguments and I couldn’t find any documentation for this device! I looked and looked and looked and finally asked Mele about it. I’m glad I did! She didn’t realize the documentation was only in a place where I had no access. She quickly sent over just what I needed and I was on my way again.

I worked on getting it all done and it took me until about 18:00 but I pushed it all back up to the repo. Everyone was done for the day so I won’t know what stuff I have to fix up until tomorrow but I feel like I accomplished a LOT. It’s not really ready to be merged in though until I can actually do some testing on a real device.

Andrew came downstairs just as I was done working and reminded me that there was a Perl Mongers meeting. Ugh! It was so windy out and staying inside sounded like a great idea. He really wanted to go though so I asked if we could skip hanging out at the Lucky Lab after. He said sure! So we headed to the meeting. We were late but there were only a couple of people there before us. We said and waited a bit until more people showed up and then the organizer gave a talk about Test More. I don’t know Perl at all but his talk was very interesting! After the talk he let me know that his company was looking to hire some junior developers. I’m definitely going to be needing a job soon so I will have to send them my resume!

We came home and had delicious not-chicken noodle soup and bread with Jason, Alice, Lauren, Sean and the five of us. Jordan wasn’t feeling well so didn’t join us.

Today I learned that the indentation of a comment took down most of CPAN.