2014.12.10 – Midway Through Week Two of UA

I got up in time to make the MAX. It was overcast out but the temperature was very nice. I had a crowded but decent ride downtown and then walked to work past our bank so I could get some cash from the ATM. Of course when I got there the ATM was rebooting. I stood around and watched it go through the process, it runs on Windows 7 Professional, and then decided it was taking too long and continued on to work. I got all situated and Jesse showed up shortly after. He had been looking at the requirements.txt issue as well so I talked with him about what was going on and he did a bit of digging and gave me some things to try. I finally got it working! Meanwhile Adam was discussing it with some others on Slack and they came to the conclusion that it should just be left as is. Oh well, I definitely learned stuff by messing with it.

With that ticket closed we had only the Changelog and version ticket to finish and Amanda had taken that one. Adam and Mele came in to work with us on it so we could see how the process is done. We were incrementing the version from 0.6.2 to 0.6.3. It was really a one person thing so I looked over our upcoming tickets while I listened to what they were doing.  I also had a quick docs edit I made so I pushed that up and merged it after I got my +1s.

Our son, Jordan is applying to a code boot camp and was sent a tech challenge. He is just learning Python so I didn’t know how much he could do. Well I’m embarrassed to say he is picking things up SO much faster than I did. He has learned in a few days what took me weeks! I’m really glad he’s getting it though. He sent me what he did for the challenge and it was great. I’m worried they will think he cheated 🙂

We took a break for lunch which was being catered since it was Wednesday. It was SO good! No idea where it was from but I had salad, quinoa and sweet potato something, fingerling potatoes, grilled portobello with chimichurri sauce, bread with balsamic vinegar and oil and there was even a vegan cookie! I ate a lot.

After lunch we got back to work. I was able to merge in my doc changes and Amanda finished up with Adam and got the version updated. It was time to pick a new ticket from our next bug pack. She decided what she was going to work on and then I picked a ticket. Mine involves adding the ability to use channels in Audience. It looked to be pretty easy once Mele went over the details with me. I added the various channel functions that were needed and added some tests as well but when I ran the tests they were failing. It took me a bit but I finally figured out that I had to add the new functions to a couple of init files and then everything was happy.

Wayne was on his way to get me so I packed it up and met him downstairs. We were supposed to go get a tree but my brain was done for the day. I actually took a nap before dinner just to recharge. We had burgers and tots but I wasn’t terribly hungry. Wayne, Andrew, Jordan and I sat around talking about the state of the world today. It was some great conversation but unfortunately we didn’t solve anything.

Today I learned how to write a python script to send API requests. It wasn’t terribly complicated but I hadn’t done exactly that before so…..

2014.12.09 – Taco Tuesday

I didn’t get ready early enough to catch the MAX so Wayne dropped me off. I ended up being about 10 minutes earlier than usual so nobody was there. I grabbed a bowl of cereal and had that with my tea while I read my UA email and caught up on Slack messages.

I was just about done with the ticket I was working on. I just wanted to look everything over and do some final testing to make sure it was all correct. We had a team meeting scheduled for 10:00 so headed over to a room we could all fit it. Everyone went around and talked about what they were working on. Most of it is stuff I will never touch since we are working on customer APIs and the employees are working on internal proprietary code.

I got my ticket all done and pushed up to the private repo and then waited for my two +1s. I started working on another ticket that involved removing some development only packages from requirements.txt and moving them into setup.py. When I did that and then ran ‘python setup.py test’ it happily went and found the packages I needed and installed them but the tests were failing because one of the packages was not found. Huh….I checked and they were being installed globally and not to the virtual environment! That is not handy. I did a ton of searching and reading but didn’t really figure out what I should do.  I talked to Adam about it and he had some suggestions but we were going to revisit it in the morning.

The Winter Coder’s Social was being hosted at UA at 18:00 so I asked Andrew to pick me up and come in so we could at least say hello before we headed home to dinner night. There were several people I knew. Kronda arrived and brought a game. She asked if we wanted to play and we definitely did. It was called Forbidden Island and it was fun even though we totally lost! We lost pretty quickly too. It’s a cooperative game so everyone loses or wins together. I definitely want to play it again.

We arrived home to a wonderful house full of people! Wayne was making tacos and they smelled amazing. Tonight we had the now six of us with Jordan and then Estelle, Spencer, John, Alice, Jason, Taylor, Delaney, Miri, Dale, baby Michael, Lauren and Sean.

Today I learned the workings of the setup.py file.

2014.12.08 – Week Two at Urban Airship Begins

I was excited to get back to UA and learn more cool stuff so I woke up early and was ready to go. I had a nice walk to the MAX and enjoyed looking at our beautiful city as we crossed over the Steel Bridge. The walk to UA takes me about 10 minutes and I love to change up my path so I can see new things.

Nobody was in the CE area when I got there so I got set up and grabbed a quick bowl of cereal to eat while I worked. I checked my UA email and quickly read through the Slack channels before getting back to my next ticket. I was writing some tests to verify that an iOS alert can be either a JSON string or dictionary. I was basically just using older tests and modifying them to suit my needs. Shoulders of giants I tell ya! My pull request got the necessary two +1’s meaning two people reviewed my code and approved it so Mele said I could go ahead and push the merge button. Yay! My first merge at UA!

Mele and I had a one-on-one scheduled at 10:00. We found a quiet room off of the Hangar and chatted about how things were going. She seemed happy with me so I plan to continue working as hard as I can and to learn as much as possible while I am there.

When we all got back to our little glass office I asked Mele what the use case was for a dictionary vs a string and she went over that with me. She sent me the syntax for a curl request to test it out and I asked if it could work with slightly different syntax. She said it shouldn’t but she wasn’t positive so I should test it out. Ok! I first tried to run the syntax she gave me but kept getting a syntax error. I couldn’t figure it out so finally asked for help and she immediately showed me that my helpful Mac had changed my plain double quotes to special characters. Grrr! I had lots to find and fix. There must be a way to stop that from happening.

Once I got the quote issues worked out I got another error. This time it was an invalid character ‘{ ‘. Well hmmm….I looked and looked at the JSON code but it was hard to read in one long line so Mele suggested I use a web based visualizer. That made it much easier to see and helped me figure out that the code sample in the UA documentation had an error.

Amanda and I went to lunch with some of the CE team. They were going to Boxer Ramen. I had walked past it many times and also heard great things about the food so I was really looking forward to it. They did not disappoint! I had their vegetarian curry ramen and it was wonderful! I would definitely eat there again. One of the guys had a degree in physics so we talked a bit about the difficulty of making a career of it and how we each ended up on this path to developer.

When we got back I screwed around with braces and commas for what seemed like too long and then bam! I had valid code! Yayayayay! I fixed up my curl request and it worked!!! Well now I had another issued I could fix so I stashed my current git branch and checked out another. After I did that I figured out that stashing wasn’t necessary because I could have just switched to the documentation repo I had cloned and since it was a different git repository. Duh! No big deal though. I made a new branch and then fixed the syntax error, pushed my branch to Github, submitted a pull request and within no time (after someone fixed an indentation issue. Woops!) my change was merged.

I read about dictionary values that Apple allows for iOS alerts and tried to understand each use case. I read and read and read and read but I still don’t completely understand them. I really can’t believe all I have learned in one week though. A very short time ago I knew nothing about push notifications other than that they magically ended up on my phone. Now I’m making them happen and I kinda know how! I am so thankful for this opportunity.

Wayne messaged to say that he and Jordan were on the way to pick me up. We were taking Jordan directly to his interview afterward. We got there pretty quickly in spite of the traffic and waited in the car for him. He was in there for a half hour or so and seemed pretty happy and positive when he got in the car. I hope he gets accepted!

We came home and Jordan buried himself in Learn Python the Hard Way. Andrew went to Jason’s house to listen to some new piece of stereo equipment he just got and Wayne went to the store. I helped Jordan here and there as he needed but he was doing just fine for the most part.

Wayne made a delicious Asian veggie skillet thing and rice. We sat around and talked until bedtime. It was a great family evening.

Today I learned commas are a pain in JSON

 

2014.12.07 – Errands with the Kids

It was a very quiet Sunday for the most part. I relaxed in the morning by catching up on my Twitter feed. There was no lack of interesting stuff to read. Lauren wanted to upgrade her phone so she, Jordan, and I headed to the Sprint store. The process was relatively easy and we were out of there pretty quickly. Her phone is on back order for a month though! Silly iPhone users. We also went up to 23rd so she could run in to Lush.

Jordan and I sat in the car and talked while we waited for her. He had applied and would be interviewing at PDX Code Guild the following day so he was curious about what they might expect of him. I told him I wasn’t really sure since the school is totally different now but that they have excellent instructors and offer a great learning trajectory.

We were all hungry so we decided to go to Por Que No? for lunch. It was a bit more crowded than we had anticipated for that hour but not too bad. We got a nice table in the back and had a great lunch.

When we got home I read a bit of Red Mars. I hope I finish it someday since I only get to read a few pages here and there. I read quite a bit before dinner was ready though. I wasn’t too hungry since we had a late lunch so I only had a small plate. Wayne made vegan fish stick things and they were so gross. I can’t stand seafood so I had the not-chicken nuggets.

I looked over the pull request from Friday to see if I could find my mistake and fix it so it would be ready to go on Monday but I saw what I thought was the correct test. I commented back and asked if everything was ok after all and got a message right back saying that yes, it was in fact good to go! Yay!

After dinner I watched a few more episodes of The Big Bang Theory. Andrew finally got done with his side project so he, Wayne, and I watched Theory of Everything. It was pretty good. The actor did a fantastic job of playing Stephen Hawking!

Today I learned that code reviewers can make mistakes. It makes me feel less stressed about everything.

2014.12.06 – Jordan’s Homecoming

I had insomnia again which is typically unusual for me but this is the third time in a couple of weeks. Maybe this time it was a combination of stress and the fact that our son, Jordan, was flying in with his dog and cat. They will be living with us while Jordan gets settled and we are all really happy about this! Now all of our children are here in Portland.

Alena came over with the kids in the morning and we hung out until it was time for us to leave for the airport. I love them so much and am really glad they moved out to Portland as well.

Wayne, Andrew and I piled in the truck and headed to the airport. As we were driving there, Jordan messaged to say he had landed. His plane was about 15 minutes early! We parked and headed down to baggage claim where he was waiting for his dog. He looked tired and happy and we could hear his irritated dog barking in the back. Nobody was bringing him out so Jordan went to the airline desk and asked if he could get him. They brought him right out in this HUGE crate! Comet is a big boy for sure! He’s a golden lab and weighs over 100 pounds. He’s super sweet and was very happy to get out of his crate. The cat, Vanilope, was meowing away in hers so we let her out as well. Andrew tried to carry her to the car but she started freaking out and scratched his hand up. Back in the crate she went.

We came straight home and both animals explored the house. Our cat was not very pleased to see this new cat in her house so kept stalking her. They didn’t fight and Vanilope is really sweet and would rather be friends so hopefully it goes well. Comet had a blast romping and playing with Lily and Ladybug. They wrestled and played for hours.

Andrew, Wayne and I walked down to La Bonita for lunch and brought a burrito back for Jordan. Taylor and Delaney came over to hang out and welcome Jordan. We all sat around talking and catching up until it was time for dinner. Nobody really wanted to cook anything so Delaney and I grabbed some pizza for everyone. We also stopped by Voodoo 2 and got some donuts. Jordan was getting a very Portland experience. Dinner and dessert were great and we were all stuffed. Taylor and Delaney headed home so Jordan, Wayne, Andrew and I watched Almost Famous. It was a pretty good movie!

Today I learned that right means right and not left.

 

2014.12.05 – A Surprising End to a Busy Week

Today would complete my first week at Urban Airship. It really flew by! I got a great nights sleep and was feeling much better after my super blah day yesterday. I was going to go in early again with Andrew but he decided to stay home so Wayne drove me down and I got there just before 09:00. Amanda was working away at the desk and everyone looked pretty intent on what they were doing so I slipped into the glass office and got to work.

There was some confusion over the tickets we were working on so I started a different one dealing with accepting 200 and 201 http status codes when a device token is registered. Currently there is an error when a 200 occurs. This ended up being a bit of a yak shave since I’m new and don’t know the system. I had to start from the point of error and work my way backwards.

I had to send v1 API requests (UA is on v3) via curl. Well what’s the syntax for that? I asked in one of the Slack channels and another employee gave me a whole page of various v1 requests. Great! But what’s “master authorization string”? Got that clarified. Great! Well crap, I need the device token so I need an iOS test device. Obtained iOS test device. Great! Do I need to install a dev kit for this and configure it? Looks like it’s already set up. Great! How do I get the device token? Read lots of docs and find three somewhat complicated methods. Well this is going to be a pain. Mele comes to check on us so I ask her and she says those methods are for external users but I can just go to the “tokens” link in one of the test apps. Doh! But yay! I send my request and get back a 200. Hmmm…that’s good right? The CE and Support teams are oddly quiet and we hear they are working on something critical so I am at a blocking point. No problem since there is plenty for me to work on and learn.

I open the ticket from yesterday which involved removing some old code. I’ve gotten a lot better at searching from the command line so it was a fairly quick process to find the code to remove and the tests to update. I worked through this and then ran tests. One was failing. Hmmm….ok. I looked everything over but it seemed ok. I undid my changes and the tests passed. I started over removing the code and the test was failing again. The failure was due to an invalid argument that had seemingly nothing to do with the code I was removing so I was pretty confused. I dug around and finally figured out that there was a build directory that is generated when setup.py develop is run. There was a file in there that was causing the test failure! I deleted the directory and everything was fine.

Mele has put out her fire and it’s 16:30, demo time. We wander to the Hangar and listen to the presentations. I don’t understand a lot of them but Mele fills me in as best she can. After demos we head back to the CE area and I ask Mele about the previous ticket so I can move forward with it. She says I need to now go into iPython and load the library then send the request from there. Off to figure that out! It was pretty self explanatory but I was making some syntax errors that Mele pointed out. Whew! Things work so much better with the proper syntax. She also showed me how to build the docs in Sphinx and then parse them for any references to code I had removed for the other ticket. There weren’t any so I felt ready to submit a pull request on that one. She went over their procedure and I submitted it. It was late and a PR needs to people to review it and give it a +1 before it can be merged so it would have to wait until Monday. All in all I felt I had accomplished a good amount for my first week so I wished everyone a good weekend and headed out.

Mozilla was having their closing party at 18:00 and Lukas said I was invited so I thought it would be nice to see my mentors one last time before they all head home. Lukas had said it was at the art museum again so I headed for the street car….and just missed it! Oh well. It would be only slightly slower to just walk even though it was pretty far away.

I zig-zagged my way there and other people were also arriving. They all seemed to be dressed in very fancy clothes but I was told to wear whatever was comfortable. I went in and said to the front desk person that I was there for the Mozilla party. He looked very confused and said there was no Mozilla party. Well then…..I messaged Lukas but got no response. At about this time Barbara pinged me on IRC and asked if I was going to the party. It turns out the party was actually at Pure Space clear back where I had come from! I briefly considered just going home but it looked like the streetcar would take me pretty much where I needed to be.

I walked around the corner to the stop and a car came pretty quickly. As I walked toward the event I saw lots of activity, and several travel trailers parked outside. I could hear bagpipes and saw fire. The Unipiper was there! He was outside, dressed in his Darth Vader costume and people were taking lots of pictures of him. I went in and gave my name. Lukas said I was on the list but I worried I wasn’t going to be. There I was! I got my hand marked, checked my coat and backpack, grabbed a soda and headed for the food! There was amazing food everywhere. I was pretty hungry so piled up my plate and then looked for a table. I found a spot with Richard and tried talking to him over the very loud music while I ate. He left and I wandered off to mingle. I soon found Peter so we hung out and talked for a while and then Barbara showed up. I went with her while she got food and ate and then we found Lukas. She introduced us to several people and it was really nice to put faces with names I had seen often. About this time I got an email from Mele. I had deleted a test we needed so my PR couldn’t be merged. Darn! Had this been my first PR I probably would have been mortified at making a mistake but I’d already submitted several for Mozilla and never had one completely right the first time around. I was totally ok knowing I could fix it on Monday. Progress!

Alice had messaged to see if we all wanted to watch a movie at her house at 20:45. It was going to be Expendables 3. It sounded like a pixar film or maybe some movie based on a comic book. I had no idea but it sounded ok to me. I didn’t need to stay too late. I asked if Wayne would come and get me at 20:30 so at about 20:20 said goodbye to everyone and went to coat check. The woman said, “You really don’t want to leave.” She said there was going to be entertainment and I probably really wanted to stay for it. I asked her who would be performing and she couldn’t tell me but assured me I should stay. Ugh, Wayne was not going to be happy! I got my backpack anyway and ran it out to him telling him I was actually going to stay. He wasn’t thrilled but I told him I would figure out how to get home so he didn’t have to come back. I kissed him and went back in. This had better be worth it! I had a strong feeling it would be based on the fancy trailers outside and the high security inside.

Barbara and I mingled around until about 20:45 and then planted ourselves at the very front of the stage. If I was going to stay I was not going to get stuck behind anyone and not be able to see! Soon the CEO of Mozilla came out and thanked several people and made several toasts. He congratulated the team that worked for months to secure the new search partnership with Yahoo! and then the woman who headed up that team came out to announce the entertainment. She talked about how Mozilla is the independent choice and then said something about how these artists were also independent. It HAD to be Macklemore and Ryan Lewis! And it was! They put on such a great show and I got to be right up front for the entire thing. I was so glad I stayed.

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Once it was over I headed upstairs with Barbara. Lukas was up there and shuffled us, Yenni, Dino, Christie and someone else to be in a silly picture together. Andrew messaged to say he was on his way so I rushed over to the coat check area and it was complete madness! I handed someone my ticket and waited and waited and waited. It was such a mess of confusion. Andrew was outside and I was still waiting. After a bit the coat check people just wheeled all the coat racks out into the crowd and people started going through them themselves. I had very little confidence I’d be finding mine because it seemed people were going through the coats and just picking something that looked like it would fit. Ugh, but at least I had sent my backpack home with Wayne earlier. I searched and searched with no luck and then heard “I found it! I found it!” and the woman I had given my ticket to forever ago was coming my way with my coat and scarf! I gave her a huge hug and rushed out the door to a soaking wet and waiting Andrew.

Today I learned about curling API requests and building docs in Sphinx. I also learned I can do this. I AM doing this.

2014.12.04 – Happy Birthday Natale

Today is our youngest son’s fifteenth birthday! It was still a work and school day and I leave before he gets up so I didn’t get to wish him a happy birthday in the morning.  Andrew and I left for the MAX and it was pretty darned cold out and a bit rainy. I walked with him to his office and then made my way up to UA. It was just after 08:00 so not many people were in. I got situated in our little glass room and started messing with Android Studio. I wanted to send notifications to my phone. It went well and was not as exciting as I thought it would be since it was pretty much like sending to the tablet 🙂

Mele arrived as did Amanda. Mele was going to sit with us as much as she could so we could ask questions. I asked her how to use curl on the command line to send push notifications so she showed me the example page and I did a few of those. I was done messing with the mobile apps so asked Mele some questions about the bugs we were to work on. She went over them and I picked one to start with. It involved removing some code and tests so it was probably going to be a pain.

I was leaving early so I wouldn’t work over 40 hours and since Andrew was downtown we decided to meet for lunch. Yep, Los Gorditos. Amanda joined us and we had lots of great nerd conversation while we ate. We headed home and Amanda headed back to UA. Wayne started a fire when we got home and I made myself some tea. Nearly a full week in a new position while lots of fun is also stressful and I was starting to feel it so it was nice to sit by the fire and relax a bit.

Roberto and Frankie were over and would be staying for Natale’s birthday dinner. Wayne had taken them to Ikea to shop for new furniture. Natale came home from school so I could finally wish him a happy birthday! Soon Taylor and Delaney arrived as did Alice and Jason. Jayde and her friend Estelle decided to put on a play for everyone. It was really random and parts of it were actually hilarious. I helped Wayne make spicy garlic noodles for dinner. It’s always a favorite and it came out especially well this time.Everyone was stuffed but we still brought out the cake and Natale opened his presents. Alice and Jason gave him some really cool stuff and he seemed pretty happy about that.

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Even though it was a school night and Natale has trouble getting up in the morning we let him stay up and go over to Alice and Jason’s to watch The Giver. I was just not feeling very social so I bowed out and went to bed early.

Today I learned that although there are significantly more Apple mobile devices than Android they are quite a bit more difficult to set up and provision to receive push notifications.

2014.12.03 – Dinner with my Mentors

Wayne drove me to Urban Airship this morning. I’ve been getting there at about 08:30 and  stay until about 17:30 but I found out today that I can’t go over 40 hours per week so may have to leave early at the end of the week. When I got in I asked Jhenna, another CE, why Android Studio was unable to see the SDK when I launched it from the finder but could see it when launched from the command line but she wasn’t really sure. Everyone decided I should just launch it from the command line. Ok.

I moved to the Hangar again since the don’t have desks for us yet and soon Amanda joined. I don’t even know what stuff we were struggling with exactly but I had her start Android Studio from the command line and it still didn’t work so we added the export line to her .bashrc. That helped and it seemed to work ok. There was a meeting in the Hangar so lots of employees came in. They were going over the new health benefits so we half listened while working. We decided to move to a small room in the CE area and that was a lot better.

Mele wanted us to get our Android apps working and receiving push notifications but Amanda wanted to look over the bugs we were going to be working on so we did that until it was time for lunch. Urban Airship provides lunch on Wednesdays so I had salad, veggies and some sort of spicy tofu. It was ok. Very nice of them to feed us though!

After lunch I just went back to getting my sample Android app running and helped Amanda here and there as needed. I was getting some weird error about a missing module and wasn’t finding a lot of help for it. Mele saw that I was getting frustrated so she came in and helped me. It was nice to see that she was almost as confused as me but after much clicking around she had it running and then showed me how to push a message. Cool!!

After all that yak shaving it really amounted to downloading the UA Sample Android app, importing it into Android Studio, adding an appkey, appsecret and the project API number to a config file. After that build the app then run it. Hopefully there aren’t any errors. If there are, get Mele to come click around on things so quickly you have no idea what just happened (just like at home with Andrew) and then stuff works. Once the app is loaded on the device go to the UA apps dashboard, create your push notification (all sorts of configuration options here) and then send! Look super confused when your console shows the message was sent but nothing happens on your app and then realize you need to actually opt in to push notifications in order to get them. Opt in and then viola! “Hi Lisa” pops up on the device. It probably doesn’t sound as interesting as it actually is.

Next it was time to get Amanda to that point. I figured it would be good for me to help her so I could remember what we just did. We got all the way to the module error and then we just couldn’t figure it out. We screwed around with that until it was time to go. Amanda even deleted her app and started all over with no luck. Frustrating! We’ll get it tomorrow though.

I was meeting Peter and Richard from Air Mozilla for dinner so we could talk about my upcoming internship with them. We were meeting at Andina which was just around the corner from UA. I hadn’t ever been there before but wow it was fancy. We had delicious food while we talked about all sorts of things. I told them my back story and they told me theirs. We talked about the future of Air Mozilla and what I would be working on. I’m excited! We discussed how to make new contributors feel less intimidated and more welcome. I think Mozilla is well ahead of the game in this area but I’m probably biased. I had a great time and they were wonderful company. Definitely two people I would hang out with just because.

Wayne picked me up afterward and Roberto and Frankie were over to have dinner. They were approved for an apartment they looked at yesterday so were very excited about that. Wayne was making burgers and tots and Lauren, Sean and their friend Jorge joined as well. I caught up on my Twitter feed while they ate, talked and laughed. I love how happy and full our house is.

Today I learned that I shouldn’t fork a private repository. Who knew?! Apparently not me.

2014.12.02 – Fighting With SDKs and JDKs

I was up early again and ready to go. The weather report said there was freezing fog and it sure looked to be the case so I decided to take the MAX and not have Wayne drive in that. With our car issue yesterday I wasn’t going to push our luck. As I walked to the train I passed by our gardens. Everything alive was completely frosted over. It’s interesting though because the kale just loves the freezing weather.

I got downtown about 08:15 and even though UA is fairly close to Mozilla I take a different street to get there so I pass different stores. I found a bagel place that Andrew’s co-worker had mentioned liking several months ago and since I hadn’t had breakfast I stopped in to see what they had. Luckily all of their bagels are vegan and they even had a savory spread. I packed up my bagel and headed up to UA. I ended up getting there at about 08:30 even with my stop so figured I should be able to leave a bit later.

Nobody was really in yet so I grabbed my laptop and headed to the Hangar. I checked my UA email while I had my bagel and tea and then Mele came to invite me to the stand-up meeting. I took a seat in the conference room and Amanda arrived shortly afterward. We listened in on the meeting, not really understanding everything but enough anyway. After the meeting Mele got us working on installing Android Studio so we could create and run an application on an Android tablet. Wow, talk about yak shaving. It was a pain in the ass and I had to wait for a lot of stuff to download. While I waited I downloaded Eclipse which is another Android development IDE.

Mele wanted to take Amanda and me to lunch with some others from the CE team so we put aside our yaks and headed to The Parish. I hadn’t been there before so I wasn’t sure what they would have for vegans but Portland is great about that so I wasn’t too worried. They didn’t have many options but they did have a baby kale salad with roasted beets which was delicious. I also had some bread and balsamic vinegar to dip it in. Yum! But it was time to head back to our yaks all too soon.

I left Android Studio updating the SDK when I went to lunch but of course forgot to change the setting to prevent the hard drive from sleeping after a certain amount of time so it didn’t finish. Bleh! I started it again and switched over to Eclipse. It seemed pretty happy and did everything it should do but I really wanted to make the other one work so I went back to it once the SDK was updated. It was much happier but there weren’t very many tutorials for it. Most were in Eclipse. Mele came in about this time and said we should just skip the tutorials and install the UA sample app. Ok! Unfortunately this led to more yak shaving. Amanda and I struggled with more SDK issues until it was time to go home! That’s a lot of yaks in case you were wondering.

Wayne came to pick me up and had Roberto and Frankie with him! It was so nice to see them. I hadn’t had time the day before because of my busy day but it was dinner night so it was the perfect night for them to come over. We had spaghetti, garlic bread and salad, easy! Tonight we had Dale, Miri, Michael, Roberto, Frankie, Spencer, John, Alice, Jason, Taylor, Delaney and the five of us.

Today I learned that Android Studio is a pain in the ass.

2014.12.01 – Day One of UA Done!

I was up early of course, excited for my first day at Urban Airship. I wasn’t hungry but made myself eat so that I wouldn’t have a nervous, grumbly stomach until lunch. Andrew made me a thermos of my favorite tea and Wayne drove me there. As we were exiting the freeway he suddenly stopped slowing down and there was a van in front of us. I was so confused until he said, “Whoa!” and then the car beeped and the dash lights all lit up. Something bad had happened and he no longer had power brakes! We were right at UA so he dropped me off and then took side streets all the way to the dealership.

I saw Amanda walk in ahead of me so I hurried to catch up but she was nowhere to be found once I was inside. The front desk people didn’t even look up at me when I walked in and since I didn’t see her I assumed she headed upstairs. I went to the elevators and someone was getting in ahead of me. He pushed the button for 3 and up we went. When I got out of the elevator I still didn’t see her though so I messaged her. She was still downstairs but had gone to the restroom! Back downstairs I went and met her in the lobby. The HR person soon came to get us and took us back upstairs. Their new Community Manager, Randy, was also with us for his first day so we all got a tour of the building. They have a very nice gym, bike storage, kitchen and so forth. Amanda was disappointed to see that they didn’t have an espresso machine though.

We were then taken into a room where we were given our laptops, taken through the basics of our UA email accounts and then the paperwork. There wasn’t a ton for us so that went quickly and then we were off to our work area in the engineering department. Unfortunately they have had a lot of new hires so didn’t have desks for us yet. We opted to sit in the Hangar, which is their spacious area filled with all manner of couches and chairs. We spent pretty much the entire day setting up our dev environments and customizing the laptops the way we wanted them. Amanda and I went to Los Gorditos for lunch of course and then she stopped at Tilt for a real coffee. I looked up at the building where UA is located and just couldn’t believe I worked there! That’s where my current job is. Yes it’s just six weeks but it’s an amazing opportunity that I hope leads to more amazing opportunities.

All of the Mozillians were coming to Portland for a work week and I was invited to their evening social/party along with the other Ascenders so we could have a reunion. I hopped on a streetcar and headed over. Luckily I was there early enough to get in, check my coat and bags and hit the food tables. The food was great and they had plenty of vegan options! There were SO many people there. It was packed and loud but so awesome to see Kronda, Lukas, Dino, Katt, Jim, Barbara, Yenni and Jessica. I was really hoping more of us would have come though. I also got to see Richard from Air Mozilla and was able to meet Peter, my upcoming Air Mozilla mentor. We did a lot of socializing, I thanked Lukas likely to the point of annoyance, and then called it a night. Amanda was so kind and drove me, Barbara and Kronda home.

Once I got home we had to turn around and head to the airport to pick up Dale, Miri and baby Michael. We left Penny at our house though so we could have one last night and day with her. I miss having a dog. Our timing was perfect as they had just gotten their bags and were headed out the door as we pulled up. They were so happy to be home! By the time we dropped them off it was 23:00 and my bedtime so we came home and went straight to bed.

Today I learned that Mozilla has an apartment in Paris!