It’s Thursday so I usually go downtown pretty early with Andrew. We were on time this time which was nice. Roger and Alice were leaving at the same time and offered us a ride. Yay! I probably wouldn’t get a ticket today. It was foggy again but not horrible. I love hearing the ship’s fog horns anyway.

Alice dropped us off and I walked up to Mozilla. I got there just after 08:00 so Katt hadn’t arrived yet. I just stood out in the hallway and caught up on my Twitter feed. Eventually a Mozillian saw me and let me in so that was nice. I got right back to my usual job of being confused. At least I know how to do that much! I felt like tests for my sync view were pretty good so I needed to start writing some for my home view. I’d need that template to be working though and yeah….I at least figured out that I had to rename some stuff to get my template to load so that was good. I tried to sign in though and it was not happy. Hmmm….I checked my settings.py file to verify things were as they should be. They were. Oooooooh I bet I’m not a super user. That was it so I was back in business once I fixed that.

I tried changing stuff in the template to see what was going on but it didn’t seem to make any difference. I could either completely break it or nothing changed. Not helpful. Kronda showed up and Jordan came over as well so I had some company but none of us did a lot of talking. We all seemed pretty focused.

I had a Vidyo call with Peter after lunch. He looked over my tests and my views. We talked about how things should work but I’m still pretty fuzzy on how all of this is going to work together so I wasn’t very helpful. He’d ask me why I did something a certain way and I’d discover it isn’t going to work the way I thought it was. I told him I usually feel like I have no idea what I’m doing and thankfully he seemed to understand. Whew!

I loaded my template to show him that it doesn’t display any events so he had me go to the Python shell and see what was in the database. That was really interesting! And I only had one event. He suggested I work on populating the database with more events and then get them to show up in the template. He also suggested I make a dummy html page and get a star icon to overlay an image with some css. Great! I don’t know much about databases but I’m very interested in learning and the css thing sounds completely doable.

I got started trying to figure out how to populate the database. Peter had mentioned using a create event method I was using in one of my tests. Hmmm…..my method adds just one event and it’s very specific so that wouldn’t work as is. I need to add a lot of events with different titles and such so I would have to change it. I also wanted to be able to populate the database with a bunch of events at one time. I didn’t know how to do it but I figured it must be a thing. Nobody would want to hand enter that much data. I poked around on the net and found that Django supports writing your own command scripts. Neat! I found a brief article showing the basic structure of a custom admin command and got to work. This was a fun challenge! I worked and worked at it until I had it adding any amount of events I requested. Super cool! I need to do a lot more work on it so it’s more useful, maybe having it star events as well.

It was time to go meet Andrew and Dave for dinner before the Perl Monger’s meeting though so I had to stop working on it. Boo! But yay for Los Gorditos. I hadn’t been there in a loooooong time and was really looking forward to it. Jordan and I met them in front of Mozilla’s building and we wandered down there. It was a beautiful night! It’s February and it was like a cool summer evening. Dinner was fantastic but we had to hurry to be on time for the meeting.

Tonight a couple of people were talking about documentation. Everyone’s favorite 😉 One person presented on why POD is a bad thing. I’ll have to take his word for it since I guess it’s a Perl thing. He said to use Markdown instead I think. I was kind of distracted by my command script. I didn’t want to stop working on it so I was doing that instead of listening. The other presenter spoke about Sphinx which is or was primarily a Python thing but there are plugins for other languages. I used it at UA and really liked it.

After the meeting we headed over to Fathead Brewery for beer and more discussion. We were there until about 23:00 and I was tired! We still had to walk to the Max and had to wait about 30 minutes for the yellow line. We made it home just before midnight and I went straight to bed!

Today I learned about writing custom admin commands in Django.