Today is the first day of sprints and I am joined OpenHatch again. Asheesh is one of the first people I met at PyCon last year and he was so welcoming. We met him on our first night in Montreal while hanging out in our hotel lobby, he told me a bit about OpenHatch and what they do and then asked if I wanted to fix a security bug in Django at the sprints. I was SO excited and told him that I did.  We hadn’t scheduled time to stay for sprints because I didn’t know what that even meant but we would have half a day since our plane left in the late afternoon. My excitement about fixing the bug started to fade as I thought about things though. Although I had been learning Python for a couple of years I still felt really new and started to think that maybe Asheesh was just making a joke about the bug and I didn’t get it because I was so new. Why would a newer programmer be fixing a security issue? He had to be joking and wow what an idiot I am for not getting it. I went from excited to embarrassed pretty quickly. The conference was great, we met tons of wonderful people, listened to great talks and it was over before we knew it. It was the first day of sprints so Andrew and I went over and I avoided the OpenHatch room but went into the Django room to see what I could learn. I fumbled through their issues for a long time not understanding much of anything at all. I took a bit of a break and happened to run into Asheesh. I figured he would avoid me but he came up and asked if I was ready to work on that security bug. Huh?? He wasn’t joking. I told him I would be right there and that bug ended up being the very first open source thing I had ever contributed to with a LOT of help from Andrew.

Anyway, back to this year’s sprints. I thought we were late since I have been sleeping in but there was only one person there before Andrew and I. More people showed up and they were new to open source and OpenHatch so I helped them get set up on IRC and helped as needed while they set up their dev environment. I looked through open issues but honestly I spent the entire day talking to some really interesting people! Russell, is from Hawaii and works on the big telescopes at the university. Fascinating to talk to him.

Lunch was provided so we were able to eat and get back to work (talking) but a group of us went out to dinner together. Michael who I had the pleasure of working with at Mozilla, Hannes who lives in Portland, Renee who lives in San Francisco, Eric who also works at Mozilla but lives in one of the Carolinas, Andrew and I all went to a really good Italian place in old Montreal. The weather was amazing on our walk there and back. We had a great time.

Today I learned that the big telescope on the island is 24ft in diameter but they are trying to build one that is 30ft in diameter.