Month: January 2015

2015.01.11 – GSG Holiday Party

This year the GSG holiday party was the weekend before the work week. I kind of like it that way because we were able to fly in on Saturday and home on Friday then have a weekend before work starts again.

Andrew and I slept in a bit and then got dressed and took a cab to South Side so we could finally eat at the Zenith. I had been wanting to eat here for three years now and today was the day!

Two summers ago, when Wayne and the kids came with us, the five of us walked from the hotel all the way over to South Side to eat there. It was hot and miserable but it was only about 3 miles away so we toughed it out. When we got there we saw a huge line winding around the corner. Uh oh! We took our place in the back and some regulars assured us that there was plenty of room inside. Whew! I was really looking forward to eating here because everything was vegan. Vegan pancakes, french toast, savory meals, baked goods. Yum! We were about fifteen minutes early for the opening so stood around and listened to the kids complain a lot.

The time had arrived and they should be opening but the line wasn’t moving. We waited another 10 minutes and still nothing, 10 more minutes and nothing. Some people were walking away. Ha! More room for us! 5 more minutes and nothing. Finally Andrew went to their website on his phone and there was a little notice that they were closed and on vacation. Well then…….the kids were so unhappy! I was disappointed and we were all hot and tired. We ended up going to some meh place and took a cab back to the hotel.

But today they were open! The Zenith Cafe is in the back of an antique store which is kind of unusual but very cool and interesting. It’s group seating so we were at a table with six other people. Really nice, helpful people who gave us all sorts of suggestions about where to get vegan food in Pittsburgh. We had really great conversations with all of them and the food was amazing! There was a huge table full of different pies and cakes. There was another with all kinds of salads like fruit, potato, macaroni, pasta. I ordered the french toast and Andrew had the Tofishy sandwich. Mine was excellent. I didn’t try his because I don’t like seafood or anything that tastes like seafood. He said it was really good though. After we couldn’t possibly eat another bit we paid the bill and summoned a Lyft. Wow, she showed up in like three minutes and was very pleasant. I would definitely use Lyft again.

Once we were back at the hotel we had a bit of time before we had to get ready for the party so I caught up on email and any articles I had open tabs for. Andrew worked on some OpenBSD stuff.

The party was in the Grand Ballroom of the hotel so once it was time to go we just headed up the elevator. It was nice to see his team and their families. We always have a great time hanging out together. We never get seated at the same table but always end up gravitating back to a group once dinner is over.

The food was pretty good this year. The vegan offering was pretty similar to what they serve most years but they added some couscous and marinara sauce so it was more like a meal instead of a plate of veggies. The dessert is still a boring bowl of fruit though…..We stood around talking with his team for quite some time after the party was officially over and then headed to our rooms. The employees have an early morning beginning with breakfast and then a full day of meetings so everyone was off to bed. Besides, the Speakeasy is closed on Sundays 🙂

Today I learned that The Franktuary moved! It was one of the few places I could get a vegan lunch. Boo!

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2015.01.10 – Hello Pittsburgh!

Soooooo early……up and out of bed. Grabbed our stuff and headed to the car. Wayne, the best, drove us there. The airport was busy but the security line was not at all. We got put through pre-check so getting through was a breeze. Our flight left on time and arrived in Denver on time 2.5 hours later. Our next gate was steps away.

We had about an hour layover so I went and found us some lunch. Burritos that were not awful. By the time I got back with them though it was time to board so we had to eat on the plane. That’s ok. Two of Andrew’s co-workers were on the same flight from Denver and we were sharing a car when we arrived so that was convenient. Our flight from Denver was also about 2.5 hours. That is definitely the way to fly to Pittsburgh. Two relatively short flights instead of one looooong one.

We got to Pittsburgh about five minutes early and since Andrew and I didn’t check bags we went to the group meeting spot to wait for our chauffeur.  There was another couple flying in on a slightly later flight that would be riding with us as well so we sat and talked while we waited. The chauffeur ended up finding us and off we went to the hotel. GSG always puts us up at the Omni William Penn. It’s a beautiful old historic hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. I’ve been here twice per year for the last three years so it feels like home away from home now. They took it upon themselves to upgrade us to a suite which was REALLY nice. Everything was perfect except we miss Wayne!

Andrew and I decided to brave the 10F temp and walk to our favorite Indian restaurant, Indian Spices. It’s usually where we eat our first dinner and we typically end up going back at least one more time before we leave. We had a fantastic dinner and ordered slightly too much food as usual but man it was good! After dinner we hustled back to the hotel. I think we were walking into a slight breeze and it was making our faces hurt so we hurried 🙂

We were both pretty done after our long travel day so we called it a night fairly early.

Today I learned that yeasted semolina pancakes are a thing. Gonna have to try and make that!

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2015.01.09 – Last Day at Urban Airship

Well it’s been a fantastic six weeks! I feel like I accomplished more than was hoped of me. I learned a ton and met some really wonderful people. My last day was a good one too. Adam looked over my PR and had a few suggestions. I made the changes and got a +1 so was able to merge that in. I pushed up the document changes for the version bump. I wouldn’t be getting to do the deployment though because Amanda is still not done with her ticket but oh well. On to new adventures!

Mele let me pick where the team lunch would be and I chose Boxer Ramen. It was SO good, again 🙂 I invited Lisa, the new data scientist, to join us. She is really nice. I hope we can keep in touch!

When we got back to the office I merged in my last PR and then really didn’t have anything else to do so I turned in my badge, gave Max, the new PSU intern, my desk and moved to the Hangar for my last hour. Zach and Jhenna were in there hanging out too. They asked if I had ever been to Blue Start Donuts but I said I didn’t think they had anything vegan. Jhenna looked it up and they do! I suggested we go there immediately! They just kind of laughed so I went back to whatever I was reading.

Adam came in shortly after and we talked a bit before Happy Hour. I was going to leave before it got going since Wayne was on his way to get me. As I was walking out Jhenna stopped me and said I couldn’t leave because they got me a going away donut. Aw! They snuck out and got them when I wasn’t paying any attention! They are too nice. Of course I had to stay for that! I watched everyone’s demos and then we headed back to the CE pod. They got me a vegan matcha donut and it was yum! I said my final goodbyes to the CE team, found Adam and thanked him and that was it.

Wayne picked me up and then we headed over to PDX Code Guild to pick up Jordan. We also stopped by Trader Joe’s so I could get some snack stuff to take on the plane. We would be flying all day starting at 06:00 and I wasn’t sure what kind of time/options we would have for food.

When we got home I needed to pack. Nothing like waiting until the last minute but I’d mostly be in the hotel room working anyway. I had purchased an outfit a couple of months ago to wear to the holiday party. I hadn’t ever tried it on though so I figured I should do that just in case it was horrible. Luckily it was just right!

Once I was packed we had a quick dinner and then it was early to bed. We had to be up at 03:30 and on our way by 04:00. Yuck.

Today I learned that I want to work in all of the places!

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2015.01.08 – Stalled

It’s the day before my last and I’ve got my final PR submitted, one +1, and just need one more. A lot of people are out today, including Adam, to participate in building a house for Habitat for Humanity. I still posted in the Python Slack channel asking if anyone had time to look it over. Jessie decided to take a look at it and he didn’t seem to like much about it. He basically wondered why the module I added was even in there.

We went back and forth on a few things and finally Mele said it was ultimately up to Adam so we kind of left things at that and would wait for him to look at it tomorrow. That works for me! With that being settled sort of I really didn’t have anything to work on so I read some articles that people posted in Slack. This all pretty much took up the morning.

Amanda asked if I wanted to join her for lunch so the two of us headed to Tilt. They have an awesome vegan burger and their fries are tasty. We talked a lot about coding, life and the future. I kept getting distracted though by this guy sitting behind Amanda. He had ordered a burger (their burgers are very tall) and was trying to eat it with a fork. That doesn’t sound unreasonable but the way he was doing it was captivating and entertaining. He had cut a wedge out of this very tall burger and had squished it onto his fork so it looked like a Popsicle. It was a huge wedge though and he was trying to figure out how to take a bite. He would open his mouth and turn the burger this way and that in an attempt to get any portion of it in his mouth but was really having a difficult time of it. I wish I had a picture!

Anyway, after lunch I we came back and I worked on changing the documentation for the version bump that would hopefully happen before I left. Amanda did the last one so this one was for me to do. It would all depend upon her finishing her ticket though and she was having trouble. I did help her figure out some of her testing issues so hopefully she was moving ahead.

Jordan showed up and I gave him a tour of the space before he and I moved into the Hangar to wait for Andrew to be done working. Jordan was amazed that a place like this even existed. I told him that this was pretty typical of a tech company and was really hoping it would inspire him to try hard at the code school. He seemed inspired so we will see.

Andrew showed up and the three of us went to Los Gorditos for dinner. I wasn’t horribly hungry so I just got a couple of tacos that were delicious! After dinner we walked over to Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) for the Perl Monger meeting. Jordan hadn’t been to a meetup and he, like me, knows nothing about Perl so I warned him that he might not understand a thing that was being said but that it’s good to immerse yourself in tech environments and to socialize with people. Networking is probably as important as learning new programming skills.

As expected the talk was way over our heads! Very mathy. Something about prime numbers and cryptography and blah, blah, blah. I stopped listening after a while but Jordan really tried. After the meeting we went to Fat Head Brewery and it was the perfect place for us. We had about 15 people and they had plenty of room for us. It was also not too loud so we could all talk and hear each other. We stayed and talked until nearly midnight! Luckily Wayne is a really good man and came to get us.

Today I learned about sqitch. I was chatting with the guy who developed it. It sounds like an interesting tool for database migrations.

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2015.01.07 – My Last Pull Request

It seems like I just started this internship and now it’s nearly over. I finished up my ‘actions’ ticket and submitted my pull request. I’m getting ahead of myself though. I was still stuck in the morning. I was pretty sure I knew how it all worked but my test wasn’t passing. I kept getting an error saying add_tag needed to be a string. I screwed around and screwed around reformatting things and trying this and that but that only led to different errors. What the heck?

I took a break from that and tried to help Amanda with her testing issues. She’s got one last thing to finish up and get merged before I can do a version bump. I’m hoping that all gets done before I leave or no version bumping for me. I was able to help with a couple of errors she was getting but she was still having issues and I couldn’t figure them out.

Lunch was catered today. It was really good. Some sort of kale, sweet potato, carrot mixture in a curry sauce over rice. There was some grilled tempeh as well and I tried it but I just don’t like tempeh.

After lunch I went back to working on my ticket. Why wasn’t it working??? I finally asked Adam if he would mind taking a look at it and helping me. He came right over and looked at what I was doing. I figured it was going to be something really simple and dumb and it was but he is SO patient and nice. He explained what I was doing incorrectly and didn’t make me feel dumb at all. Everyone I’ve worked with there is like that. Really helpful, patient and kind. I am super lucky I was able to do this internship.

Once that was figured out I was able to quickly get my test working, write some documentation and get it all pushed up to the dev repository. Mele had a few additions and suggestions so I got those fixed up and am now waiting for more comments or another +1. That’s it. That’s probably my last PR. I feel like I accomplished a lot while I was there and learned even more!

After I got my PR submitted I worked with the new intern, Max, and showed him the Python library. I talked about what I did to get up to speed on the APIs and we talked a bit about his background and what he was hoping to get out of the internship. He’s so excited to be at Urban Airship. I told him he was going to have a wonderful time and would learn a ton.

Wayne and Jordan picked me up and Jordan had some questions about stuff he was working on in class. It was fun and funny to see how I still get confused about things I learned in the earliest days of this coding adventure. Oh well 🙂

Today I learned that I just have to let some things go. Not everything in life is going to make sense and I just have to roll with it. I can try and seek out answers but when they don’t reveal themselves it’s time to move on. I hope a year from now I have absolutely no idea what I was even talking about 🙂

 

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2005.01.06 – Must Stop Over Thinking Everything!

It’s really nice getting in to work a bit later in the morning. I’ve been getting in around 08:30 and then Wayne drops Jordan off at class. Jordan has only been going for two days but is enjoying it and is learning a lot. On our way to my office the fog was low over the river so the water was hidden. There were just the very tops of buildings and structures poking through. It was amazing!

I got a lot done on my ‘actions’ ticket but kept getting stuck on one particular thing. I must have read the documentation fifty times just trying to wrap my brain around how it works. An action payload requires the user to perform an action on their device in order for something to happen such as having a tag added or removed. There is a certain way to format the payload when sending an action to a device and I thought there were two different places where this could be done. Technically there are but the second place did not work the way I had been imagining it did. Finally I asked Mele to come look at stuff with me. Once she looked it over and refreshed her memory we were able to talk through how things really worked and I was able to plow ahead with my code. I was really over thinking the whole thing as usual. I’m close enough to done now though, that I’m thinking about the documentation portion of this task and I don’t like it any more than I have in the past. Bleh! But it’s part of getting things done. Hopefully I can get it all finished enough to push up and PR for comments.

Wayne and Jordan picked me up and as we were driving home over the Freemont Bridge the east side had just vanished in thick fog. It was so cool looking! I love how much the view changes from day to day here.

It was dinner night and Wayne was in charge of the “turning out” portion of making my sourdough bread. He did a fantastic job and it was just about ready to bake when we got home. Perfect timing! He was making a vegetable barley soup. He didn’t follow a recipe and just kind of seasoned it the way he thought would be good. It was excellent! Everyone loved it. The bread was also perfectly crunchy on the outside and sour and soft inside. Alice brought salad to complete a perfect meal. I brought out a jar of strawberry rhubarb jam I had canned over the summer to have on some bread as a dessert and wow, it was good! It was like eating summer. Yum! Tonight we had the six of us, Estelle, Roger, John, Spencer, Alice, Jason, Lauren, Sean, Taylor, and Delaney.

Today I learned how ‘actions’ really work.

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2015.01.05 – Long Lost Cousin

It’s Monday. So begins my final week at Urban Airship. There are no holidays this week so I can work a normal 08:30 – 17:00. Today is also Jordan’s first day at PDX Code Guild. It’s the same book camp I went to but wow, have they improved! It was definitely the place I needed to be at the time and I sure wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t gone there. Anyway I’m really excited for him and he’s really excited for him too 🙂

I got to work and the office was just busy, busy now that so many people are back from vacation. It was really nice to see people everywhere. I got back to work on my ‘actions’ ticket but Amanda had asked if I could help her with testing so I headed to the Hangar to help her out. By the time I got there though it was time for my 1-on-1 with Mele. We talked for a bit about how things are going and I told her how much I have enjoyed being there. She said to keep in touch when I’m done with Mozilla and I will most definitely be doing that. Hopefully they will have a place for me.

Most of the day was really working on ‘actions’ and Amanda’s testing. We got stuck on trying to import her new module and screwed around with it for quite some time before calling for some help. Adam came in and of course easily and quickly figured out the problem. There were two problems really. One was that the virtual environment wasn’t activated in the tab where she was trying to run the test. I sure never noticed but I definitely learned something there. Check that! Also, she had at one point installed the urbanairship library globally so when she tried running her script it was running that library that new nothing about her module. Learned something there as well!

Toward the end of the day I got a LinkedIn request from a name I didn’t recognize. Well I did recognize the first name, Angelina, but not the last. Hmmm…..I have only ever known ONE Angelina personally and that would be my cousin. Could it be her?? I took a chance and sent off a message. “Could this be my long lost cousin??” Sure enough it was her! Holy crap! We hadn’t spoken in like 28 years. I let her know I was at work but would call her that evening.

Wayne picked up Jordan and then me. Jordan was very excited about his day. He said he knew stuff and didn’t know stuff but learned stuff and liked it a lot so that was great! He wanted to show me some things when we got home. But first I called my cousin! She was doing really well, was married with two boys, 17 and 14. She was happy. We filled each other in for about two hours and promised to keep in touch. What a great day.

Wayne was making fajitas so I started helping him in the kitchen. He decided to cut up and cook some fresh jalapenos. This ended up being a horrible idea! We were all coughing and sneezing. Even Andrew, who was upstairs in his office, was choking and coughing while trying to talk to one of his contracts. Wayne stood over the stove, his face covered with a rag. Lily the dog was reverse sneezing. It was awful! We all recovered but as new people came in the door they immediately started choking and coughing. It was really ridiculous and funny too. Dinner was most excellent by the way.

After dinner I worked with Jordan on some things he didn’t understand. I found out how much I don’t understand too! Good times. I definitely had one of those, “I have no idea what I’m doing!” moments.

Today I learned to check for global package installations when having weird import errors. Really just make sure to do all Python dev inside of a virtual environment.

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2015.01.04 – But Home Is so Cozy

Ahhhhh another relaxing day doing not much at all. I got up and helped Wayne start a fire and then I curled up on the couch and worked through an interactive Git tutorial. I use Git regularly but always stick to the same few commands and hope I don’t mess anything up. I’m hoping to learn more than just the basics though so hopefully this is a step in the right direction.

I got some sourdough started in the afternoon. I’m going to try and let it proof for 48 hours and see what happens. Usually I leave it 15 – 18 hours but it’s not always very sour tasting. I also got my remaining starter into clean jars and got them all fed. I decided to make some chocolate chip cookies while I was in there. I found a recipe that uses coconut oil for the fat and I really like they way they turn out. I’ve used the recipe the last few times I’ve made cookies and everyone loves them.

I did a bit of reading while Andrew and Natale went to see the third Hobbit movie. I stayed home because I’m trying to stick to our budget but mostly because it’s just really nice being home by the fire.

We decided on Garlic Noodles for dinner. I made the sauce and toasted the cashews. It’s one of my favorite meals and it was yum! After dinner we watched Dr. Who. Slowly catching up.

Today I learned about this interesting art project.

 

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2015.01.03 – Easing into the New Year

Today was really quiet. Andrew spent the morning working on OpenBSD stuff at home and went to help Dave go through boxes and organize stuff at his house. I worked with Jordan and went over some Python and Git basics. He’s going to be starting a coding bootcamp on Monday and he’s ridiculously excited about it. I think he will be fine if he just sticks with it.

Natale and I spent the early evening taking all of the ornaments off of the tree and packing them away. We have a LOT. He did a fantastic job of getting them well situated in the bin. It was impressive!

We had burgers for dinner and then went over to Alice and Jason’s house to watch The Hundred-Foot Journey. I really enjoyed it! The father in the movie totally reminded me of my dad and made me miss him a lot. It was a beautiful, slightly foggy night as we walked home. It’s wonderful here.

Today I learned that Elon Musk is going to try and land a reusable rocket on a football sized platform in the ocean.

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2015.01.02 – End of Week Five at Urban Airship

I woke up feeling so much better. I was hoping that would be the case but colds usually take at least a few days to pass. I got very lucky! I didn’t rush to work this morning because I was going to be over my 40 hours by early afternoon. I got there at 08:30 and it was so quiet. I think I only saw one other person.

I got back to looking at a ticket I had started Wednesday. This one will be adding an ‘actions’ attribute to the notification payload. It’s a bit more complicated than just adding it though because the attribute can also be set in the platform specific/override payload. If the same action is set in both places it will cause the server to return a 400 error so I was thinking I should maybe figure out how to prevent a user from doing this. It seemed like it could get pretty complicated though. I’d have to think about it and ask for advice.

When people started getting in I posted my PR from Wednesday in Slack and asked anyone with some time to look it over so I could either fix it or get it merged in. Adam gave it a +1 right away so I just waited for the next one.

Today is Friday and that means team lunch. I really enjoy going to lunch with the team. I like to listen to their friendly banter. Everyone meshes really well. I hope to be a part of a team like that someday. It was decided that we would go to Kenny & Zuke’s. I hadn’t ever been there but I knew it was definitely one of the few places in Portland that wasn’t terribly vegan friendly. I’d give it a shot and eat at home if I couldn’t find anything.

We got there at just about 12:00 and the place was pretty busy. They still ended up getting the six of us seated pretty darned fast though! I looked over the menu and didn’t see a lot but they did mention grilled veggies and some potatoes so that would work. When I asked the waitress about it though she said all of the veggies were cooked in butter. Huh…how about the potato knish? Egg. How about the rye toast? Vegan. Great! How about the applesauce? Butter. Sheesh. French fries? Vegan. So rye toast and french fries. Great? I also ordered a side salad and had her add avocado. When she brought out my three sides she remembered that the soup of the day was vegan. Split pea coconut curry. That sounded great so she brought me a small cup of that as well. I now had three plates and a cup of soup. It ended up being a really great lunch! I ate everything but the toast which I took to go with some packets of jam.

When we got back to the office I had another +1 so I merged in my PR and resolved that ticket. Excellent. I was able to delete that branch and get back to my new one. Mele suggested I try and figure out the ‘actions’ conflict if it wasn’t a pain but to forget it otherwise so I had a direction. I first wanted to send some curl requests so I could see how it all worked. There weren’t any examples I could find so I had to modify another one to work for me. I worked on it until it was time for me to go home and it still was throwing some syntax error. I didn’t care if it was off the clock though. I’d be working on that when I got home or it would bug me all weekend!

Wayne picked me up and we had a nice, traffic free, drive home. The no-kill mouse trap I ordered had shown up so Wayne and I checked it out and got it all set up. We have a little visitor and it’s time for them to leave. After that was taken care of I got back on my work computer and messed with the curl I was trying to send. It kept throwing syntax errors. What the heck?! Fiiiiiinally I figured out that some of the quotes were being converted to smart quotes. Argh! Freakin’ Unicode just won’t leave me alone. Once I found and fixed them all was well and my curl sent. That was enough of that!

We decided on breakfast burritos for dinner. Wayne was awesome and made everything even though I wasn’t really sick anymore at all. It was delicious! After dinner we watched some Dr. Who by our nice, warm fire.

Today I learned that our internet famous cat shows up in the most random places. At work in the Slack #cat channel. Too funny!

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