Month: March 2015

2015.03.31 – Shaving of the Yaks

I really have to get busy and get this presentation written. I’m not looking forward to speaking in public so I keep dragging my feet. I definitely have a mental overview of what I want to say but I need some slides so I tried to fire up Keynote. Yeah, no. The app just opens another finder window with keynote greyed out. Super handy! I poked around to see if anyone else had the same issue but didn’t have any luck there. Apple was so unhelpful. I was informed that there was a great new update to Keynote and if I would simply upgrade to Yosemite I could have it. No thanks. I am not a fan of how Yosemite looks so I’ll hold out as long as possible before I have to upgrade.

I searched around for some free slideshow apps but didn’t really find anything I liked. I wasted a bunch of time yak shaving this issue and was just frustrated so moved on to fixing up some small nits with my feature. I was working out in the common area and there were lots of conversations going on so I was easily distracted. The room I work in was busy though so I just did the best I could and before I realized it the day had come to an end.

It was dinner night but also the day before Spencer’s birthday so Jordan and I ran out to Voodoo Donut and got a bunch of birthday donuts. Wayne made pasta with almond pumpkin sauce, salad and bread. Alice is gone for the week at a training seminar so it was very odd without her! Miri, Dale, baby Michael, Spencer, John, Jason, Taylor, Delaney, and Glenn joined the six of us though.

Today I learned about this really beautiful dance with light.

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2015.03.30 – Working at Home

I worked from home today because I had a bunch of phone calls to make and some errands to run that could no longer be put off. I handle all of the family administrative type stuff and with me working each day I haven’t figured out how to fit everything in. The errands took me to a couple of county offices so by the time I finished everything up it was well past lunchtime.

I came home, ate and got right back at starred events. I needed to figure out why the stars weren’t being recovered from the server when a user signs out and signs back in. I spent some time following the flow and there it was plain as day. The variable, serverStars, which sounds kind of important was getting the stars but then nothing ever happened with them. They weren’t getting passed back to the browser. That was a pretty easy fix once I found it so I pushed the changes and opened a PR. When Peter looked at the fix we had a bit of a talk about the change and then it got merged in. Great!

That simple CSS issue re: star placement on an event is not as easy as I had initially thought though. I get it looking great for me but Peter has different fake content and at times it doesn’t sit in a very good place. Grrr!

Today I learned how Wayne plans to lay out the new bathroom. I wish we could fit a shower in there as well. It’s roomy but not that roomy.

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2015.03.29 – Bye Bye Tree

Wayne, Andrew and I met our friends Roberto and Frankie for breakfast at the A.N.D Cafe. I’ve eaten there a few times and it’s really good. I was worried about having to wait a long time though because it’s Sunday, we are a group of five which is just one person too many to make it easy to seat us, and Portlanders LOVE Sunday breakfast/brunch. Luckily we got there at a great time and didn’t have to wait long at all. Our food was amazing as always and kept me full until dinner. Yikes, I don’t even want to think about how many calories I must have consumed.

After breakfast Alice and I went to two different Goodwill stores. We were gone pretty much all afternoon. When I got home I heard some noise in the back yard. I looked out the window and was quite surprised to see that our neighbor had pretty much cut down the entire huge tree that was falling over and pushing down our fence! I went out and helped him push the last giant branch over from our yard to his. It looks so weird with it gone but it was definitely a danger.

Before dinner I had a really long conversation with Natale about the experience of being a teenager, puberty, mood-swings, and so on. I definitely remember being 15-16 and it wasn’t that great so I really feel for him.

Today I learned that people are still looking at our cat video!

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2015.03.28 – OMSI

Jayde, Estelle and spent the morning at OMSI where we met Dave, Alena and the kids. The museum theme right now is “Mazes” so Tiberias and I had all sorts of fun. We got lost for a while in the biggest one but each dead end had a fun musical instrument to play. We had a quick, delicious lunch together but I had to rush home in time to go with Andrew to his Dr appointment.

The appointment went well and his new doctor seems great. He suggested some things Andrew could try to stave off the headaches he sometimes gets and will do some routine blood work in about two weeks.

I spent the rest of my day reading and then watching some Dr. Who with Wayne and Andrew.

Today I learned how to complete one of those highly frustrating rope/disk/hole brain teaser puzzle things at the museum! I was determined.

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2015.03.27 – Shirts!

I had a late start this morning and ended up getting to Mozilla just before lunch. I had more bugs to work on, one that was particularly annoying and one pretty simple CSS fix. The annoying one is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1148566

Yeah it’s really not great to sign out and not get your stars back from the server! That’s kinda one of the major features of this project. I know for sure it was working properly though so I must have changed something to break it. There has been flurry of activity in these final days so that wouldn’t surprise me.

It’s an entirely different workflow doing quick bug fixes because now I have to remember to switch back to the master branch, rebase and make a new branch. I have gotten kind of lazy working only on the same feature branch for the last 3 months. This has caused me to make some silly mistakes like pushing to the wrong branch. Doh! But all of these mistakes give me opportunity to practice my Git skills. So far I’ve figured everything out and made it all ok. I think Git and I get along pretty well most of the time.

At some point one of the Mozillian’s came into the room where I was working and she had a Mozilla bag of some sort. I assumed someone left it in the common area and she was checking to see if it was mine. I was wrong. She went out of her way to get me some Mozilla and Firefox shirts and a sweet Firefox hoodie! I couldn’t believe it. I thanked her and gave her a big hug.

The reason she even did this is because I was telling a funny story over lunch the other day. Last week at the Q&A I was talking with the chief of staff afterward about being an OPW intern and how there was really no path for us to employment with Mozilla and that there is a pretty clear path for the university interns. He didn’t really seem too interested in talking about it and quickly changed the subject. He said, “Oh! I just have to say that the TSA just loves Firefox. I don’t know why but they do! The next time you fly make sure to wear a Firefox shirt.” I said, “I don’t have any.” and he said, “Well, if you ever get one.” Ouch! Everyone thought this was pretty funny and kinda not funny too. I said something along the lines of, “If I can’t get a job here I, at the very least, want a shirt!” Well, she made it happen. So sweet!

At the end of the day Dietrich was setting up the Oculus Rift. I totally wanted to check it out so I packed up my stuff and waited my turn. It was amazing! I was in a helicopter, on a boat, a cruise ship, on a beach, skiing, para-skiing I guess. Anyway, it was really fun to try.

Today I learned that my friend Christy and her husband are buying a house in Prescott Arizona.

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2015.03.26 – Fixing Bugs

Now that this project is in master it can be tested for bugs and wow are there some bugs. I guess this is normal? Some of them are pretty tiny and easy to fix so maybe this is just how things go. Anyway, Peter is doing lots of testing and then filing them as he finds them. So far I’m able to fix them pretty quickly either because he tells me why it’s broken or it’s instantly obvious.

I didn’t get a full day of work in though because I had to take Jordan to the eye doctor. He needs glasses! It was also a shame to spend so much time inside because it was 75 degrees out and beautiful. Alice was out in the gardens when we got home. She had taken half the day off when she checked the weather report. We all couldn’t help but just sit outside with her and enjoy the rest of the day. So many people walked by. Andrew was still at work and missing the awesome weather. He made it home just in time for us to leave for BSD Pizza Night. We were meeting at Mississippi Pizza, one of our favorites. We had a new attendee tonight, Mark. He was really nice and funny. He’s a greybeard and has worked for Apple, Atari and Intel. I loved hearing him and another greybeard talk about old-timey computer stuff and silly things they did when they were younger.

Today I learned that ooooold hard drives could be made to ‘walk’ across a room.

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2015.03.25 – Merged Into Master

Today I had an interview at Urban Airship. I was meeting with Peter in the Technical Support department. He was SO nice! We had a really great talk and the position sounds interesting. He said he’d like me to come back and meet the rest of the team next week so we’ll see.

I walked down to Mozilla and decided to work in the common area. i had a comment from Peter saying he liked what I had changed, that he had made a few other changes and once I had his stuff merged in, everything rebased and Travis passing that I would probably be ready to have my stuff merged into master. Wha?? Wow! I got busy and got everything rebased. Peter had made a few changes and had taken care of anonymous user events sorting in the correct order (most recently added at the top). He used a Python lambda function which was super cool! I wouldn’t have figured it out on my own but now I know 🙂

When I rebased I had a merge conflict so I resolved that and got my stuff pushed up. I watched Travis and it was happy! I let Peter know so he merged my feature. Woo hoo! I was so happy! And then I noticed this automated message in #airmozilla-dev “< airmodevpush> something terrible happened. check the logs (master web-ops_cli_script)” Huh. Is it just me or does that sound like something terrible happened? I asked Peter what was going on and sure enough I made a mistake when I fixed the merge conflict. He had added another path for schema migrations and I didn’t enclose it properly. It kinda broke stuff! He said it was no big deal and did a quick fix. I was kind of bummed I missed that though.

Michael and Keeler were out in the commons so I told them my stuff got merged into master but that it broke stuff. Each of them then proceeded to tell me the things they have broken with their merges. Michael took out all of Mozilla’s email for about an hour once and Keeler had a version of Firefox release with a security issue and there was no way the QA person could have caught it upon testing. Ok, in retrospect maybe my mistake wasn’t that awful. Thanks guys!

Everything was rainbows and butterflies. Peter asked me to meet him and Richard in a Vidyo chat. They were very happy and so was I. And then Peter said he wanted me to do a brown bag presentation about this project. Ugh! I told him I was sick that day but he just laughed. I guess I have to do it. He said it will be a good way to show off the new feature, a thing for me to show potential employers and a way to help new interns who may feel unsure of their abilities. Guess I better get busy!

Today I learned about Lambda functions in Python.

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2015.03.24 – Lots to Do and Getting Some Work Done Too

I had a ton of stuff to do today so I elected to work from home. I had an appointment at the doctor, had to file a deed so our house could be put in our trust (we did the paperwork last May!), had to get a copy of Jayde’s birth certificate for our trip to Canada this summer, and had to stop by a hardware store.

By the time we made it back home it was lunch time and I hadn’t eaten so I grabbed a quick meal and got right back to work. I had a few questions for Peter so we hopped on a Vidyo chat and he clarified what he was asking for. He asked me to move some more stuff out of the return part of the JavaScript module so it wasn’t exposed, move another function inside of it, change some stuff in a template so it would all still work and get it pushed up within a half hour so he could look it over before he left for the day. First I had to stash my unfinished work and rebase from master. I got everything done and went to make some tea. Peter had to leave in the mean time but he was happy with the changes I made and just had a couple of small suggestions. Whew!

It was dinner night and Wayne was making tacos. It was the six of us, Miri, Dale, baby Michael, Spencer, John, Glenn, Alice, Jason, Taylor and Delaney.

Today I learned that scientist are going to up the power of the Large Hadron Collider to again try and detect tiny black holes.

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2015.03.23 – I’m Almost Done With This Feature…..Or Not.

I got a lot done over the weekend so pushed everything up for review. It felt like I was really close to being done so I was pretty happy. Then I got a huge list of things to refactor, change, improve, delete…..My first thought was, “Maybe I just suck at this. Maybe I’ve wasted my and everyone’s time trying to do something I don’t have an aptitude for. Maybe my mentors are too nice to just tell me this and can’t wait for me to be done already so they can get a decent intern.” So much for being close to done!

And then I remembered that I’m really good at trash talking myself at the drop of a hat. I told myself to knock that crap off then I went to the kitchen and grabbed a snack and a drink. Mozilla has the best snacks and drinks if I haven’t mentioned that before. I went back and read through the comments and realized that although there were several, they were all just fix-up kind of stuff and optimizations that, as a much more experienced developer, my mentor can see. It’s a code review for a reason. There was a ton of valuable help in there. I got my head back in the game and happily worked through the changes requested.

Today I learned that I really am close to getting this feature implemented.

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2015.03.22 – Church of Waffles!

The plan was for the three of us to go to Jess and Kronda’s house for waffles. Wayne woke up with a cold though so it would just be Andrew and I. I got my sourdough batter mixed up and gathered up the other things we needed. We were a little bit late so people were already well into waffle making/eating. I got ours going, made a plate and began introducing myself to people I didn’t. Wow, there were so many really nice new people to meet and talk to! I particularly liked Jonathan and Dean, and Rachel.

I could have stayed all day just talking with people but I still had work to do so I packed up our stuff and back home we went. Alice was out in the gardens when we pulled up and invited me to go with her to Goodwill. Jayde had been asking to go back so it seemed like a great idea. It was! We found her some great shirts and shorts.

Now it was really time to get back to work. I was having trouble getting my anonymous user JavaScript to sync up properly. The anonymous user stuff has been the most difficult which was another surprising thing to learn. I managed to make a ton of progress though and got it all pushed up for another review. Hopefully it goes ok!

Today I learned that I need to make this.

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