Day two of the Ascend Project was great as well. I am not used to having to be somewhere from 09:00 to 17:00 and I really do not want to be late so I caught the early Max just in case. Lukas was the only one at the office besides some Mozilla employees. She was setting out bagels and cream cheese for our breakfast so I grabbed one and had some tea. The other students began to arrive and everyone got some breakfast before we all got our computers and got seated. We did our morning check-ins and got our daily agenda.

We did a couple more Strength Finder exercises before moving on to a tech related exercise. It seemed pretty straight forward. We were put into groups of 3-4 people and then each group was given a Mozilla open source area to research. We had a list of questions we needed to research the answers to so our group of 4 got busy researching SUMO, the Mozilla support community.

We all got busy on our research and wrote up nice posters with our answers because we figured we would have to present our findings to the class. This was true but what we didn’t know was that it was going to be a tad bit more formal. But first lunch! It was another spectacular food choice thanks to Kat, the amazing woman who keeps the office running so well.

We did have to present our findings to the class but we had to stand at the podium with microphones to present AND the Mozilla employees were invited to come watch and ask questions! Ack! We were the second team so had to go up fairly soon and NOBODY wanted to do the talking. We stumbled through it quite poorly and it was really painful to watch everyone struggle so I just did the best I could which was not that great. Oh well. I did get up there, I did talk and I didn’t die so….success!

After we did our presentations we had a short bathroom break and then it was time to see if we could make some sort of open source contribution in just 10 minutes. I tried but was unable to complete the task. About 4 people got something contributed and that was great. One person answered a support question on Twitter and the other three edited some documentation.

Kronda took over at this point and began teaching the class the basics of the terminal, command line and Git. It was fun to watch how delighted some were with these new found skills. I worked on setting up my dev environment, forking the Ascend repo on Github, perusing the files and such.

Now it was the end of the day so we all did our check-outs. Most of us were still really excited but pretty tired and ready to head home. I am really loving this program.

Today I learned a lot about various Mozilla open source products and communities like SUMO, MDN, Webmaker, QA and add-ons.