After our morning check-in we went over some housekeeping type things such as setting our default Firefox to re-open our last tabs, how Github handles new pull requests when a person already has one open and that losing work sometimes is pretty much inevitable.
Kronda talked about culture fit and hiring practices and showed us an example of a blog post by a woman here at a local tech incubator that was really frustrating to read. I really appreciated her bringing this up so we can all be aware of it when researching job opportunities.
We took a short break and then had some guest speakers. Gregg Lind and the others spoke about how they came to be at Mozilla and gave us some great tips on the many ways we can contribute to Mozilla. They also made it clear that we don’t have to know all of the terminology in order to file bug reports. It is perfectly fine to word things with the terminology we are familiar with.
After their wonderful talk we paired up to work with those who hadn’t filed a bug report yet. Lukas gave us some tips on searching for bugs. There are bugs tagged steps-wanted that seem like a great place to find bugs to reproduce and then document. My partner found a great bug and it turned out hers was related to mine so that was interesting.
We all got to head outside again for lunch. Today I skipped the bathroom and walked to the food trucks with everyone else. I headed for The Dump Truck and got some amazing potato curry dumplings with a vegan coconut yogurt sauce. Yum!
After lunch everyone set up jekyll (a web server) on their local machine so they can see their blog posts locally before they push them up to Github. It’s nice to be able to do this so we can check our formatting before we submit a pull request. I had done this yesterday so I started my blog.
Kronda discussed how we can contribute to the Ascend pages. We are able to file bug reports and patches and submit suggestions regarding how we think the web page might look better. I am the worst at any kind of design stuff so I don’t think I will be jumping on that one. Lukas talked about Git blame and diff and how our commit messages are kept in our history and are visible to all. That means it’s always a great idea to be careful about what we say and to really try and be clear in what we write. We then had a scavenger hunt to find the date Lukas was added to the Mozilla contributor’s page. Finding the answer is an exercise for the reader.
At the end of the day we all just worked on any unfinished tasks. I was caught up so I took the time to fix my background color issue in Vim. I poked around and looked through my vimrc, commented things out and added other stuff based on suggestions I searched for but ultimately I had to ask Andrew and of course he had no trouble finding the answer and now it looks SO much better! I can actually read the text.
Check-outs went pretty quickly. I think we were all very ready to go home. I grabbed a couple of carrots from the fridge to eat on my walk to the Max. It apparently had lightly sprinkled so we were finally getting some weather! As I was walking, an elderly English couple with a young girl stopped me and asked if I knew where Everett was and that they were looking for “an ice cream shop. Ben and Jerry’s it’s called.” I started to reply but the woman spoke up and said to the man that I might not know where it was since I was eating a carrot. Uh…..ok. I gave them directions and then told them I hoped they could find some carrot ice cream when they got there.
As I was riding the Max home, Alena messaged to see if we wanted to meet for dinner because she was picking up her (and Andrew’s) mom from the airport. I said it sounded great so we all ended up at a fairly decent Ethiopian place on Broadway. I don’t know how much solid food baby Anya has had but she sure loved all of the injera I was feeding her.
Today I learned how to reproduce and document a bug.