Fresh Code

I spent the day avoiding the news and people. Ok maybe not people. I sat out in the common area and talked to people here and there but everyone was pretty much head down busy. I’m trying to flesh out my talk since it’s coming up on Tuesday. Also trying to fix little bugs as they come up. It’s interesting how much gets missed even with tests and live testing. There are just so many possible scenarios. Peter is pretty quick to find stuff too.

I’m working on a test to check that pagination works. I find writing tests and testing to be very interesting but a lot of people really dislike and/or don’t understand the need for them. I see similar reactions from people who are asked to use a virtual environment for a coding project. I might write up my thoughts on these tools and why I think they are not just a great idea but very necessary.

Today I learned that my project is just about ready to move to the development server!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have lots to do to get this feature ready by Wednesday even though I’ve been working on it seemingly forever! When Peter and Richard first talked to me about what I would be doing I was so confused about why this feature would be the project for my entire internship. I mean come on, it’s a star you click on and off. Yeah, silly me! I had NO idea how much was involved in making this all work. Tons of parts and pieces and lots of things to consider. What I end up releasing will just be a start too. I am sure I and others will want to add to it and improve it quite a bit.

Needless to say, I worked all day on stuff. I hit some walls, got frustrated, figured some things out, asked for help with other things and got a decent amount done. I rewarded myself with some Dr. Who.

Today I learned that these are a thing. A thing I must try!

Today I was back at the office but Katt was using the conference room. It seems there are some MDN people in town and also a new IT person is being trained so the office has a lot more people. I got set up out in the common area and put on my headphones. I had a lot of changes to make after reading through the comments on my PR. I worked through everything one by one and tested as I went. Everything was working great until I had to add some new JavaScript. I’m pretty sure it hates me because I could NOT get it working. I tried this and that and searched the net and looked through books on Safari. I was basically just getting frustrated again so I deleted my code and left that issue open. The rest of the fixes went really well though so all in all it was a good day. The weather was amazing again so that made everything better.

Today I learned about these 8 regular expressions I should know. I think I’d like to know a lot more but this is a good start.

The car had to go in for routine maintenance today and I was making homemade sourdough bread so it seemed like a good day to work from home. I had pushed up my latest changes and let Peter know so he could look them over. Once that was done we headed to the dealership. While we were out I needed to run by the bank and we needed to get groceries for Dinner Night. We were having lasagne and it’s a bit time consuming to prepare and assemble even without pre-boiling the noodles.

By the time we got back home I had to get my bread rising and by the time I got that done it was time to go get the car. By the time I got back home with the car it was time to start dinner. I got very little coding done today but I did get a nice list of comments from Peter so I would have a lot to work on tomorrow.

Wayne and I got the lasagne and bread in the oven and Alice came over shortly after that to make the salad. Lisa from Urban Airship arrived so Wayne took her on a tour of our house while Alice and I made a peach cobbler. Dinner wasn’t done too terribly late! Tonight we had the six of us, Lisa, Alice, Jason, Spencer, John, Miri, Dale, and Baby Michael.

Today I learned homemade bisquick doesn’t taste as good as the real thing even though it’s not as full of crap.

Jordan came to Mozilla with me today and sat in on the Monday meeting. Much of it was probably boring for him but they did talk a bit about their WebVR. They are doing some pretty cool stuff.

I pushed some stuff up for Peter to look at but he was super busy today. I worked on tests instead. I have two that are failing but they seemingly have nothing to do with what I have changed/added. I rebased my branch from master to see if that would help. No luck. I forced a new database. No luck. I switched to the master branch and rebased and of course all tests pass. Well, I guess it’s something I added/changed but I really can’t see how. I put in some print statements but I still don’t see where things are going sideways.

On a positive note I was able to help a new contributor and get them pointed in the right direction. Jordan and I cut out early and wandered down to the Max. It was SO beautiful out. I was definitely overdressed.

I’ve been job hunting which is NO fun at all. I am really hoping to be able to go back to Urban Airship if they will have me. I loved the environment and the people. I learned a ton and the work was great. I will have to apply everywhere though because it’s crunch time and there are never any guarantees. I want to work somewhere I look forward to going each day and I really loved going to UA. Ah well, something will work out.

Wayne made us yummy perogies, vegan kielbasa and cabbage for dinner.

Today I learned about this cool thing that works on Android or Chrome devices. Don’t forget to move around!

I got to Mozilla a bit later than usual and was barely getting going when Katt said some maintenance people needed to work in the room I was using. No problem! I moved myself out to the common area to one of the comfy couches and got back to work. Or so I tried. It was Friday and everyone else seemed to be in “wind down for the weekend” mode so there was lots going on in the common area. I put in my headphones but still got drawn into conversations. I love it though because it has taken me a bit to become a part of the office since I’m kind of separated from everyone else for the most part. I was pretty frustrated with my feature anyway.

Earlier in the day Jim had mentioned some cool game that teaches people about Assembly. It sounded really interesting to me as I had never learned anything like that before. After lunch I looked up the game and was poking through the tutorial for it when Jim came back from a trip to Powell’s. I told him I was checking it out and he immediately sat down with me and spent the next 2 hours (or more since we were pretty involved in it) helping me work through and teaching me additional things I didn’t know. He taught me about representing negative numbers as a really large number, hexadecimal math, two’s and ten’s compliment, memory addresses, bits, flags, and tons more that I am sure I am forgetting. My brain was so happily full of information! It was an extra excellent day for sure.

Today I learned SO much!