I rode in on the Max with Andrew this morning and hung out at CA for a while. I tried to get irssinotifier set up on my phone but I couldn’t finish before I had to head to class. For once I wasn’t the first one there! I made a small breakfast and had my tea while we all talked about this and that. Our computers were brought out so we grabbed them and got to work. We did a short exercise with bash command line flash cards. I’m feeling pretty comfortable on the command line but could use more practice searching for things. Do I use grep? ack? find? What other commands are there?

Lukas and Kronda were finishing up the final one-on-ones and I was first up so I headed in to the office to meet with them. They said I was on track and asked a bit about my bug and that was about it. Back to work I went. Carmen had some questions so we worked together here and there and she definitely made forward progress.

I wrote a comment on my bug regarding changing the logic in a JavaScript file that, from what I can understand, doesn’t actually need to be changed. I went ahead and added my function to the file I was modifying and made a patch file. I ran some Mozmill tests and the one in particular I was to focus on failed but I’m not sure why since my changes don’t mess with anything.

I set that mess aside while waiting to hear from my reviewer but he seemed to be afk all day. I uploaded a couple of blog posts and edited a couple, pushed them and submitted a pull request. This has become very routine and comfortable. Now that I’ve said that, Git will probably blow up.

Lunch was yummy sweet potato and kale soup with some really good bread. The weather is cooler so it was perfect. I ate lunch pretty quickly and then went back to my computer. I finally activated my Safari Books membership that Mozilla was so kind to give me. I had just been so busy I didn’t have time to activate it sooner. I had just logged in and it was time for Kronda to give a talk titled, “Stop Crying in the Bathroom and Start Your Own Business”. It was great! She made so many good points about why it’s so freeing to be your own boss. She also covered the down sides like possibly not having a steady pay check and having to be able to promote yourself.

So yesterday I was given a challenge, which I accepted, to approach the organizer of Portland Linux/Unix Group (PLUG) and ask about speaking. Since I’ve been a regular at this meeting, I know the crowd is friendly and I know the organizer so I wasn’t completely freaked out about asking. The meeting was tonight so I’d have to figure it out soon. I was thinking about this when I got an email from a friend inviting me to participate as a panelist in a moderated discussion about personal eating choices. I’ve never been asked to sit on a panel before but I have some pretty strong feelings about why I eat the way I eat so it could be fun and interesting. It also sounds terrifying!

I went back to running tests and trying to figure out why they were failing. I copied the error I was getting and saved it in a text file so I could refer to it later and then I finished getting irssinotifier working on my phone. Once that was happy I tried to set up the Mozilla IRC server on Irssi but of course that had to give me issues. That was just the way my day went.

It was getting close to the end of the day so I filled out a progress report and then we did checkouts. Maybe it’s just my bias but it seemed like lots of struggling went on today. Enough that Lukas said Ascend was getting renamed to “Drink and Cry Your Way to a Patch in Six Short Weeks”. In spite of our struggles, everyone was pretty light-hearted.

I stuck around a while after class waiting for Andrew so we could walk over to the PLUG meeting. It was beautiful out so our walk was extra nice. We stopped at East Side Deli and each got half a sandwich to have for dinner. We made our way over to Portland State University where the meeting was being held. We were early enough to eat our food before the meeting started. Jennifer Davidson was giving a talk about diversity in tech. Yenni and Candida showed up just as the meeting was getting started so three of us Ascenders were there. Jennifer’s talk was SO good! The audience was quite engaged and heavily participated in many discussions and had a lot of questions and comments. It was one of the best PLUG meetings I have been to and Jennifer gave a shout out to Ascend! After the meeting I asked the organizer about whether I could speak and he said, “Sure! How’s November 6th for you?” Uh………

Andrew made our way home and the night was just as beautiful as the early evening. We had a really nice walk and ride home and still had time for an episode of Dr. Who with Wayne.

Today I learned about virtualenv-burrito. Ridiculously handy for setting up virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper all at once.