Wayne drove me to Urban Airship this morning. I’ve been getting there at about 08:30 and stay until about 17:30 but I found out today that I can’t go over 40 hours per week so may have to leave early at the end of the week. When I got in I asked Jhenna, another CE, why Android Studio was unable to see the SDK when I launched it from the finder but could see it when launched from the command line but she wasn’t really sure. Everyone decided I should just launch it from the command line. Ok.
I moved to the Hangar again since the don’t have desks for us yet and soon Amanda joined. I don’t even know what stuff we were struggling with exactly but I had her start Android Studio from the command line and it still didn’t work so we added the export line to her .bashrc. That helped and it seemed to work ok. There was a meeting in the Hangar so lots of employees came in. They were going over the new health benefits so we half listened while working. We decided to move to a small room in the CE area and that was a lot better.
Mele wanted us to get our Android apps working and receiving push notifications but Amanda wanted to look over the bugs we were going to be working on so we did that until it was time for lunch. Urban Airship provides lunch on Wednesdays so I had salad, veggies and some sort of spicy tofu. It was ok. Very nice of them to feed us though!
After lunch I just went back to getting my sample Android app running and helped Amanda here and there as needed. I was getting some weird error about a missing module and wasn’t finding a lot of help for it. Mele saw that I was getting frustrated so she came in and helped me. It was nice to see that she was almost as confused as me but after much clicking around she had it running and then showed me how to push a message. Cool!!
After all that yak shaving it really amounted to downloading the UA Sample Android app, importing it into Android Studio, adding an appkey, appsecret and the project API number to a config file. After that build the app then run it. Hopefully there aren’t any errors. If there are, get Mele to come click around on things so quickly you have no idea what just happened (just like at home with Andrew) and then stuff works. Once the app is loaded on the device go to the UA apps dashboard, create your push notification (all sorts of configuration options here) and then send! Look super confused when your console shows the message was sent but nothing happens on your app and then realize you need to actually opt in to push notifications in order to get them. Opt in and then viola! “Hi Lisa” pops up on the device. It probably doesn’t sound as interesting as it actually is.
Next it was time to get Amanda to that point. I figured it would be good for me to help her so I could remember what we just did. We got all the way to the module error and then we just couldn’t figure it out. We screwed around with that until it was time to go. Amanda even deleted her app and started all over with no luck. Frustrating! We’ll get it tomorrow though.
I was meeting Peter and Richard from Air Mozilla for dinner so we could talk about my upcoming internship with them. We were meeting at Andina which was just around the corner from UA. I hadn’t ever been there before but wow it was fancy. We had delicious food while we talked about all sorts of things. I told them my back story and they told me theirs. We talked about the future of Air Mozilla and what I would be working on. I’m excited! We discussed how to make new contributors feel less intimidated and more welcome. I think Mozilla is well ahead of the game in this area but I’m probably biased. I had a great time and they were wonderful company. Definitely two people I would hang out with just because.
Wayne picked me up afterward and Roberto and Frankie were over to have dinner. They were approved for an apartment they looked at yesterday so were very excited about that. Wayne was making burgers and tots and Lauren, Sean and their friend Jorge joined as well. I caught up on my Twitter feed while they ate, talked and laughed. I love how happy and full our house is.
Today I learned that I shouldn’t fork a private repository. Who knew?! Apparently not me.