2014.09.29 – Guido Needs a New Picture

I woke up sort of panicked thinking I had overslept. At least I was wide awake. I was ready to get my day started and see if my patch and comment were acceptable so I was up, dressed and out the door. It was overcast and cool which was a really nice change. I grabbed some sweet cherry tomatoes and a few sprigs of purple basil out of the garden to eat on my way to the Max.

My neighbor Jessika barely made it to the train. I hadn’t seen her in several days so it was nice to start the week off by catching up with her on our short trip over the river. Each morning after I get off the Max I walk past Ground Kontrol arcade. I love how they have speakers outside that broadcast the sounds of a classic arcade. On the next block there is usually an older gentleman sitting outside. I say good morning to him each day and at first he would just ignore me but now he looks at me and says good morning. He hasn’t been there the last few times I have walked by though.

Our morning started out with a Vidyo meeting with Marina Zhurakhinskaya. She was talking to us about the Outreach Program for Women which is a bit of a misnomer this year because they are accepting applications from any of us Ascenders and also from any marginalized populations regardless of gender. This is a program I am very interested in applying for so I was really happy she came to talk to us. The class asked her some great questions so I pretty much found out all of the things I had been wondering about. The difficult part is deciding what project(s) to apply for. There are several interesting participating organizations and companies. Mozilla will be a participant and getting accepted with them would be a dream come true but I think it’s pretty competitive so that is probably not likely.

After our meeting with Marina we did our check-ins. Lots of people were dragging for various reasons but everyone was pleased to be having another catch up day. I showed Lukas my patch and comment and she felt it was ok to submit so I got that done and then helped my table neighbors with whatever they needed. Mostly I think they just needed to “talk to the bear“. I know for sure it helps me. The All Hands meeting was next and I was particularly interested to hear Bill Mills speak about Mozilla Open Source Science Projects. They put out a CFP for research projects to participate in a pilot study that will bring together the scientific and developer communities.

Lunch was SO good! Again 🙂  Today we had food from Kalé. It was also someone’s birthday so Katt ordered cake and vegan cinnamon rolls for everyone. I ate too much food! Again 🙂

After lunch we got back to our computers while Lukas and Kronda met one-on-one with students about what they needed to work on to meet the milestones set out for us. Not everyone got to meet today so that will continue tomorrow. I looked over the bug tracker trying to help some classmates find bugs to work on and also read more information on the OPW participants so that I can narrow things down. While I was reading I saw a familiar name pop up in our IRC channel. Sumana! It is indeed a small tech world it seems. Andrew and I had met Sumana at Pycon this year. Actually we met her at the airport while waiting to catch our plane back home. It’s kind of a funny story so I should write it down….

We were walking to our gate when we saw someone wave at us and say, “Hi! Did you go to Pycon?” We said that we had and she said she was gathering up Pycon attendees to sit together while we waited for our flights. How nice! So we made our introductions and Sumana told me where she worked and what she did there. I explained that I was a first time attendee and totally new to the community and that I didn’t really know anyone at all. Andrew explained that he was a Perl developer and that got a laugh just as it had each time he mentioned that during the conference. Anyway, we were having a great conversation with Sumana when someone caught her eye. I looked where she was looking and she said, “Is that Guido van Rossum?” I had only recently learned who he even was and had only seen him from tens of yards away so I had no clue. He was walking past us so Sumana got his attention and asked if he had attended Pycon. He got this really weird look on his face and then said, very quietly, “Yes”. She said, “Oh! Well we are gathering up Pycon people to sit together while we wait for our planes.” He sounded very unsure and asked, “Is it ok…..if I sit…..somewhere else?” Ha! Off he went to sit by himself. I quickly did an image search for Guido and showed her the picture. They looked nothing alike at all. Sumana said, “Oh, well I guess he just has a ‘Dutch guy’ look about him.”

Cut to us on our plane home. We were seated in a row of three, Andrew at the window and me in the center. In front of us was a row of two seats with no seat in front of Andrew. We were flying along for a while when Andrew leaned over and said, “That was Guido in the airport.” I asked how he knew and he said, “Because he’s sitting in front of you working on his laptop, sending email, and I can see his name.” He totally shoulder surfed!

Ok, back to my day! I was pretty happy to see Sumana in IRC because I had mentioned her to Carmen. Carmen is interested in an OPW project with Wikimedia so I encouraged her to let Sumana know. She did and I believe she now has some valuable resources as well as a person to contact at Wikimedia for more information. Carmen and Wikimedia seem like the perfect fit. I’m excited for her!

I spent the rest of my day bouncing around the interwebs kind of aimlessly trying to wrap my head around a concrete path to a decent OPW application while also helping anyone that needed it. Our day came to an end with our check-outs. It was sort of a misty rain outside so I had a really nice walk down to the Max. Jessica was getting on the same train so we got to have a nice conversation on the way home.

When I got home I went right to my computer so I could finally listen to Kronda’s interview on Less Than or Equal. It was so good! Wayne listened with me and loved it as well.

Jason and Alice are leaving for Arizona tomorrow so we went out to dinner with them since we won’t see them until this weekend. We went to the Bye and Bye. I love that place but wasn’t feeling very hungry (shocking I know!) so I just got a grilled cheese and only ate a little bit. It was nice to hang out with them though. We always laugh a lot.

Today I learned about bit rot when referring to a patch that has been submitted but not applied. If the patch sits too long without someone reviewing and applying it then the code it was to modify will most likely have changed which will require a partial or full rewrite of the patch and can even render the patch unusable. There is also a more standard use of the term bit rot but its existence is still debated.