First thing this morning I saw a message from my code reviewer. He mentioned there would be an Automation meeting just about the time I get to class and sent me the link to join. After my many frustrations yesterday I was very ready to get back to Mozilla to see if I might have better luck with the CI configuration on a newer computer and I definitely wanted to join the meeting.

I rode up the elevator with Katt and she set me up for the meeting right away. She’s really great! I was kind of nervous to join in because it was a Vidyo meeting but I have to get past these sorts of stresses. Meeting stuff was happening, words were being said. They were talking about projects I didn’t know about but I didn’t feel completely lost or anything. I read over the wiki while they were talking and saw that they were announcing Virginia and me as new contributors! I was hoping Virginia would get to the office in time to join the meeting so we could both say hello but she didn’t.

The meeting was actually pretty interesting. There was some back and forth about landing patches and whether they had to be submitted for review if they were pretty small. The lead guy said yes, all patches that touch a certain part of the code have to be reviewed by him. A patch from Friday was not given to him to review and the person who landed it said he didn’t want to keep the contributor (one of our Ascenders! Yay!) waiting. The lead guy said he would have landed it today but the other guy said some things take up to six months and he wasn’t happy about that. There was a bit of tension there but it was all very polite in the end.

I headed to the classroom, we all checked in and I got right to work on Travis. I had to install the Ruby virtual environment, rbenv, and several other things. It didn’t take me too long though and I was running a rake test! Sure enough, it spat out the same amount of errors as the Github run so something is definitely up with my computer at home. I suspected Nokogiri, libxml2, and libxslt but I’d have to figure that out later.

K needed just a bit of help today so I got her squared away and then completely immersed myself in setting up CI. I started the day with 197 errors and just kept chipping away at them and chipping away. I also sent my code reviewer a comment on my bug and he got back to me with more confusing statements. I was getting fairly frustrated about that but I was too busy doing other stuff. The All Hands meeting started and I moved away from the desk so I could continue working while the meeting was taking place. They mentioned Ascend and that two of our cohort had landed patches! It’s nice to see that people are excited about what Lukas is doing. Before I knew it, it was lunchtime. We had to leave early because the employee only meeting was taking place directly after All Hands.

Amanda and I went to the food carts and got Ethiopian. I am pretty sure I could eat that ever day. We wandered over to a nearby park to sit in the warm sun and eat. As we were eating and talking, several other classmates came and sat with us and we talked about all sorts of stuff. I was really wanting to get back so I could keep working so I headed back with Amanda. Unfortunately the meeting was still going on so we had to stand in the hallway for quite some time. Finally we could go back in! I sat back down and worked and worked and then I took a look at my bug comments and got frustrated again. I decided to ask a Mozilla employee there in the office if he would look stuff over and see if I was mistaken in my thinking. He looked over the code and the comments and said he also felt that my code reviewer was mistaken. I’m so new though that I really don’t know. I keep feeling like it’s just something I am missing or don’t understand but it’s not terribly complicated JavaScript so it was kind of vindicating to hear that he agreed. I sent off another comment to the reviewer and he replied while we were still looking over the code. He suggested that a previous bug be reverted so that my new function could be implemented but that made no sense. The change to the previous bug was good and should stand. I wrote back and said that the previous bug fix was clearly the proper thing to do, reverting it was not what should happen and that I would be happy to just work on another bug if he felt my function was really not needed any longer. I submitted my comment and buried myself back in the CI task.

The day just flew by! I barely spoke to anyone and probably owe many apologies for that but I was in a zone. I couldn’t believe it was time to check out already! Everyone went around and talked about their struggles. It seems a lot of us had them today. Lukas said that it feels frustrating but it’s actually progress. She’s been where we are many, many times so I believe her. It helped to hear it too so maybe that’s why I believe her 🙂 Anyway, I was rushing to run another rake test before I had to turn in the computer. I managed to get rid of a few more errors so that was good. I just couldn’t figure out why I was getting internal path errors though. Ugh, I had been working on it for days. I asked Lukas if she would take a look and in about 1.3 seconds she said it wasn’t working because the internal file paths were in fact incorrect. Huh? She said that internally it had to have _posts in the path. Holy shit! Days of working on this and I that never occurred to me! I felt really dumb but she didn’t make me feel dumb at all so I immediately let that negative feeling go. And besides, I had made a ton of progress on the other errors so it wasn’t like I was wasting my time. I had them down to 54 by the time I closed the laptop.

I was getting ready to leave and Jim, the helpful employee asked if anything came of my latest bug comment. It had and it was just as confusing and frustrating so I asked if he would look at the reply. It was mostly just that I wanted company for my misery and he was nice enough to oblige. He took a look and seemed frustrated as well. He said he really had to get going but wanted the bug number so he could look the whole thing over tomorrow and see if there was something we were both missing. What a nice guy!

I went downstairs and saw that Wayne had messaged asking if I was nearly home. I called him and he offered to come pick me up so I took the opportunity to sit on a bench outside and read a bit. The evening was so incredibly beautiful! I was immersed in my book when I noticed someone sit down just a bit too close to me than a stranger should. I looked over and it was Katt. She had her book of poems and read some to me while I waited for my ride. Wayne, Roberto and Frankie showed up and we offered Katt a ride home. She lives up on a hill in a great place with an awesome view of Mt. Hood!

We headed home, Wayne took a wrong turn and we ended up on a small adventure! But we found a Freddy’s so we could stop and get the few things we needed for dinner. We got home, I headed directly upstairs to pay some bills and then tried to figure out what is wrong with my old computer so I could run tests from home. Naturally I was in such a rush to get through a test run at Mozilla that I completely forgot to push my changes up to Github! Grrrr! Nonetheless, I shaved a LOT of yaks until dinner was ready. Wayne made some boxed vegan mac n’ cheese and mixed vegetables to go with some of my homemade sourdough bread. Mmmmm a craptasticly (that should be a word) wonderful comfort food dinner. I thought I’d hate the vegan mac n’ cheese but it was actually really good which is probably a horrible thing because I’ll definitely buy it again.

After dinner I showed Andrew the bug I was working on and tried to talk through the code while he corrected or clarified anything I was not completely clear on. I think I have a pretty good handle on things but it will be interesting to see if Jim uncovers something I have been missing. I’m new so I keep leaning toward that being the problem.

Today I learned that it’s so easy to overlook the most simple things. _posts…of course!