My first days at the Ascend Project have been great and today was no exception. I arrived early as usual and grabbed an almond yogurt and some carrots for breakfast. Once everyone was there and had eaten we got right to check-ins. It seems everyone is doing well and we were all excited to learn more.
Lukas and Kronda were going over the basics of Git so I listened while I worked on continuing to set up my environment. I needed brew, pip, virtualenv, virtualenvwrapper, my bash_profile and my vimrc. I worked on getting that all going and helped Carmen who was sitting next to me as needed. She is wonderful. A very gentle soul. Her meekness and insecurity tends to overshadow her sharp wit but I constantly see her catching on to all the information being thrust upon her even when she says she is confused. I love her delight at learning a new concept. It’s a great thing to witness.
We broke for lunch and it was blah today. Sandwiches were ordered and I have no idea where they got them but whoever made them thinks that vegans love a dry sandwich with some random veggies on it. Not so much. That sounds like complaining but I really don’t mean to. I have been completely spoiled in this program and I don’t know how I can ever thank anyone properly for this opportunity. I hope to just pay it forward.
Early in the day I made my first pull request on the mozilla/ascend repo but I screwed it up by not looking carefully before I committed and ended up with a note from Lukas asking me to fix the issue before it could be merged. I fixed it and resubmitted but there was still some weirdness. I dunno. It got merged and I will be more careful! I hope.
We were split up into groups of 2 to 3 and were given some specific git commands to research. We got ‘remote’. Our group of three researched it and then had to get up and present. It was so much easier to speak in front of everyone today than yesterday! Maybe because the Mozilla employees weren’t watching or maybe it really was easier. Anyway, the instructors loved seeing the change from one day to the next so they plan on having us do a lot of presenting. It will be good for me since I think I would like to try giving a talk at a conference one of these days once I actually know about something worth talking about.
The day kind of flew by and before I knew it, it was time for check-out. Everyone really seemed to have a great day and were looking forward to tomorrow. I was going to the Women Who Code meeting this evening at 18:30 so I hung around for about an hour to kill time. There were others there and I don’t think they minded me staying.
I headed over to the library so I could meet Alena and baby Anya and walk to Puppet Labs with them for the meeting. We hopped on a streetcar instead and made it over there more quickly than I thought a streetcar could manage. The meeting was great. Paige is the organizer and she gave a great talk on regular expressions and then Alena talked about a cool website that WWC is getting started. pdxtechwomen.com. I think it would be fun and interesting to help out with the site if I can find the time.
Alena with Anya, Paige and I walked to the streetcar stop so they could make the long trek out to Beaverton and I began walking to the Max. Andrew was nice enough to come get me though and that saved me a lot of time and I got to tell him all about my day before he headed off to bed. I think it’s time for me to do the same.
Today I learned that regular expressions aren’t nearly as daunting as I kept telling myself they were! I also learned that I like my cohort more and more each day. What an awesome group of people.