It’s Friday and that brings us to the end of yet another week of Ascend. That only leaves two more weeks and I don’t like that at all! The weather was amazing today though. I keep hearing how unusual it is but I haven’t known any different since we have moved here. I suppose I will be in for a rude awakening when things go back to normal.
The morning began as usual with breakfast and conversation. We moved into the room and everyone got to work on their various tasks before check-in. Lukas and Kronda came in for check-ins and gave us a friendly reminder to be on time for check-in and to close laptops and ignore phones when it’s check-in time or we have a speaker. It’s so easy to be distracted by the gadgets so it was a great reminder for me. During check-in one of the students (I won’t name 😉 was talking about how they feel just a bit rebellious about the “laptops down” rule because of some past experiences in school and then said to Lukas, “It’s not you. It’s the baggage.” I really love spending my day with these funny, intelligent people.
Lukas talked about how we can level up by always communicating via our blog posts, progress reports, tweets, Etherpads and so on; Staying busy by finding things to do. Even small things like reviewing git commands or running Mozmill tests for practice; Taking risks because this is the time to do it. We are in a safe place to learn and breaking things is normal and fixing them helps us learn; Claiming our space by being a voice in the movement. We are already a part of things so we need to think about how we will continue to contribute and carry on our legacy. It was a great talk!
K had asked me if I would help her get caught up on some things she was having issues with so I worked with her pretty much until lunchtime. She was able to get a LOT accomplished. I think she just needed another set of eyes because she moved right along and made sure to take notes as we went. I think by the end of the day she was all caught up.
Lunch was out today and what a perfect day for that. I decided on the salad place again because it was so good. K went with me and we took our food back to the office. We didn’t spend too much time eating before heading back to our laptops. I poked around looking for a new bug I might get started on and worked on trying to get a better error message from a test I’ve been running for my bug but that didn’t really go anywhere and I’m not too sure what exactly it has to do with my bug. I guess I will have to wait on that one too.
I also did a bit of poking around, gathering up resources and information for my potential talk. I emailed Katt with some questions about what sort of use a contributor has of the Mozilla open space. I did some research about logos I might be able to use on my slides. I’ve never done anything like this before so it feels scary and a bit overwhelming. I just keep telling myself I only have to prepare something. I don’t actually have to present.
The day flew by and here we were checking out. It’s so interesting to hear others talk about their bugs. They sound SO ridiculously complicated! I’m thinking, “Wow! Here we knew nothing coming into this four weeks ago and now these people are talking about things I don’t understand at all.” Is that how mine sounds?? Lukas mentioned that one of the students typed a set of empty curly braces in the markdown header of a blog post and it took down the Ascend site. She said she should probably get some continuous integration set up on the site to keep that from happening in the future. I mentioned I had set up Travis-CI on a site before and she said she would welcome a pull request. Fun!
Andrew met me at Mozilla so we could head home together. We made a quick stop at a spice shop for some smoked paprika and then we headed to the Max. David happened to be on the same train so I said he should come nerd talk with us. He started telling me about his bug and wow definitely more words I didn’t understand at all. I totally get the issue he is working on but I wouldn’t have a clue where to begin. Go him! We have some really intelligent people in our class.
I got home and jumped right on my computer so I could get started setting up Travis for the Ascend site. The docs recommended using HTML-proofer to test links, images, and scripts. Sounded great to me! First I had to figure out how to get Jekyll running. I had struggled with it a week or so ago and I just couldn’t get it but it wasn’t critical so I gave up. Well now I had a reason to make it work so I searched and searched and found the answer! Once I had Jekyll running I configured HTML-proofer and ran it. It wouldn’t build….there were errors related to ASCII and when I opened one of the files I could see there were some weird characters. Maybe smart quotes?? Anyway it was late and I was so tired. It would keep until tomorrow.
Today I learned that Mozilla has a TON of different logos!