I was excited to get back to UA and learn more cool stuff so I woke up early and was ready to go. I had a nice walk to the MAX and enjoyed looking at our beautiful city as we crossed over the Steel Bridge. The walk to UA takes me about 10 minutes and I love to change up my path so I can see new things.
Nobody was in the CE area when I got there so I got set up and grabbed a quick bowl of cereal to eat while I worked. I checked my UA email and quickly read through the Slack channels before getting back to my next ticket. I was writing some tests to verify that an iOS alert can be either a JSON string or dictionary. I was basically just using older tests and modifying them to suit my needs. Shoulders of giants I tell ya! My pull request got the necessary two +1’s meaning two people reviewed my code and approved it so Mele said I could go ahead and push the merge button. Yay! My first merge at UA!
Mele and I had a one-on-one scheduled at 10:00. We found a quiet room off of the Hangar and chatted about how things were going. She seemed happy with me so I plan to continue working as hard as I can and to learn as much as possible while I am there.
When we all got back to our little glass office I asked Mele what the use case was for a dictionary vs a string and she went over that with me. She sent me the syntax for a curl request to test it out and I asked if it could work with slightly different syntax. She said it shouldn’t but she wasn’t positive so I should test it out. Ok! I first tried to run the syntax she gave me but kept getting a syntax error. I couldn’t figure it out so finally asked for help and she immediately showed me that my helpful Mac had changed my plain double quotes to special characters. Grrr! I had lots to find and fix. There must be a way to stop that from happening.
Once I got the quote issues worked out I got another error. This time it was an invalid character ‘{ ‘. Well hmmm….I looked and looked at the JSON code but it was hard to read in one long line so Mele suggested I use a web based visualizer. That made it much easier to see and helped me figure out that the code sample in the UA documentation had an error.
Amanda and I went to lunch with some of the CE team. They were going to Boxer Ramen. I had walked past it many times and also heard great things about the food so I was really looking forward to it. They did not disappoint! I had their vegetarian curry ramen and it was wonderful! I would definitely eat there again. One of the guys had a degree in physics so we talked a bit about the difficulty of making a career of it and how we each ended up on this path to developer.
When we got back I screwed around with braces and commas for what seemed like too long and then bam! I had valid code! Yayayayay! I fixed up my curl request and it worked!!! Well now I had another issued I could fix so I stashed my current git branch and checked out another. After I did that I figured out that stashing wasn’t necessary because I could have just switched to the documentation repo I had cloned and since it was a different git repository. Duh! No big deal though. I made a new branch and then fixed the syntax error, pushed my branch to Github, submitted a pull request and within no time (after someone fixed an indentation issue. Woops!) my change was merged.
I read about dictionary values that Apple allows for iOS alerts and tried to understand each use case. I read and read and read and read but I still don’t completely understand them. I really can’t believe all I have learned in one week though. A very short time ago I knew nothing about push notifications other than that they magically ended up on my phone. Now I’m making them happen and I kinda know how! I am so thankful for this opportunity.
Wayne messaged to say that he and Jordan were on the way to pick me up. We were taking Jordan directly to his interview afterward. We got there pretty quickly in spite of the traffic and waited in the car for him. He was in there for a half hour or so and seemed pretty happy and positive when he got in the car. I hope he gets accepted!
We came home and Jordan buried himself in Learn Python the Hard Way. Andrew went to Jason’s house to listen to some new piece of stereo equipment he just got and Wayne went to the store. I helped Jordan here and there as he needed but he was doing just fine for the most part.
Wayne made a delicious Asian veggie skillet thing and rice. We sat around and talked until bedtime. It was a great family evening.
Today I learned commas are a pain in JSON