I am job searching! Fun times. I also have a weirdly high proportion of friends simultaneously job searching, which is cool because we can discuss interview stuff. This is exactly what led me down the road labelled "learn SSH" - my friend and co-job-searcher behind Hey Heather, it's me again mentioned that an interviewer asked "If you needed to get some files onto a remote server, how would you do that?", and my response was externally a cool, blank stare, and internally a spiral-of-doom-panic. 😅

...

BIXI is Montréal's beloved bike sharing system, and I'd like to ask your help, dear readers, in getting their attention.

You see, a few years ago, they added a feature - after you borrow a bike and return it, you can see how many kilometres you traveled, and an estimate of how many calories you burned. I love seeing how many kilometres I biked. I like knowing the distance between spots, and feeling strong that I'm capable of biking so far! But I hate seeing a calorie count. In fact, I hate just seeing the word "calorie".

...

Oh, Miss hboo:

Many years I have waited
For a gift like yours to appear
Why, I predict this project
Could make you a first rate! francophone
My dear, my dear!
I'll write at once to blog readers
Tell them of it in advance
With a tool like this, dear there is
A definish chance
If you work as you should
You'll be making ...goooooooooood 😍

Did that really just happen?
Have I actually understood?
This problem I've tried
To ignore or hide
Is a talent! that can be learned...to
Help me use French numbers!
If I work good.
So I'll work good...

😂

I definitely ripped that off big time from Wicked the musical. And my changes aren't particularly clever, which is fine, because the goal here is:

LEARN YOU SOME NUMBERS IN FRENCH FOR GREAT GOOD.

And not: "Be good at writing song lyrics." We can work on that another day maybe. 😂

...

There is a super cool thing a friend of mine did, which I wish to emulate: have an adorable page of random thoughts. It seems super low pressure, fun as a reader to get a glimpse into someone else's head, and fun as a creator to just collect a mish-mash of glorious tidbits.

The original implementation doesn't involve any manual git-anythings, and makes a nice separate page for these random thoughts. However, I (apparently) am never going to get around to doing that, so a blog post that I update with the thoughts seems good enough. It will be weird, but I am fine with that. 😄

...

I downloaded a little plugin the other day; you might use something like it yourself, if you're a super nerd (sorry..): it's called disable-javascript. It's a browser addon that I use in Firefox to maximize speed and minimize annoyance when visiting one of the bajillions of overloaded how-to and fake-news and cooking websites, where by "overloaded" I mean there's 999 ads, and auto-playing videos and pop-ups and newsletter subscriptions all vying for my attention when all I want is basic content.

...

Here's another glorious tidbit from the past, which is actually really exciting because it demonstrates to me that my grasp of French has, in fact, improved in the last few years! 😂

...

Holy buhjeebus the amount of steps. I just want to listen to business casual. Ya know... Let's keep it business. Let's keep it casual. Let's keep it...fun.

So! Here comes, how to listen to spotify from the terminal in fedora. YMMV (Your mileage may vary).

...

So, this post was drafted years (no, literally years) ago when I was applying to Outreachy, and it just stayed a draft forever because I guess I thought there was more to it. It turns out, there wasn't, because if there was, it would be there. Ha! I still think it's interesting though, and I want it out of my "untracked files" when I run git status*, so here it comes, in all its overdue glory. 😉

...

Why I don't feel like a programmer:

I use a mac at work

Real programmers don't like Apple.
Real programmers embrace all the manual dirty work they have to do configuring and trouble shooting basic functions on this or that linux distro.
I just want shit to work.

I use package managers

Mac has homebrew.
At home on Fedora, I just use the software manager GUI. If I want something not through it, I have to look up instructions. I don't even know what my package manager is.

...

: Wherein I discuss the weirdness of half ppl being like "GTFO L8ER !*#$&S", and the other half like "wut where u goin jus chill out"

I am struck by a strange dichotomy of phenomenons that I find in tech job mentalities.

One goes a little like this:

You've been there 9 months and you're not looking for a new job?! Why not?!

While the contrary goes like:

Yeah, this place is good. I can seek out what I need within my company and I am well supported here.

Perhaps you identify with one or the other mentality. Certainly I found myself happily settling into my workplace, grateful for the autonomy and influence I was given, grateful for the people I worked with, grateful for interesting challenges without undue pressure and unachievable deadlines.

...

I am an @computed evangelist when it comes to getters in the many MobX-React components my team writes for work. I prowl around PRs, hunting for unsuspecting plain ol' innocent getters like this:

@observer class Potato extends React.Component {
  @observable frend = 'Ms. Beans';

  get grewInTheGround() { return props.earthlyInfo.source === 'the ground'; }

  render() {
    return <div> look, i'm a paytaytoe { this.grewInTheGround && 'from the ground' }</div>;
  }
}

...and POuNCinG on them: "What if we used @computed for that grewInTheGround getter? Check out the docs!"

This was a gleeful pastime of mine until one day I was rudely* interrupted by a co-worker not so easily convinced.

...

Oh my bananas, I am having a computer crisis. It all started when I was nOT tOUCHING mY cOMPUTER at all and the only application running (to my knowledge) was Firefox, which had like 4 tabs open. "So what?" you think. "Who cares?" you ask. Well, my fan was going as hard as it could for several iterations of several minutes. I was starting to worry for my baby's health.

...

"Con't" is how I used to abbreviate "continued" when I took notes in HS/uni. The good old days. I could never use my laptop even in university (ie when I had one) to take notes in class because the instant I would get even remotely disinterested, I would be totally gone and only tune back in to be hella confused. Dis bad.

Anyway, since deciding that continuing to explore & contribute to Mozilla would be better than trying to (frantically, because that's apparently the only way) apply for other jobs, I have found myself much happier.

Today I set up Docker!

...

It's all in the title. I formally submitted my application to participate in the wonderful Outreachy today. If you haven't heard of it, Outreachy is an amazing internship opportunity to be a (paid!) contributor to FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for underrepresented groups in tech (more details here). For Outreachy, this means:

• women: cis and trans

...

Maybe it's just because I've been setting up wackloads of dev environments and picking projects, but this whole Prepping for Outreachy business is making me think that there's a lot more to jobs than all these job interviews involving little code challenges get at.

...

Oops, note to self - need to strip special characters such as apostrophes from file names. (Guess how I came up with that one..[1]).

Having got all this Jekyll stuff finally up and running, I was dying from manually formatting all of my posts and their titles. Seriously, typing out the whole date for every post's file name?! Terrible. Also, srsly, what kind of programmer am I if I keep doing something manually. What is even the point.

Unfortunately, shell scripting is not my forte.

...

While there are multiple tutorials out there on using the Heroku Scheduling add-on with Node.js, they all seem to suggest the same strange series of steps.

...

I tried to start writing another post but vim is back to its old habits of appearing to insert weeeeeiiiiiird characters as I type.

...

When I searched this, I found a lot of mentions of Laravel and PHP. Whaat? What is this Laravel? And I certainly don’t want to start getting involved with PHP. Surely there is a simpler explanation for this!

Well, now there is! Right here. On your very own screen.

...

What am I doing?
I'm waiting for git to finish cloning Mozilla's Bedrock repo.

...

You may know by now that I like to make tutorials for things with dismal search results, and this is no different. The search results when I queried for the title of this post included the following:

Yeah. Not exactly what I was looking for.

...

This post was originally labelled "Where am I".
I'm not entirely sure whether I should count Monday to Fridays, or weekends too - weekends too I guess, since Fridays themselves aren't even techically normal work days.

Day 11 it is then.

...

My Computer

Su helped me fix my Windows partition!! Holy smokes! She is a magician!! ❤️
I should definitely have been able to do it myself - we just reset the whole thing. But it was fun to not have Windows for a while and just live that way. Because whatever.

Also, my poor boring new computer has some new digs - Stanley was sharing some of his long-collected stickers!

...

Today is the day before the day before I will begin a series of days at the Recurse Center. I have two reasons for writing this — One, they suggest keeping a blog to track your learning etc., but even before that, I read a few blogs from people who went to RC and did just that, like Julia Evans. It was really cool to see what they were doing, and I kindof want a place to organize my thoughts.

...

Wow, so I’m always amazed when something I want to know how to do doesn’t stare right back at me in the top 5 Google results. I’m sure you can guess why I am writing this article today (hint: check the title), but be assured that I have previously been unsuccessful in my mission to publish my Vue.js directive to npm. Please join me for a thrilling recount of my journey to enlightenment.

...

I like Vue.js. A lot. (See my comparison with React.js here.) It is a beautifully simple, straightforward, and superbly functional view-layer framework. I’ve gone over most of the docs multiple times, and I am absolutely enamoured with the clarity they exude. They don’t use stupidly obscure words or send you around in circles trying to find what you want. They make you and Vue Just Work.

However, I had a weak spot — the “Custom Directives” page.

...

This article is just going to be a little nublet of an article. Or a nugget. Whatever.

...

I am going to share with you a great and magnificent secret: the stages of creating a clickable svg map in a React project. Are you ready? You might want to take notes, because it is super mind-blowing.

Wait, first here’s the map, being clicked on (ooh, ahh):

...

Ooh, this is going to be a juicy one! I’m sure many people are fierce supporters of one of these technologies and zealous bashers of the other. Both Vue.js and React.js are both pretty new to the scene — let’s get some background information to begin. I’ll go in reverse alphabetical order to avoid offending anyone right out of the gates. 😉

...

I recently wrote about the wonders of gulp. Ironically, as soon as it was published, I ditched gulp for webpack. Actually that’s not quite true — I first tried to incorporate browserify into gulp. I knew I needed some sort of packaging system in order to use JSX and React, and of these two most popular, browserify and webpack, webpack was touted to be a real mind-bender to set up. Everywhere I looked suggested that people who weren’t terribly experienced with other module-requiring systems like CommonJS should probably use browserify. So I got to work setting it up, only to realize that webpack would pay off in the long run.

...

I take great pride and pleasure in using an operating system sometimes thought of as difficult, risky, and geared towards programmers. Being the extremely novice developer that I am, I like to boost my sense of competence by using this somewhat elite OS so that I can bask in the surprise of others when they find out that I am using neither Windows nor MAC.

...

Ze* would be pretty amazing. I don’t know zir* very well yet, but ze* sure seems to have a lot of people who like zir. Granted, there are also a fair few who are not afraid to speak out against gulp — but that’s hardly unusual when someone wonderful shows up on the scene.

Gulp was a little hard to follow at first. Ze uses all this language that, like everyone in the field, is a little perplexing until you’re used to it. I suppose you would call that jargon.

...