Coffee check-in group was the check-in-iest it’s been since I started going to it, which was super fun. It also means I spend a bunch of dollars, but then I have coffee and a delicious bagel, so hey.

Ann and I started speccing out Red Flag, which she’d told me about this weekend. We’re going to try to implement a command-line period tracker this week, before she heads back to SF. I’m psyched about this.

I also resolved some exciting environment variable problems (I know enough to know I don’t want my API keys anywhere in my git history!). Got some help from Rob, who I keep describing as “my unofficial mentor,” and I was right that he had the quickest route to an answer (since I knew we’d walked through this months ago, and I had the credentials for another service to prove it — I just didn’t know how to USE those).

For the curious, I set my Twilio creds up in their own directory and was using `chpst -e ~/twilio/ python myapp.py`, then moved them over to my .bashrc file to minimize having to do that EVERY TIME I ran something.

Continued working through the Heroku Python tutorial. Spent way too long in a gruesome battle with some gnarly errors that appeared to be maybe psycopg2, maybe something with gcc, maybe god knows what oh goodness why are there eight lines of red text, and finally found that some benevolent individual had 1) encountered this problem, 2) found the solution, 3) blogged about it. Not before baffling Mary the facilitator here, but I learned some small things about virtualenv, too, and made a terrific mess that I think I mostly undid. If not, it’ll be a new thing to learn later.

This is when I write badly about how other people’s clear writing helped me tremendously. Anyway. I was grateful. I will endeavor to become one of these people in the future.

Got home kind of late, and tried to write some nice parting words for the Summer 1 batch (their last day is Thursday, and then a new batch will start on Monday, and we’ll share the second half of our batch with them). Everyone’s invited to share some compliments with them directly, whether anonymously or attributed, and I really wanted to write whatever I could, and I was hoping I could get it done kinda quickly. Turns out writing articulate feelings is just always hard, and I haven’t practiced it in a few months, really.

I also described my gnarly exciting problems to Nathan, who happily jumped in to help — the “apparently it was this one line in my .bashrc file” problem was followed by a new one, wherein this `foreman start web` thing gave me the following error:

rbenv: foreman: command not found

The `foreman' command exists in these Ruby versions:
  1.9.3-p0
  1.9.3-p125

Reasons why this is exciting: I haven’t touched rbenv in probably a couple + years, and also I am not doing anything directly with Ruby right now, and also this is the page RIGHT after the one I got stuck on earlier.

Ran `ruby –version`, and it turns out I’ve got ruby 2.0.0p247. Sigh.

Nathan told me that there is some python tool that was inspired by rbenv, and he’s familiar with the python version, so on a hunch, he had me try `rbenv shell 1.9.3-p125`. Tried the foreman command again, and lo and behold, it worked!!

That sets the ruby version, but only for that particular shell session, and since I know I’m likely to open this in another shell at some point, I’ve now set it for the directory as a whole with `rbenv local 1.9.3-p125`. Neat!

Maybe now I can get through this Heroku tutorial…