Got in a tiny smidge early, and sat quietly in one of the new beanbags for a bit & looked at the books. Had nice quick check-ins (yay! my favorite). Felt like I actually had something to report, which was weird and neat.

Ended up re-intrigued by the bookshelves right afterwards, and fell into a book called Hipster Business Models. I think I meant to be annoyed? But it was a new book and I couldn’t resist and I fell into reading about a dude who made Yoga Joes (for various reasons that are well beyond “just because,” he wanted to make little army dudes doing yoga poses), and then read about a bunch of interesting, successful, strange little ventures all over the place. (The library here is amazing. I already almost miss it. Even if one spent one’s whole batch reading books one found interesting, there’d be so much left unturned.)

Had largely worked my way backwards through the book, and then discovered the table of contents, which listed something about…Hacker School. Of course! And so I learned some more things about how this strange, amazing place came to be.

Some non-zero hours later, I emerged in search of food or computers. It was one of the most satisfying mornings I’ve had in a long, long time, though, and I’m hoping I can remember that.

Had coloring club again, and we took it to the coffeeshop, and I made a postcard (blank postcards! so good! you can write on them and make a tiny art and then send it somewhere!), and then I came back.

Worked on my tiny weather utility a little bit more, and actually got some functions pulled out to do some things (instead of a just-go-down-the-page-and-do-all-the-things program, which it previously was).

So fun! It now prints out current weather for RC, or a few other places I’ve defined. I love it.

Heading to Hack && Tell tonight; excited to hear people talk about things they’re excited about.

Wasn’t late! Woo. (But not by much; I got a fast hissing flat on the way in and walked the last handful of blocks.) Thinking I might need to start up sitting group again, if only for myself. It really helped me get here a bit earlier, and start the day on a good and successful note.

It’s like my brain is in quicksand this week. Every once in a while, I manage to fling up an arm or two (much like my experience in the ball pit, come to think of it), but it feels almost impossible to get more than that above the surface. And then I sink back down, and it’s not so bad, only not much can happen down there.

But I got out of the ball pit. Several times, in fact, in the course of a half hour. Maybe I can eventually lift myself out of this as well. It might just make my muscles sore. Nothing I can’t recover from, and it’ll make me stronger.

I find a lot of solace in metaphors.

Joined the new little statistics study group, which is awesomely beginner-friendly. Alicia’s taught a bit of Bayesian statistics before in an intro CS class (for quite some time, if I remember correctly), and some other folks appear to have some experience, but I don’t feel entirely out of place yet. Just like I need to practice reading more often.

In any case, we’re working from this book, which looks kinda fun. Got a bunch of things installed in a fresh virtualenv, so PyMC and Numpy? and Scipy and Matplotlib are all like <3 <3 <3 in my terminal.

Headed back to my little weather thing. It currently displays a couple lines pulled from the Dark Sky API, which makes me feel powerful and awesome. But that’s hardcoded.

I want to make it a little more extensible for myself (though I’m not concerned about making it generalizable for everyone), so I started looking into what one needs to do to use command-line flags and stuff. Turns out Python’s argparse is happy to help! And of course there’s a concise, friendly tutorial. Also I finally figured out how to display code inline on WordPress (control option x). YES.

Took me forever to figure out what the difference is between defining optional and positional (mandatory) keywords. Deep in the docs, I discovered that when using argparse, anything with a – (dash) at the front is optional; anything else is positional. Well crap. That’s not so tough. Yay!

Got on a good roll shortly before the jobs talk for the evening. Hoping to take some of this momentum into tomorrow. Ended up having really good conversations with Steve and Shad afterwards, continuing my trend of “never go home on time, be grateful for having such a flexible and understanding partner.”

Missed check-ins (again); this did, however, give me a good opportunity to talk with Seth about being slightly late, and also feelings vs. programming (or feelings AND programming?) at RC. (The things you can talk about when waiting for water to boil!) In conversations I keep having with Recursers and alums, I am struck over and over by how often people cite the emotional component of RC as the (or a) part that was really important for them. The programming part is important, and it’s an amazing programming community, but this is also an intense experience feelings-wise. That’s not bad; it just encourages certain kinds of personal development in a way that I’m not used to. It’s hard. And I like it.

I also had feelings about check-ins in general and had a really good chat with facilitator Allie about last week and this week. She also has a rad keyboard, and talked me through a little bit of how to get started on my super mega dream sidewalk stamp project. The sun is shining. Maybe this is the week I start on that, just a little bit.

Played in the amazing ball pit upstairs (Jump In!); it’s going for a month, and it just started Friday, and it’s all but sold out already. And it rules. It’s exquisitely hard to get back up again, once you’re far down enough, but it is super fabulous. I jumped and swam and was generally ungraceful, and it was a blast. Went with a bunch of other RC folks, and then there were a couple people we didn’t know with a selfie stick. Takes all kinds.

Having a heck of a time focusing on ANYTHING. Tom asked me twice today if I wanted to pair on anything or if I had any questions, and the second time he said “weather” and my brain went “YOU WANTED TO PLAY WITH THE DARK SKY API” and anyway now I have a tiny little Python script that pulls weather from Dark Sky, and it’s a little fabulous. I’m going to make it fancier.

Also, he got me to try BPython, and it’s kind of amazing and magic.

Mostly continued bouncing off the walls of distractibility, but didn’t have to go anywhere for the Monday night talk (thanks, gas leak at eBay?), and new resident Li Haoyi’s talk was informative, hilarious, and a lot of fun. I would easily go see Haoyi speak somewhere now, regardless of the topic, just to watch him present.

Got my new laptop stand, but not my keyboard. Ordered the awesome one that Allie has and paid a few bucks extra for one-day shipping, because the future is weird. Looking forward to having a reasonable and healthy standing solution.

CW: weird situations with strange men

Got home late last night after a truly bizarre and unsettling first experience with Lyft, wherein a ride home took way longer than necessary, and included:

• more bridges than necessary (Queens => Brooklyn does not involve the Williamsburg Bridge)
• an illegal u-turn in a fair amount of traffic (after attempted illegal left turns)
• repeated assurances that I would be there in however-many minutes
• the driver asking me if I could maybe look up the directions on my phone? then commenting that they looked the same as his, but asking if he could use my phone to navigate instead, and so he took my phone with 11% battery left and I realized I had no recourse if anything went wrong, and wasn’t sure I’d be able to make my way home from wherever we were
• getting home safely in about twice as long as it should have taken

Anyway, that + more loss yesterday didn’t exactly make for a rad night of sleep. Took forever to crawl out of bed, missed check-ins, figured I’d get in and get down to business…and didn’t so much. Mostly just read a lot about what folks have been saying about Sheryl.

Headed back to the Khan Academy SQL resources, which I was loving a lot this spring, even though I only got to do them an hour or so at a time. Looking forward to having more freedom with my time, and I think the structure will be really helpful for me right now.

Didn’t get a lot done, but did more than nothing.

Also hosted the inaugural RC Coloring Club, which is where you bring yourself and the desire to color something (and maybe something to color), and then you color it, and it was awesome.

Ended up having a really good conversation with a fellow batchling about grief, cancer, art, death, New York, comedy, and the advantages of a big city if you are, or are feeling, introverted. Not so much with the code today, but we do what we can.

Finished off the day with game night, where I learned MORE new games, which is both unlike me and super fun. Played Coloretto (and kept wanting to sing Bohemian Rhapsody with it; “I see a little coloretto”), and also Batman Love Letter, which is based on Love Letter, but instead of princesses it’s got Batman (five Batmans, in fact) and friends (and enemies). Both games are great and do not take forever, winning much favor with me, and I got to hang out with great people while playing them.

What I did:

• Studied some SQL for the first time in several months.
• Hosted coloring club.
• Finished the “You don’t have to be good at everything” page in The Affirmations.
• Talked about important things with a great person.
• Played games with good people.

What I learned:

• How to play two new games!
• Sometimes it’s better to talk about feelings than bro down and crush some code.

Questions I have:

• Nothing articulate. More weird handwavey “is there a way to predict what grief will do?” and “what happens when grief is compounded by more?”

Week 7! How is this possible? And am I going to say this every Monday from here on out?

New batch joined us this morning, so I’m trying to let go of that feeling that I should have Done Real Things with my morning. The supposed “real things” (involving bro-ing down and crushing some code?) didn’t happen. That’s okay. I’ve already met a handful of the new batch, and they’re awesome and have interesting and diverse backgrounds. Looking forward to getting to know them a bit better.

Brought in my new copy of The Affirmations Colouring Book (purchased at Bluestockings on a wandering post-dinner adventure with Melissa, Ian, and Nathan this weekend), which I’m leaving with RC, because coloring affirmations is pretty fabulous, and everyone here should get to do that if they’d like.

Went on an adventure to Soho Art Materials to pick up colored pencils & a sharpener to facilitate coloring the coloring book (also planning to leave them here). This last week has had a lot of “I want this crafty thing, but I do not want to own it and hoard it” (coloring stuff and also friendship bracelet materials: turns out they’re still a blast, because I am 7), and it’s kind of fun.

Wrote two blog posts (what!). Was baffled by reading the same programming resources I was working from last week, which wasn’t an awesome feeling. Went for a walk to acquire the aforementioned colored pencils. Partly colored one of the pages in the Affirmations book. Realized it was already about 6 pm, which seems absurd. Wanted to get More Code Done today, but hey, not all days can be mega productive.

In summary:

• What I did:
  • I shared a piece of advice with the new batch.
  • I wrote three blog posts (including this one).
  • I colored part of a page of the Affirmations book: “You don’t have to be good at everything.”
  • I led a little lunchquest to Sweetgreen (we had a gluten-free person in our group, plus me the vegan, and SG can feed both easily!), and I didn’t get us too lost, and I got to spend time with three new batchlings.
  • Went to the Monday night talk, which was awesome and went at about 300 mph.
• What I learned:
  • Focusing on code; trying to interact with a bunch of new people…Possibly mutually exclusive?
  • Just because I’ve understood something before doesn’t mean I understand it today. And that’s okay, because I suspect it might work in the other direction, too.
• Questions I have:
  • Not really anything outstanding at the moment.

I didn’t actually write a word on this day. But I bet I can still remember the salient parts!

I went out with coffee check-in group, and got back and had “bagel conversation time,” which now reliably follows coffee check-in group for me. This means my “do computer things” days start a little bit later, but also I feel more ready to start.

During this particular morning’s conversation, aside from rambling on and on about a lot of OPINIONS I HAVE ABOUT WORK AND CULTURE AND AGHHHH, I also mentioned that I was pretty awesomely stuck with a Heroku issue. Steven kindly offered to pair with me (after patiently listening to me ramble), and so we had a totally unscary time working through what was going on.

With the previous day’s Heroku errors long since resolved, we were free to figure out what was wrong on this end. Got lots of `gunicorn.errors.HaltServer: <HaltServer ‘Worker failed to boot.’ 3>` (me: “computer, that is not the way we write a heart <3”), which was interesting, because I didn’t think I had a worker. 

It was also interesting, because `pip install gunicorn` actually, uh, installed things. In retrospect, this all seems terribly obvious, which is probably because we talked about the error afterwards, and how to catch it faster next time (or prevent it entirely!).

Things then worked just fine locally, with `heroku local`, but NOT on my actual Heroku app.

Long story short, installing gunicorn locally (in my virtualenv) but NOT adding it to my requirements.txt file (of the packages needed) made this happen.

Steven finally asked me to try `pip freeze` (which prints out all the currently installed packages, and their versions), followed by requirements.txt, and lo and behold, they were one letter different.

`pip freeze > requirements.txt`, a new push to Heroku, and voilà! A test app is born!!

It lives here, in my least-favorite of the three random names Heroku’s given me so far, and is prone to be changing swiftly, but hey! It works! Something is there!

I then could not manage to get a single computer thing done for the rest of the day. Some days are like that, though, right?

The afternoon had early Thursday presentations, followed by Not Graduation for the Summer 1 batch.

Mostly, this involved each of them getting a printed envelope full of nice things people here said about them, a t-shirt, and a request to please return their keys now, which frankly sounds way better than actual graduations. Someone had collected some niceties about the faculty here, too, and the summer 1s were going to read some out, but then decided to make a markov chain app so we could, you know, simultaneously read all the compliments at once. Just. Mixed up. It’s amazing.

I can’t believe they’ve actually finished their batch. The Fall 1s are so close to being here now!

The lot of us (mostly) headed to Brooklyn Bridge Park for a snack-y picnic, lots of hugs, spontaneous nail polish (which I instigated), and five thousand mosquitoes. (I counted 12 bites this morning and probably missed some.)

I’m sad that they’re all heading to their next adventures, and that I now have even more friends who are far away, but this ALSO means I have friends in more places now.