Code For America, Week 1: 10 Internets of Awesome

It's the start of my google summer of code 2011 internship at Code for America, a week Dan Melton, our CTO, has termed the "bootcamp." Whew. It's been a crazy week for me. I didn't know what they expected, since I fall into a lot of categories:

• Female
• From MIT
• Not a full-blown CS major
• Haven't had a real programming job before
• Have never contributed to open-source code

The first few days or so I lived in constant fear that they would find out they hadn't gotten what they'd bargained for (I seriously considered resigning). I'm closer to believing that they'll accept me the way I am, clueless and all. For a while I wondered: was I only here (despite my lack of expertise in python/github/FOSS development) because I was a female or because I was from MIT? Then the feminist side of me came out and was like "screw that I shouldn't have to think those thoughts, I was admitted for better or for worse so let's just get on with it."

Anyway, for me it's been a whirlwind tour of once again, getting over my aversion to asking for help. WTF, it's pretty obvious I'm completely inexperienced, why am I still afraid to show the extent of my uh lack of anything in my brain?

Hehe. Ah well, it's Friday, which is open labs (work on whatever you want), and I'm in a happy mood and fine with the fact that I still need to improve myself.

Learned/learning this week:

Github, git

Serious python development: nose, mock, coverage.py

Vi plugins: minibufexplorer, janus, solarizer, nerdtreeexplorer

Dotfiles .bashrc .vimrc .coveragerc

How to be humble and also how to not run away and hide in my dreams

APIs and devtools and how to write wrappers, RPC, JSON, XML, REST, http headers, chrome inspector navigator

App deployment (in 5 minutes o.o) and some of the services out there

Continuous integration server for python

Fabric, python eggs

Mashape

Talks this week:

Coda Hale, metrics

DJ Patil, LinkedIn / color

Twitter product head, cofounder random questions