Tomorrow is the first day in my new role at the Mozilla Foundation, and I’m getting the new job nerves and excitement now.
Between wrapping up at WWF, preparing for Christmas, house hunting, and finishing off my next study assignment (a screenplay involving time-travel and a bus), I’ve been squeezing in a little bit of prep for the new job too.
This post is basically a note about some of the things I’ve been looking at in the last couple of weeks.
I thought it would be useful to jump through various bits of tech used in a number of MoFo projects, some of which I’d been wanting to play with anyway. This is not deep learning by any means, but it’s enough hands-on experience to speed up some things in the future.
I setup a little node.js app locally and had a look at Express. That’s all very nice, and I liked the basic app structures. Working with a package manager is a lovely part of the workflow, even if it sometimes feels a bit too magic to be real. I also had a look at MongoDB, Mongoose and MERS as a potential data model/store solution for another little app thing I want to build at some point. I didn’t take this far, but got the basic data model working over the MERS API.
I’d used Git a little bit already, but wanted a better grasp of the process for contributing ‘nicely’ to bigger projects (where you’re not also talking directly to the other people involved). Reading the Pro Git book was great for that, and a lighter read than I expected. It falls into the ‘why didn’t I do that months ago?’ category.
Sysadmin-esque work is one of my weak points so the next project was more of a stretch. I setup an Amazon EC2 instance and installed a copy of Graphite. The documentation for Graphite is on the sparse side for people who don’t know their way around a Linux command prompt well, but that probably taught me more than if I’d just been following a series of commands from a tutorial. I think I’ll be spending a lot more time on the metrics end of Graphite, so getting a grasp of the underlying architecture will hopefully help.
Then, for the last couple of days I’ve been working through Data Analysis With Open Source Tools at a slightly superficial level (i.e. skipping some of the Maths), but it’s been a good warm-up for the work ahead.
And that’s it for now.
I’m really looking forward to meeting many new people, problems and possibilities in 2014.
Happy New Year!
