GSoC Day 55 and Helium Grant!

So I can finally say it

• I received a Helium Grant this week! I’ve been in touch with Nadia Eghbal since Wednesday keeping it under wraps (but of course, sharing with with my parents, my brother and our dog :D The very next day, I found out I had also received a ticket to RustConf! I mean..pretty exciting! :D
• Back in April when I applied (it wasn’t that long ago, but feels like it’s been a long journey since then!), I had two barely functioning computers. I was thinking of duct-taping a camera to one so that I had something close to screen-sharing. A week or two later Chris, my mentor, decided to purchase me a laptop. I’m really grateful for this.
• However, I never expected to receive the Helium Grant! I was in the middle of my part-time testing gig, and went downstairs during my half-hour break, and checked my email (by being a bum and just using the coffee shop’s wifi; they know me and I do buy a bagel from time to time, so I am not too much of a leech of their wifi lol). The email surprised me.
• I felt conflicted because I did have a laptop, even though I was having issues getting it to screen-share. This was before I did a clean re-install and worked out my current situation, which is workable.
• So I asked Gabe what I should do. This is where the “dad-advice” came in. He gave me really solid advice, which I used to proceed. I wanted to be honest about my situation to Nadia. Where I’m from, honesty is a big thing. He basically said to be honest and let her decide.
• She got back to me the next morning and told me I was chosen because of the significant challenges I had overcome, my motivation and because I was doing something really interesting with my life. Out of 700 people, 11 people were chosen. And I was one of them. I still can’t believe it. I’m super grateful.

This has been a long journey

• And I could have never imagined I would have had such immense support. It means a lot to me. This has been the winding path for sure, and a few years ago I would have never imagined that this would be my life. But it’s been really rewarding; much more than I could have ever imagined. There have been ups and downs but I’m really excited about my trajectory.

Anyways

• I have some Elm to do today. I’m focusing on understanding how the debugger works. So I may make some notes on this as I understand it tonight.

  Update

• So I didn’t actually get around to doing the Elm earlier in the day I tried to wake my laptop up from sleeping, and it actually didn’t wake up :O
• As it turns out, my screen went kaput, so I could see it dimly flickering. So working on getting that repaired, but in the meantime I got a Lenovo Laptop. It has a more powerful core and is already faster; however Chromium is not working on 18.04 in a stable manner. There have been several complaints. So I opted for Opera instead, and I love it. It’s fast. It also works flawlessly with GHangouts, which is what we use for our screen-sharing. I also got a new headset, which is more like the one I use at work. It also works quite well. Henry II (this new laptop) has space, Deep Spec, LambdaConf and Coq stickers :D However, he really needs a Haskell sticker :(

Elm

• So I believe our slider will be something along the lines of this. Here it keeps in memory a list of the mouse positions and their click locations. The slider tracks when they occurred, and we can go back in time to a state in time in which the clicks were applied.
• Apparently, the debugger was inspired by this talk