Curry On and Twitter SFSummerVibes

A lot happened this week!

• After Utah (aka Racket School), I went to the Simons Institute in Berkeley, for an encryption workshop. Right after that, or rather, the very same evening that ended, I took a ten hour flight to London to attend Curry On. It was awesome.

Curry On

• I met awesome people, and a number of Haskellinos were there, including P. Wadler and SPJ. E. Brady was also there, and the Fb team gave about three presentations on some code analysis tools that they are working on, that were pretty interesting. One of the talks was on using Machine Learning to analyze questions you might want answered with code eg. how do I create an X in Y language (sorted by relevance), another was on helping to search for similar code (to write more correct, less repetitive code) and that sort of thing.
• There was also a talk on debugging distributed systems, and on benchmarking compilers and my personal favourite, one from C Solomon on Logo (the programming language). It was all really cool and I’m so happy I had the opportunity to attend! Unfortunately, it was the last Curry On! :( I can’t thank Heather, Gabe and Kyle enough for supporting me both financially and from a mentorship point of view so that I was able to attend!

I got to visit my brother!

• Well, rather, he visited me!

• We had doubles, sushi (he just got back from a trip to Tokyo), among other things!

Incredible time in London!

• Being in London was the first time in a while I felt like I could really be me because there are SO MANY CARIBBEAN PEOPLE THERE!!! I squealed in delight when I landed and saw the photos of Carnival, and heard the familiar accents. On Tuesday evening, I skipped the final Happy Hour of the Conference to wander through the Shepherd’s Bush Market, while eating a shrimp roti and two doubles. A Caucasian British man asked me how the doubles was, and it was obvious that I was enjoying it because I had doubles all over my face!

I returned to SF

• I planned to go to an event via a recruiter, but I was exhausted after travelling back. So I got some curry and went home, and slept like a log until 4am on Thursday.

I applied for a talk

• And got in! It will be a five minute talk on a time something failed. I believe mine will be about my first GHC panic, and about how when things break in high level languages, low level languages can be revealed.

An Open House at Twitter!

• I was invited to an Open House at Twitter! It was really fun! I had boba, got swag, tried out their “Silent Disco” (really great headphones playing music that alternated depending on what colour you were on; the headphones rotated between red and blue).
• They also had a really great presentation, and I spoke to quite a few engineers. They really stressed that they are a company that has mentorship and cares about different perspectives. I made friends with a US veteran there, who went back to school and was finishing up a CS degree! Everyone that was selected seemed to really have a bright future; I was honoured to be there and to meet so many nice, encouraging people!

I ran to a dinner

• Right after that, I headed to a company dinner. I was asked to toast about something, so I said “Haskell?” and so, we lifted our glasses and toasted “to Haskell”. I can’t imagine anything better. :)

And that’s it