GSoC and RustReach Day 36 and Hi from Philly!

Yeah…always something

• Seriously, though..it’s almost 2am on the East Coast and I’ve been working on this Haskell problem for an hour now, trying to anticipate test / edge cases, and I can’t go to sleep, but I have to get up in 5 hours. I’m ecstatic!
• I just had a corn muffin for dinner..with corn in it! My roommate isn’t here yet, either. From the Slack channel, it just seems like a lot of really nice people.

Why are you here

• I’m here because I want mentorship and am interested in areas of research for a PhD.
• I’m also interested in seeing which person from which school I may be interested in seeking out.
• Also, PLDI is just awesome :D

Haskell stuff

• I am building a function that truncates the describePicture function based on its length. So we’ll see. It’s late and I’m a bit tired, so I may have messed it up, but I think it works bases on the tests and edge-cases I did.
• Gabe stepped in today to help. I really appreciated it, because today was one of those days I was not feeling so great about my abilities and Haskell. Don’t get me wrong, I did a fair amount of Haskell today, but some days I really struggle with stuff (okay, all days, since I’m learning).
• I do have a better understanding of point-free / tacit programming now. I went over that chapter today in the book. Just writing code has helped a lot.
• Gabe commented on this; I struggled initially with coming to terms with people who just want to talk about Haskell and Category Theory, and people who want to write things in it and build things and be a working developer. I’ve actually opted out of a local Category Theory group in town, because I don’t think it’s useful to me at this juncture. I really just need to write a lot of Haskell, fail, understand the errors and get better.
• Particularly, there are people in the community who have turned out to not be so great at actually getting stuff done in Haskell, even though they talk about Category Theory all the time. For someone who is learning because they want to be a Haskell dev, it’s distracting and not very helpful.

Rust stuff

• I have to continue with that later in the middle of this week. I had started on Sunday, and I’ll be building an application in Rust sometime during the week.

The good thing is

• The conference is upstairs from where I am, and I really don’t plan on partying or anything after the meat of the conf, so I will be going upstairs and just working on the evenings, from around 7 until whatever hours in the morning. I don’t have to get up at 4:45am (when I usually get up for my local internship), so I should be even better in terms of hours this week. Exciting.

Anyways

• I am on West Coast time and it’s really late…I have to force myself to sleep because I need to get up in five hours or so. That’s pretty much it for me. Haha I picked the bed by the window, roommate. Tough luck mwahah (evil laugh) :D