GSoC and RustReach Day 43

Yes, I skipped a Day

• A very special person in my life celebrated their birthday, and it was day 42 of GSoC, which is 24(th June) backwards :D. 42 is also the answer to the Universe, so there’s that, also. I actually took the morning to go to the Farmer’s Market, pay rent and caught some of puffnfresh’s stream in the evening. I learned a bit about lenses and of all things, some Assembly. Brian (aka puffnfresh) is really one of those Haskellinos who has made me feel really welcome and he is kind and very generous with what he knows. He also listens. So I really enjoy his streams. He’s also working on a particularly interesting project involving Sonic and Tails and MegaDrives. Yesterday he was starting to figure out angles the character moves in terms of rotation are tied to bytes. It’s just super interesting.

RustReach

• We had a meeting today, with Florian and QuietMisdreavus. It was awesome. I love both of their sense of humour. I asked QuietMisdreavus about VBS, and he wanted to know if I follow him on Twitter haha. Actually, I don’t, but I just thought it interesting that he had created some programmes using VBS. I have a friend who is obsessed with VBS and Kirby and Windows 95. Like he’s literally wiped several laptops and replaced the OS with Windows 95 :D And he’s barely 20 years old.
• Florian was also really interesting. I also liked his sense of humour. He says he likes puns. Oh no… not another engineer who likes puns. Save us! :D My peers are amazing, and I’m going to spend an evening with Rust tomorrow because I seriously feel behind. So we’ll see how that goes! I need to fail a lot at Rust, and I haven’t done that yet. So that means putting in the time. This week is super busy for me in terms of the amount of time I just want to put into Rust and Haskell. My only committed time is Thursday, because my friend / mentor at JPL is going on vacation so I promised I’d spend some time with him on Thursday. And vacation, as in Oxford or Germany or something, so I won’t see him for at least three weeks or so. But other than that, it’s Haskell and Rust all week. I’ve also been brought on unexpectedly to a project at work to help out (that is live), so there’s that too, but I got a fair amount of Haskell done today.
• They’ve also told me (at my third internship) that I can spend up to 40 hours at work, since I’m going to be missing a week to go to Racket School. But the thing is, my hours are fine right now, because they give me time to sleep, work at night / in the morning and in the evening. Anything out of balance is going to wreck me.

Oh man…Lenses

• So today, I tried to do a Lens tutorial today. Only, I only had Stack on that computer. And it wasn’t installing. All morning. It was frustrating me. I freaking kid you not, during lunch I emailed my mentors, and they sent me an email within five minutes, I tried it, and I got the library to load. Wut? Can I be Haskell-functional like that one day, too? It’s something to strive for, and definitely comes with experience.

So I did a tutorial on Lenses

• It kind of makes sense, because Brian had spoken about getters and setters. Chris also mentioned Records tonight, which I’m going to look into as well. I freaking love Haskell. When it works it really is just a heck of a lot of fun!

Meeting tonight

• We got a lot done. The new slider is in there. We’re adding a new one, so that we can have slo-mo, and eventually even set check-points and go back in time for animations and simulations. It’s a lot of fun. It’s like making games, where you have the Mouse-Click handlers and stuff. I can’t believe I get to spend my summer doing this stuff.

So I guess

• This would be considered the “second half” of the project, so that’s cool. Super excited. I have no complaints. I’m just enjoying everything.