GSoC and RustReach Day 34

It’s Saturday

• I hurt all over, but I feel oddly really refreshed! Sailing (especially racing) is good for me!
• I completed my meeting with Aaron for RustReach, and we spent an hour talking about compilers and a really neat project called Tokei that he made. I have to say, he’s a great match as a mentor. So I have all super-awesome mentors this summer! :D
• In other news, people in Academia must hate me right now, because I’ve sort of been dropping the ball on conf PhD stuff, because I’ve been busy just working and coding. I literally got my dates in for Utah the day it was due in. Sorry, Mr. McCarthy! :( Then, in another awesome K puts her foot in her mouth move, I called someone the wrong name in an email. Winner winner chicken dinner on that one. Yikes. I apologized, though. 100+ Academia. Fun times. They’re probably plotting against me right now lol.
• I’ve always been a bit of a weirdo, so I often have doubts that they’d accept me, even though I always have a great time and learn a lot from them, and am really looking forward to hanging out with my PhD friends this week and learning about research opportunities through the scholarship I received for PLMW. Then again, I guess that I shouldn’t judge myself harshly, because good work can come from anyone, anywhere, who puts in the work. There’s also a bit of luck involved, in that you can work on something for a long time and not have it pan out.

In other news

• I’m working on GSoC all day. During the week, I’m working on a Clap project, which is specifically this, which is the sort of project I’ll be working on for RustReach. I also heard about Pest, which is a parser tool in Rust. The good thing is that I have a nice place to stay this week, and most of the activities take place during the day, so I can work in the evenings as usual. I don’t have to commute or anything, so I can work late and roll out of bed and shower and head downstairs for my duties. I’ll be doing the mentorship on Tuesday and then volunteering Wed/ Thurs/ Fri, and then returning back on Friday. I really like staying up late and working until all hours of the morning.
• I haven’t decided yet if I will go to work on Monday for a couple hours for my internship (local) and then head to the airport, since it’s about one bus-stop away. Or I could stay home and just work on Haskell lol. Either way, I’ve been working on Haskell :D. I love this language!

What I’m working on

• I’m currently converting the back end constructors I split out (so first part was splitting out constructors individually) so that they’re viewable in the UI Inspect button. So what I’ve been doing is using the function describePicture :: Picture -> String to print what each function returns. I’m about six functions away from getting them to work more or less, and I’ve been building and testing every single one to see that they work.
• My mentor just left some notes about code I have to clean up, so I’ll be jumping on that shortly.
• Update! I’ve completed all the functions. This included having to do a rebase and merge conflict. And I didn’t delete the entire repo. I’d call that a good day! Phew, now I get to see what’s next!

A friend

• Really warmed my heart when she said that I had been through a lot and it says how much I love the language that I’ve still stuck with everything. I’ve never thought about it that way before. I do love Haskell, and I hope I can work in Haskell. That would be pretty neat.

I plan

• On continuing to work in Haskell today, and then taking a nap and then staying up late to work on Haskell.
• Oh, I may do laundry because I love staying up late and doing laundry, or I may wait until Sunday to do it; we’ll see.

So that’s as much

• So that’s as much as I have for now. I was reading about students who failed GSoC. Kind of scares me, because I really want to help my organization, and I was reading that they apparently check that you blog, too. I like blogging, so I don’t think I’ll be letting up on that any time soon, but I didn’t think they actually read your blog, and that it was part of the coursework. They straight up called out someone in the past on not having a blog post for over a month, and the system reminded the student, because that could also be grounds for failure, apparently. Super strict, GSoC :D
• It really helps me to have great mentors and a purpose outside of “I just want to do GSoC” for this summer. I want to improve in Haskell, but I totally realize they could have picked someone other than myself, so I need to make the most out of the opportunity. Plus, my mentors are really awesome people, and a lot of people would kill to have a summer working with both of them. This also applies to the Mozilla opportunity, so I have to keep going!