Making Tough Decisions

I’m currently House-sitting and Dog-sitting

• The great part is that they also have food (fully-stocked) and there’s a washer and dryer. The one where I usually live is in my building, but needs quarters, and other people use it. This one just needs a push of a button and beeps loudly when laundry is done. So I was able to do my laundry pretty quickly today. I’m probably going to do it again just before I finish this stint, too!

Found a friend

• On a whim, I emailed a girl who had mentioned she was working on a Udacity mobile course. Surprisingly, she was really happy I asked her if she wanted to find a way to code together! So, we started studying on Tuesdays and Thursdays during lunch time! We’re going through cracking the coding interview! It really made my time at work brighter! We did the first bit of questions and I started porting our pseudo-code logic into Haskell. I believe she likes Ruby/JS/Python, so we are able to follow along, and we even looked at some Haskell solutions! :D

• Also, I’ll be working under the big kahuna guy for a project. I like him a lot, and I think he’s really motivational, so that’s encouraging. I’ll be the last point of contact before a release, too. I’ve never done that before, so it’s interesting. My current supervisor seems to think I get things done quickly, and I feel like I’ve been really slacking off :D I spent most of this week teaching myself how to write actual code in selenium in python instead of using the IDE which doesn’t really make you write actual code. Because..writing code..is more fun.

I got a call

• From two companies I’d love to work for. If I said which they were, you’d probably throw rocks at me, so I won’t do that. Think long…very long lines at career fairs, and people promising their first-borns. One of them I think in the future I’d definitely be a fit for, but both are great. However, I spoke with my mentor and he advised against it, and said I should, instead, focus on learning for now. So I have to let the opportunities to apply go. However, I am still applying for summer internships for next year, because why not. I’m thinking of trolling and just implementing the questions in Haskell. Since I’m learning, I can fail them, but then use the questions on my own to learn Haskell! :D

This morning

• I also booked my GRE for Sept 19th and asked for recommendations. I think I may re-write my statement of purpose for the third time this weekend. Oh, and I cleaned up and made a new resume for my Phd applications that is more suitable for that, based on a template of a current student I am friends with who I admire. I narrowed down my list to six schools. They’re really the only schools I’m interested in applying to for Fall. If I don’t get into any, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. But for now, I’m giving it my all.

And..back to work

• I spent yesterday evening starting to look at Probabilistic Data Structures. It’s interesting that a lot of schools (undergrad, I mean) haven’t latched on to this as a part of data structures / algorithms, but a lot of top schools like CSAIL and CMU have. I’ve seen it in the posters they’ve presented at ACM conferences.
• I say this because this puts a lot of schools at a serious disadvantage when solving problems with algorithms if they don’t know about some of these methods; for example, when I was looking at solving unique sets for duplicates, my friend and I both immediately jumped to using sets. Then I saw Gabe’s talk on Hyperloglog (it was in the context of Haskell and data science) through his time at Twitter. It’s more efficient than using sets. I’ve gone back and forth with statistics so I understand a bit of it, so it is definitely worth integrating it into my learning while studying long-term. It’s crazy that so many schools are sticking to basic data structures and algorithms as the only way to solve computational problems!

Anyways

• Back to work for me. I plan to spend the weekend working through understanding some of the concepts like Http and APIs in Haskell, and going through the browser engine tutorial in Rust. I’ve been making notes on my repo about it.