GSoC Day 84

A short one

• I’m currently in the middle of the last push of work, and am in the middle of:
• A final GSoC retrospective. I’ve made two drafts, the second of which I’m working on making better after having received feedback from my mentors.
• Working on some new features for GSoC that are just what I can do down to the nth, because it’s fun :) I’m really going to miss the mentorship this summer; it was all really top-notch! I feel like part of a community that has high standards and strives for quality. That feels really great.
• Working on another pull request that I started yesterday.This is a new repo in the same suite so I had to fork it (did so on Friday), and am working on it locally.
• I came to the realization on Friday that I love programming, especially in open source. It’s just been a really fun experience. Seeing your pull request merged is also incredibly satisfying! Collaborating with people and solving problems is also really satisfying!
• My other pull request was merged (Friday!). It passed the Travis CI builds. I’m enjoying working on that set of repos, which is on boolean predicates. Besides the syntax, it feels so Haskell-ish :). I also learned about Monomorphization Bloat by making concrete types for one of my commits, which I later had to remove.

What I plan coming up

• In August, I’ll be in study and application mode again.
• In September, I am getting my recs together, transcripts and SOP (statement of purpose).
• Interestingly, the end of September is also ICFP, which I’ll be attending. I’m excited by both the people who will be there (because I love the PL community!) and the companies that will be there. There is something very different about the quality of companies that are at PL conferences. They treat you differently and I really like the way they approach looking for PhD students.
• I mean that they treat you as someone with intelligence whose time is valuable. I remember having a discussion with one big company that contacts me every four months or so and I told them X company contacted me but I wasn’t really into that, and the recruiters told me to just tell them and they’ll put me in stuff that was more aligned to what I’m interested in. To be quite honest, the last time they contacted me (in July) they put me in a much better recruitment opportunity. I liked the job description a lot better, and plan on reaching out to them once I get into a programme for a summer research opportunity (if it can work out). The companies at PL conferences seem to really respect the people there and their time.
• I think I can get some great feedback at ICFP. There are several professors and post-docs who have offered to help me and review my SOP. I need to touch base with them before I get to ICFP (todo). My friend, William, will also be there! So many people I love and respect will be there. I am really excited just thinking about it!
• I also am taking Discrete Mathematics and Advanced Data Structures, while holding down my part-time gig. I’m not that excited about class at my school, except for the fact that we’ll be building a database from scratch. Well huzzah! C++ though :( I am so rusty on that $h!t. Can’t I just use Haskell or Rust? LOL.
• I also have some dog-sitting to do at the end of August/ September.
• Finally, I have a round of interviews to do in September. So, we’ll see how that goes.

It really seems

• It always seems like I have a moment to breathe, and then I’m back in the race again. But that’s OK. I’m happy to keep moving. It’s better than being stagnant.