GSoC, RustReach Day 28 and Disappointment

I’m currently going through

• The 2nd day of the ZuriHac Haskell Beginner Session.
• Day 1 was pretty easy for me, but I’m definitely reaching a bit of a ceiling for day two.
• Once I start getting into composition and Monads, I start to feel like I’m hitting a wall. I don’t have enough experience nor understand a lot of that stuff, even though I understand some bits conceptually.

Also

• I’m moving on with a new part of my GSoC project, and I’m not quite sure how to start. So there’s trepidation about that. I feel so incompetent right now.
• I also have to attend a final tomorrow, and asked three different people if it’s tomorrow, and haven’t heard back from anyone yet. Not even the teacher. I hate this.
• I’m missing hours of work (and pay) to go to this exam because my prof suggested that I do it since I couldn’t drop his class, and I have a meeting right after the exam that I’d prefer to be home for, but I was able to book a space at our computer lab to attend with my mentor.
• Also, I’m trying to confirm that I have a place to stay next week (halfway across the country), and I’ve heard nothing about that yet.
• Finally, I reached out to a person who said they wanted help with an open source project, and haven’t heard back from them. I’m going to give said person the benefit of the doubt and stay positive.
• So pretty much frustration all around. I guess part of it is my impatience and frustration that a lot of things are just out of my control. That stresses me out a bit.

You need to understand

• This is hereditary. My parents are planners. They need to know (mostly) how things will pan out. So it’s in my blood to at least have a decent idea of how things will work. My dad will blow a blood vessel if someone is half an hour late, and my mom will sigh emphatically if someone is highly disorganized. My brother is worse. He will say nothing, but he will be panicking (and dying) inside if someone is a disorganized mess. We don’t like loose-ends or loose-ends people, and one of our peeves is when people don’t follow through.
• Frustration with learning something new is also a legacy of my prestigous schooling-upbringing. The whole time I was in competition with my peers, who were all really bright, and I was in the “bright (aka Sciences)” class, so any sign of weakness or sign that you “didn’t get something” immediately brought you an immense sense of shame that I still carry to this day. We were bred in that school system to be ashamed of failing and sucking at things, because we were expected to be good at everything.
• Yes, this is setting kids up to have really low self-esteem. I know this. But it’s deeply ingrained in me and is something I have to deal mentally with every time I am learning/ sucking at something.

Otherwise

• I guess I just have to keep pushing. I really do like Haskell, and Rust has been treating me well, also.
• My plan is to work on Rust in the early mornings, and Haskell in the evenings and early mornings. So that’s pretty doable.
• Everything is just difficult right now, and it’s a bit frustrating. I have these doubts..like, what if I never get good at Haskell? What if no one wants to give me a break in the open source world after these projects? What if I’ve reached the limits of things I can do in Haskell, and it becomes gibberish after a certain plateau? Of course this is all silly, because lots of people have learned Haskell, and certainly the Rust community is super kind and friendly, so I won’t be cut off from Open source as long as I’d like to contribute, but there’s always that fear.
• I’m hoping to get into J’s Haskell book group, and stick with the Utah Online group. I wasn’t able to make the last session of the Utah Haskell group; I can’t remember why not (I was probably somewhere where I didn’t have internet access), but I plan to stick with both and get as much support as I can learning. It’s definitely not something you’d want to give a go by yourself, because you do get stuck. You do need that support when you’re learning a language. It’s super important, and also it’s important to know that people are rooting for you.

Anyways, I Guess that’s it for today

• Sorry it’s not a super-cheery post or anything. I hope I didn’t depress anyone LOL. But I try to keep it real and the truth is not every day is a Captain-Planet-saves-the-world kind of day, you know? Maybe this week will be better!