GSoc and RustReach Day 14th

• I stayed up late so I actually didn’t go to the second day of May Day Convoluted. We had split parking the day before when we went to Grand Central Market after the event for dinner, so I contacted my friend about chipping in, and to my surprise, he asked if I wanted to meet and he could help me work through some Haskell and I could just buy him a coffee! Wow. It was worth so much more!

• Very interestingly, my friend Daniel not only helped me type-check what wasn’t type-checking, but helped me speed up my workflow and really understand what was going on. He spent about 3.5 hours working with me, which was really really appreciated! We used a different method, but reasoning through made me able to come back to my original code and worth through it to match the other code :D
• I also learned how to use ghc --make (give optns cabal has) (path to file to check)

• Also -fno-code is good if you want quick feedback (but doesn’t check incomplete patterns).

• I was then able to come home and quickly get my code to type check and committed it to my PR. Super! :D

• I hadn’t even noticed before that there was a cs and a callStack in the code, which do similar but different things as functions. Also pathDrawer vs polygonDrawer. So he walked me through reasoning about a lot of that, which was interesting. He also knew when things would type check, which he said is similar to the way you reason in Mathematics, and that I would build that intuition with practice. Yes, I’d love that!

• He has a Maths background, and was telling me that in Mathematics, you often have to teach a lot more people than CS master’s or PhD TA-ing, because there, in general, many more Maths classes. So you get used to explaining things to people and seeing how they think. I found that to be profound. I’ve experienced that in my classes, also. We have a bajillion Maths classes, and I’m pretty sure a lot of the profs wouldn’t really want to grade the work, so TAs would do a lot of that, as well as help students with their work. I wished more CS people did this, though!

• Another thing he did was pulled out a paper and pencil to explain things! Yisss! My mentor at JPL does this with me all the time, so it’s something I’m used to, and I sometimes struggle to do things without it. He laughed and said that if a place laughs at you for trying to solve problems that way, it’s probably not a place you want to work for in any case LOL.

• So all in all, I had a really great, productive day. I have a meeting in the AM for Rust, but I’m pretty much free in terms of GSoC so I’ll be working on the last bit tomorrow. Let the mentors have their day! :D

Todo

• The last three constructors (involving Arc)
• My blog post on Medium

And that’s it