Thursday May 31st

GSoC and RustReach Day 18

So sad! I’m just really enjoying both GSoC and RustReach and sad that we’re so far in! It’s been a blast!
I spent my day doing some manual testing stuff, but looked over at my coworker, who has been there since February, and he was learning Selenium. Now that looked a lot better. Two guys were helping him debug, and that was wayyy more interesting than what I was doing, so I opted to do that instead :D It looks like I’ll have to learn some CSS, Python, PHP and SQL. Fair enough, but what if I could write it all in Haskell? :D
A few people got promoted and stuff, who I hadn’t met or heard of, so that’s pretty great. It filled me with a bit of fear. I don’t know that I want to get promoted, because I want to be a Haskell dev / researcher. I think I’ll just do whatever while continuing to learn Haskell until I can just do Haskell full-time. Scrubbing floors, washing cars, you name it. Pay my bills and learn Haskell until I’m good enough to work full-time in Haskell!

So yeah..I’m on chapter 13! Yeahh!
So far, so good. It’s been fun. I did the grep example. That was fun. Their examples are pretty great, but sometimes they do this snip thing in their documentation where they don’t include all the code, so you have to figure out what is being added and left in the code you initially wrote, and hope it all works out. This one time they said “root”, and for a moment I thought “but what is root in a Rust program?” LOL. So yeah, just stuff like that. The compiler helps a lot. I found myself saying out loud “Compiler..you are correct..again!”. In the middle of a coffee shop.

It currently type-checks, but I have some cleaning up to do before I move on fully to the next task.
Also, Chromium didn’t end up working out on my laptop. I don’t know why, but everything Chrome seems to just freeze, like it’s hung up on something..something about a sandboxing error. Argh. Gabe suggested a video chat which we’re trying tomorrow, so we’ll see. The good thing about that chat is the address is the same, so it’s reusable.

I gave a talk on a recap of Google IO18. I also won a Daydream VR (pretty much everyone who showed up won something :D) and I met some amazing ladies. Apparently, one of them LIVES ON THE OTHER SIDE OF MY STREET! How cool is that!? She’s awesome, and I have a feeling some large tech company is going to scoop her up pretty soon. She just finished her Master’s, did some work at ILM and is doing computer vision and augmented reality research.
One thing she mentioned that I hadn’t thought about too much is that in research, you can work for years on something and it can get cut, and never see the light of day. So now she’s enjoying working on things she sees ship. That’s an interesting perspective. She also offered to help me prepare my application, and told me that I was doing really well and way ahead, and I should be quite fine.
Oh, and she totally mentioned that I missed an email I received that’s actually a recruitment email from BigN company. Yeah, so I need to respond to that person and send them my resume, which they requested. Do you have a Haskell job or internship for me after August? Pretty please? :D Heck yeah I’ll do it part time or full-time, remote or on location. I hope you like push notifications at 2am! :D

I have to cut my rent cheque, check in to my flight, take a break at 9am for my Mozilla meeting, leave early to drop off my rent cheque, make it in time for my 7pm meeting and do laundry, and also make sure I have time to pack. On Saturday, I also have a meeting at 1pm with my Mozilla mentor, so I have to figure that out with flying out to Denver (I think I land at 10:30am, though, assuming no delays). However, I was reading something about being able to check in at 3pm, but I have a meeting that needs wifi at 1pm. So yeah..I haven’t figured that out yet.

From Saturday evening until Wednesday, I’ll pretty much have all day to attend the conf, which is pretty much workshops on learning and understanding Haskell and FP. And they mostly end at 5pm and start at 9 or 10, so I have lots of time to stay up and work, as well as get some work done in the morning. I’m on campus so the walk is minimal. I’ve heard something about an ice skating rink from someone who used to go to Univ of Colorado :D. Oh man, don’t get me started. The last thing I need right now is to be crippled in the middle of doing three internships! That would not be good!

Written on May 31, 2018