GSoC Day 86

Code Complete!

• I am officially done with respect to coding for Google Summer of Code. Even though there will be some tinkering of code, I’m just working on a final blog-post. It’s been a really fun summer! Today, I worked on a ZoomSlider and drawingOf debug controls.
• I’m working on another pull request for another project, but I decided it’s better if I take the day off tomorrow to work on the blog post and on my pull request. So that’s how it’s going to go, it seems.
• Don’t tell anyone..but there’s going to be …video! :D (Don’t tell Gabe especially, or he’ll be ecstatic! Actually, he already knows LOL). Apparently, he knows the phrase “smash that like button!” and was joking around about it yesterday, because of the videos his kids play from YT.

My next project

• I’m going to keep working on Haskellbook and work on a project next. It will be an uphill battle. But I hope I’ll come out as a stronger Haskellino.
• I found this awesome group on reddit called “GirlsGoneWired”. And lo and behold, someone had posted a link for an FP job for a startup! It was about 2 months ago, so I don’t know, but I thought I’d contact the lead to see if they’re offering internships or anything. There was one girl who was interested, and was asked to apply. So make that two…even though I’m more interested in internships or something like that. In any case, I’m going to continue learning on my own, and with my local group, and the other online group.

Things I realized

• There are some rotten apples in the Haskell community, but there are kind people. There are good people, and I’m really really thankful for that. They’ve made a huge difference in my life, and I’m really happy for the mentorship. I have a long way to go, but I’m definitely up for the Haskell journey! :)
• My mentors told me about the intention of the Haskell community, and that it has a good heart, and about the people who started it. It made me feel a lot better, and I’m really optimistic after hearing its roots. A lot of it to me is also about ideas. The FP community has great ideas that over time has filtered into the way other communities problem-solve. I got that sense about the Racket community, also. They reasoned that maybe we can’t have Racket being used as widely as Java because it may never experience that kind of adoption, but our ideas are good ones, and we can continue to spread those, and those have influenced other languages and the way people look to solve problems. Maybe the solution isn’t to push a naked, pure version of X language (because some people run away screaming just seeing parentheses), but take abstracted ideas in ways programmers from other paradigms find useful.
• Oh, I finally got around to seeing “Why Functional Programming Matters”. If you haven’t already, definitely worth watching! He conveys similar sentiments (particularly in the Intel example).

That’s about it for me.