First Approved Pull Request

Waking up

• Waking up to an approved pull-request is one of the best feelings! This actually happened, and it’s amazing!
• It’s like waking up to a great cup of freshly brewed tea! So hooray for tea and pull requests!
• Yes friends; it’s been M-E-R-G-E-D.
• I will be posting more as we meet and I work through stuff. I believe the next part involves some research and design of the infrastructure.
• This distributed stuff is F-U-N. Parallelism for life lol.
• Later in the week, I am focusing on diagramming some of the code (yes, I am tracing the types!), because that is useful in figuring out what a user expects, and how the next part should be designed. So that’s cool because I get to draw things out. Completely reminded me of my friend, years ago, when I was in school, and I would watch him stream over Twitch (including build a compiler in 48 hours or something) when we were chatting and I told him I was “doing a stupid UML for class”, he responded “UML? People still do that? What is this, the 90s?”. He has worked exclusively for some of the top tech companies and game companies, so I had to laugh. It was my first glimpse into the disconnect between industry and what I was learning and why I should still keep open communications and ties between the two realms. C++ was the other. I still have an itch for it and hang around Discords where people write quite a lot of it, but the way I was taught wouldn’t fly in industry at all. I think I probably (especially now) write some terrible C++, but at least back when I was taking class it was almost enough to get me hired as an entry level roboticist writing it for a living (with a promise of being taught Assembly, too!). A lot of the way we learned to write it (C++) felt like writing Java (the person who taught it writes a lot of Java).
• Today, my current advisor writes python like it’s lisp, because he likes Racket. And that really cracks me up. You can tell sometimes he wants to coerce it to be Racket. An iRacket notebook. raco activate iRacket. Oh, and my MSR mentor (one of them) writes Python like it’s Haskell. He seems to LOVE types, and that suits me perfectly :). At one point last week, it was really early and I wanted to ask if he was writing Haskell. As it turns out, it was just python with types.
• The other professor I’ll be working with in Fall says she “doesn’t know Python” and then will proceed to casually write SageMaths without thinking. But they’re… essentially pretty similar? I have to say for the thing it’s supposed to do, SageMaths is pretty superior, though. It does things you expect it should do when you’re doing Maths a lot easier. Except division. Wtf do we need 8 types of divisions or whatever? Ring division, nose division, toe division? But oh, cannot do integer. Error: Must use two noses to divide, not integers.
• Catch me in a year extolling the superiority of SageMaths, though :)

On another note

• This week has been CRAZY! Not only have I been getting up at 3am (yesterday I got up at 2:30am, but today I couldn’t hack it because of all the stuff going on today). I had a poster presentation, an interview and another presentation all in the same day. I barely ended up eating lunch, and was SO thankful for (1) cancelling my late night Monday meeting (2) taking the early morning session off and sleeping in until my first 9am meeting, because I would have been wiped out, cranky and distracted.
• On top of that, in my usual awkwardness, I accidentally lost a video I had been watching and couldn’t mute it, just before one of my presentations. I began freaking out because there was no way I could imagine hearing a video of someone else giving a presentation while answering questions and while giving a presentation. So that was pretty funny and completely something someone of my level of general awkwardness would find myself in. It was like being in a meta-meta presentation and yelling “help me escape!” from the inside. What if there is symbolic execution for this?
• Oh yeah, and on top of that, in the middle of a meeting, I got delivery and the driver was high or something (not untypical of my location), and dropped off my food but was sending me a notification that they attempted to contact me but I didn’t answer (there was no such documentation of any call or anything?) so that they’d have to cancel my order if I didn’t contact them within 20 minutes or something. Fortunately, they had left it outside of my location anyways, so I did get my food, and even if they decided to cancel it in the system, I got my food and they could continue to be high while making deliveries and we were all good. So yeah, a little bit of mini-scares today that made me laugh.

So far so good

• My hump for the week is mostly done, and my crazy part of last week is also done, so things are a lot better.

And that’s it