GSoC and RustReach Day 37

I have a roommate

• She got in around 4am, and she’s from Texas. She’s very funny and smart!
• We are both going to the M Carbin PLMW workshop. I am excited.

Also

• Tested my function! If it exceeds more than 30 chars for now, it truncates, or otherwise returns the string
• It needs tweaking but at least it kinda works :D

• And this is with truncation for vertices

• Pretty exciting!

I rounded the angles to 2 decimal places

• And the pull request has been merged to master. On to the next task!

PLMW

• I received a scholarship to attend PLMW. It’s a mentorship workshop for people who want to go into PL research.

We had a series of talks

• About what to expect, technical talks, how to write a research paper. Papers we should read. Different researchers were brought in to speak about their experience. They also spoke about possible topics. There was one talk at CMU I really enjoyed, and I asked the professor a question about whether he had looked into a particular problem, and he had not :D So..there we go. I’d like to go to a Haskell school, ideally, though.

Here are some pics

One of the types of researchers lol

For lunch, they had a special table for us

• They made sure a researcher was at each table so we could chat with them. I met a researcher at MIT who is a sailor, named Sara. She’s also helping her friend repair a $100 boat (Sanding it down, etc). I really liked her. She said that I should definitely apply and said that I seemed really into PL. I found out later she had started by studying biology, because her parents wanted her to be a doctor, but switched to computational biology, and then to PL. That was a shock to me. However, she had been programming since the age of 7, so she wasn’t super new to programming when she switched.

This is another MIT professor

• He actually couldn’t even get into an undergrad school. He applied in the midst of the recession, so he couldn’t get a spot. He enrolled in community college, also. He also almost dropped out of grad school twice. However, he ended up teaching at MIT and now works at Adobe in the Bay. I also ended up having dinner with him, and Zach, who I also really liked. Zach said he was the first in his family to get a degree, and had a slide that said “from bailing hay to hooding PhDs” LOL. He said that it also took him a while to learn to do things like eat with a knife and fork, because that wasn’t something he grew up doing, so he had to learn the etiquette for the conferences, etc. I found that to be pretty remarkable.

Evaluations for Research

M Carbin

• He works at MIT. His father was actually a sharecropper whose dad went to kindergarten at 9 and applied to work at MIT and got rejected. His dad ended up earning a PhD and working as an industrial chemist, and then becoming a dentist because he wanted to work for himself.

I really appreciated

• That they showed the side of researchers that we don’t typically see; that they’re human and have flaws and that not everyone came from privilege or anything. It was pretty great to see how they succeeded and failures and setbacks along the way.

Posters

• They had a display of posters from researchers and gave us the opportunity to ask questions. I met one gentleman from Cornell, and he encouraged me to apply, and said they did quite a bit of Haskell too (even though not as much as UPenn).

After dinner

• I went to City Tavern with two mentors. They ended up paying for our meal. I actually had quite a bit in common with them, as they were into 3D software, and I’ve used a lot of 3D software in my past. They told me that SIGGRAPH even has a submission category for PL now. Interesting.

I went back to my hotel and took a walk

• My hotel is at Penn’s Landing, which is right by the boats. It’s beautiful. I love sailing. I saw people playing Bocce, on roller skates and a skating rink, a ferris wheel, and it was just fun.

• I got back to my hotel after walking around and ended up chatting with a group until 11:30pm. It was just really a great experience. I’m happy I’m here.