Tuesday March 6th

It’s my Birthday!

Lots of Happy Birthday wishes all the way from New Zealand and Tokyo to a cake right here in California :D
My dog even legit sent me a birthday card! She (Izzi) asked that I please send food! :D

I spent most of my day researching grad schools and doing Haskell. I’m currently on Chapter 4, on page 107. So far, so good.

My friend is applying to a bunch of schools locally, so that he can get in for Fall of this year. This would be at the tail end of applications.
I spoke to my parents about it, and they told me to just do what I was doing, take my time and research a programme I want, and apply to those. Taking a bit more time and applying later in the year (for next year) also gives me time to build up some savings. So that’s not too bad, either. Plus, it gives me time to do some more coursework and take some more classes and do more research. Anything that gives me a stronger application and makes me more prepared is worth it for me.
A friend of mine who is a scientist and well-known FP-er and has a PhD offered to Skype with me later this week. I really appreciate his taking the time to help me. It means a lot. People in the research community and especially in PL really seem to be good people. Another person earlier last week even said over a summer once I get in a programme, I can help work on a language’s (that I like) compiler system. I’d really like to do that. I’d like to work in a lab for experience. All of that stuff would be great.

What’s my desire for all of this? POPL was the first time things really came together for me. I’ve been in and out of languages and trying to do things like web-dev because it’s what I was told I had to do to get my foot in the door in industry, and then data science because I have the capacity for it and like stats and patterns with numbers. However, PL (Programming Languages, Compiler Theory, Type Theory, FP) is that thing that lights me on fire. It’s the thing I keep coming back to. My mentor for my data science course asked me what I planned to accomplish one week and I told him I was learning Julia because I really liked the type system. He likes chatting with me, but I’m that student. What is she up to?
I once took a break from my data science coursework to do an entire course on compilers, because I just found it to be more interesting. I finished the compiler course, though! It was sad that it was so short.
This past Monday, my prof was talking about languges like C and PHP, and I asked him “have you tried Rust?” This ended up in his stopping the entire class to look up Rust. Then he went “hmm…” Hahaha. I also mentioned to him about the new Firefox and the Rust server, because well..it’s interesting.

I’m paying 1/5 of what I was paying for classes. That means I can now take more :D There used to be a symbolic logic class! Can you believe it!? I was so excited and looked high and low, but apparently, it’s no longer offered :( . I also applied for a scholarship. I don’t expect anything, but we’ll see, I guess. It took me two trips up to the office of admissions, the last of which I forgot I had my Denotational Semantics text in my bag. The trip uphill was not fun. That’s a big book!

I plan to continue working through Haskellbook
I plan to continue reading Denotational Semantics and Mathematical Logic
I plan to learn Proofs and finish up the paper I’m reading for that guy for the book
Around Fall, I plan to learn Liquid Haskell
I plan to continue in any way I can, either by making a compiler or an interpreter or something.
I’d also like to do some research..somewhere. There are a few possibilities. In any case, I seem to mostly get recruited for that sort of work. My qualifications don’t seem to match up with who people think I am, so I get some really interesting work and then I can’t get through the guard-keepers. But I will keep working on it, because it’s really, really promising that I’ve been consistently recruited for some really interesting stuff! So I don’t think it will be too much of a problem and I’ll keep on the look-out for interesting research. I still have time to apply for some research stuff at labs in my area or JPL. We’ll see.

Written on March 6, 2018