PLMW and Open Source

It’s still April, but I’m writing this anyways!

• I received two surprises today:
  • I’ve been asked to be a part of this summer’s “Increasing Rust’s Reach” commitment to Open Source. This means I’ll be working on a Rust project (specifically, CLI) that is open source. I will also have a mentor, whose name is Aaron. He lives in Dublin, so that’s going to be interesting! I’ll have to balance that with my Haskell open source project, but this project specifically asks for just 3 to 5 hours a week, and in return, will provide me with a free ticket, room and board to a Rust conference of my choice. So that’s really exciting! One of them is in Paris! :D I’m particularly excited about this because I’d like to continue contributing to Open Source, and the Rust community is great and complementary to the Haskell community (there is a lot of overlap). I won’t say this explicitly because I have no evidence, but I think that doing both will help me become a better problem-solver and a better programmer. I really think doing Rust will help me with Haskell, too.
  • Secondly, I’ve been invited to participate in my first PLMW workshop! This is great news, because it is an opportunity to meet with peers and be mentored by professionals in research. So I’m pretty psyched. PLMW is a mentorship workshop for researchers in programming languages. This one is part of PLDI, which I’m attending in June (the programming languages design and implementation conference).

I’m also booked for OPLSS

• I’m booked for OPLSS, so that’s taken care of. I will have to book the flight later on, but that will be fine. One thing at a time. Google Cal has me pretty organized, so I’m okay. It’s strange how things are sort of falling into place, though. It’s uncanny, considering I’ve butt my head against things in the past and had nothing to show for it. Since I’ve been following this path, things just really seem to make sense. It’s weird but really satisfying.
• In the meantime, I will be spending all of my time on Haskell. I have a pull request to work on all day with regards to a build error, and then I want to also keep working through Haskell material.

My general time

• Since I have to dedicate about 3 to 5 hours, I figure I can dedicate my Sundays to this, and spend the rest of my week on Haskell. Fair enough. It will also be a testament to whether learning both is really worthwhile. I’ve seen the question often about whether a person should learn one or the other. So we’ll see after this summer.

I’m really excited

• I’m excited by how much encouragement the community has given to me. I’m really grateful. I’m really honoured by how many amazing people have reached out to help me along my way. I could have never imagined a better summer. It’s going to be very tough, but I’m willing to put in the effort. It will make me a better programmer and tougher in general, and that is fine by me.