Up Late Building

Hello from SF!

• It’s been a busy few days.
• I had class yesterday evening, met with my two mentors right afterwards, and had a great conversation about digging into the codebase. As it turns out, we have a great pace. I learned so much about my mentors that I never even knew, about their initial paths and how they had a sort of curvy path to their current success. It really meant a lot to speak to them in this way. Also, I saw some ponies! :D
• Gabe and Chris both admitted that they were happy with my struggle, because it meant that I was learning, and this is part of the process. I wished more people (especially professional engineers) would talk about the struggle. Often, they make it seem like they never struggle.
• About two hours later, I took a bus trip up to San Jose. I’ve been in the Bay area since then, and should be heading back tomorrow. It’s my last bit of fun before my officially coding season begins. Interestingly, it’s turned out to be less fun, and I’m actually more excited about just working on Haskell and Rust.

And now I’m in a motel/hotel/hostel

• I don’t know quite what to call it, but I’m doing some work, trying to get my project to build with warnings. So far, so good. My machine wasn’t able to pick up on another wifi I was on with my other laptop, so I was only just able to get my project to build. But I’m making progress.

I did code today though

• I learned a bit about clasp and Gradle and Android and Angular. I completed four code labs, including one involving some machine learning. So that was really worthwhile and satisfying. I should be able to post a photo (or some photos) from it at a later date.
• I also stumped two sets of engineers; the first code lab I chose had a bug and I got a sticker just for reporting it. Things didn’t work in it at all. The second I got to work, the third was doable (Tensorflow and Structures in HTML and CSS) and the last had some issues, to the point that at some point four engineers were gathered around me, discussing that they should have some part of that documentation removed, and then cameras showed up and some guy was taking photos and they ended up thanking me for bringing it to their attention. I wonder why no one had done those labs that I had chosen specifically, or reported it.
• I really enjoyed working through the labs. I think I’ll do some more tomorrow. I’m not the biggest fan of Android or Gradle at all, though. But it’s good to go through the experience.
• It was weird overhearing other engineers saying that they wanted to do X or Y because this language or framework was “hot” or they were hearing a lot about it. It’s very unlike the general attitude of the FP community. I thought that to be an interesting contrast. I’ve been hearing a lot more from the FP community something to the extent of “this works well” or “is the best tool”. It’s an interesting difference in approaches.
• Interestingly, I had a lot of anxiety today about just being able to get back to Haskell. The whole Android thing was not really my scene. An engineer got me to write some Angular and learn about how to write emoji elements or something. It was okay, but I didn’t like that the types weren’t constrained. But it was good to try, and I’m always happy to learn.

Oh, I may be dog-sitting

• I got an offer to dog-sit near the end of the month, so I’ll probably be doing that near the end of the month :D

Working through…

• I was able to set up -fwarn-incomplete-patterns and should be setting up to show all possible exceptions and errors, so I can work through them and fix them. I really like that Haskell is sort of incremental. You chip away at it.

So I’m going to continue working

• Probably for about three or four more hours, then getting up two hours later to head out/ check out and all that.

My friend was telling me

• Before I left, a friend of mine said he found that I was very passionate and his sister had said something to the extent of how when you’re far away from home, it forces you to figure out who you are. I thought that to be profound.
• It hasn’t been easy, but figuring things out and failing, and still getting up and trying, being frustrated, finding a way, has definitely made me a stronger person and has reinforced certain values. It’s definitely been worth it, even though the journey hasn’t been easy.