GSoC Day 52

Happy July 4th!

• Sadly, I’m not on a boat tonight (see last year’s post). I actually opted to do Haskell all day today, and time just flew by.
• Specifically, I just wanted to practice types and get better at it. I did this by revisiting Chapter 5 of Hbook. I’m currently on Chapter 10.
• It was really a lot easier than it was the first time. There was one I wasn’t able to quite solve, but the rest were pretty straight-forward. I’m actually really proud seeing the improvement.
• I was actually thinking of making a repo called “Haskell_Hell” that is just a list of type-checking exercises that you could spend all day doing to practice. But I need to get better at it myself first, to make sure they work. The name is appropriate because right now that stuff is a PITA for me.

I didn’t grill or anything

• But I did make some curried crab. If I had more time, I’d also make dumpling, which is what it’s supposed to go with, but alas. I spent most of the time musing about where I’d like to be in the near future and working on Haskell.
• I think one of my internships is having a bar-hangout thing tomorrow, but since I have no life (jk), I’m going to skip on that. Not really into the social stuff right now. I’m mostly just tired from working and working and then I go to sleep. Repeat. I ended up skipping the bus on the way home and leaving a bit earlier and taking four buses home instead because it gets me home a bit earlier so I can eat and take a nap before pair-programming with Chris. Power-napping is awesome.
• The whole local commute thing really is kind of b@lls. Telecommuting please be a thing.
• And basically I spend my time just feeling like I’m not good enough because everyone was in diapers programming in the hospital…before their umbilical cord was cut. Except me.
• So shallow socializing just makes me feel more behind on everything and I think it’s stupid trying to force myself to relate to people where I currently live because I don’t..have much…in common…with the people here…my age. I have no interest in getting drunk and seeing fireworks, but I do care about the history of the US, and what it stands for. As an immigrant, that means more to me, and the promise of opportunity. I think about my mom and dad. I miss them.
• I really like my JPL mentor, though; he’s probably three times my age (LOL) but I relate to him a lot more. He always knows how to say the most perfect things, like when I was complaining about hostile Haskell-land, and he joked (okay, there was some fervour in his words) that he could interest me in some Fortran. It made me feel better. He’s also truly successful and wants me to be somebody and isn’t all talk. I really like that. It’s the most honest thing.
• I’ve been keeping away from people who talk but are selfish and won’t help up and comers (which exists in many parts of the community) or talk but have nothing on their Github repos (also exists). This is real talk. This isn’t helping people who are serious. Gabe had a great line “there are only so many ways you can say Haskell is awesome”. Right now it hurts like hell, but I want to put my money where my mouth is. I don’t want to be one of those people who just hangs around the community for the free stuff and doesn’t write enough code.
• I mean, you can be like that if you like. It just isn’t for me. It reminds me of this one guy who would show up to a monthly seminar, go for the free food, pile his plate up with food, and then nod off to sleep before the seminar even started. He would legit start snoring. Finally, they’d had enough and had a talk with him. Thank goodness they had the b@lls.

One more thing…The weird thing about listening to a playlist on loop

• Is that you have no sense of time. So five hours passed this morning before I took a break and I had no idea. I sat down to work and time just flew by.
• I also got a suprise contact today by someone from PLDI. I really like the people, but I can’t commit to anything until after mid-August. I’m just really swamped. I have to get back to work. But if it works it out, I’d love to take them up on the offer.

That’s it for me

• Back to work
• Oh, also this post on difference between putStrLn and print was helpful. Apparently print x = putStrLn (show x). OK. Who knew. It helped me get my function to type-check today.