RLOS Week 4

And we’re off!

• This week, we are working on our first distributed pipeline, starting off with two nodes. It’s almost working!
• Once it is, it will be iterated over so that the distributed pipeline is as explainable as possible.
• But yes, I have made my first pull request! Hooray! It’s not ready to be merged, but it’s a start, based on the one-node version that I had been previously focusing on, which built upon the local to cloud pipeline we started with initially.
• Since this is also a research-y project, there are some aspects that need to be designed and spec-ed out, and we’re working on that, too, via OneNote and through our discussions via Teams. So I’m working on those two things for the end of our sprint next Friday.

I am exhausted

• I’m not going to lie; I’m exhausted this week. I went to sleep at 4am, to get up at 7am today, around when I made that pull request.
• We’re working off of a feature branch, and after summer, the hope is that it will be merged into master by the core maintainers (who are my mentors).
• My response to doing that was that I was actually happy that I could get 1.5 hours of sleep and set my alarm, as I thought I’d have to work all the way up to the meeting at 9:30am because I was silly and tired and couldn’t get my git act together (until caffeine).
• I’m rotating through a lot of projects, a lot of people, a lot of meetings, a lot of stuff, across all the various things I’m a part of. I’m really busting my hump. Is it really summer?
• I’m holding it together, but there isn’t a lot of wiggle room, especially this week; if I take a break for a few hours, it means I have to make up the time later, often very early in the morning (so I often sleep and get up via my alarm for a few hours at a time). This kind of schedule reminds me of high school; a friend of mine who became a doctor would sleep and get up, like we all did, to study and do work, and she would drink 5 cups of coffee…as a teenager in high school!
• I did meet with my Blockchain mentor, and he gave me some great resources to get started on a small project, and I’m excited! But I won’t get to that until at least Friday, based on my current level of exhaustion. I have taken the time to read the paper that was suggested, though, and look at the general codebase.

I met a lot of great people!

• I met a lot of really cool people this week!!! On top of that, I attended an AI conference and a ZKProofs conference, and submitted a poster that I have to present next week sometime in the wee hours of the morning, because the workshop is based in Europe! I’m also apparently working on two papers, which is super fun.
• It’s summer, but my life hasn’t really slowed down, and I wonder who these people are that have chill summers. That would be nice, but it’s also my fault because I’m a workaholic. I did get a good book recommendation, which arrived a few days ago, so I was able to read a bit during my lunch break, but more than likely I’ve found that I use my lunch breaks to take a nap. Today I was especially wiped out during lunch, but it worked out. Yes; yours truly uses her lunch breaks either for meetings or sleep.
• Come to think of it, I’ve definitely worked jobs where people would go in their cars or trucks during lunch time, put up the Windshield sun shade, and take a nap (usually they were parents who had a crazy schedule between working and taking care of kids).
• I’ve been asked to be involved in and speak at some things coming up, so I have to prep for that, along with some of my other duties, for which I’ve been planning.
• I also have to ensure that none of these events are outside of my work hours, which has been fine so far. I’ve been quite explicit for anyone who would like to meet with me or work with me that I am only book-able either during my lunch hour (which means no nap that day :( sadness) or before or after my work hours.
• At some point, I’d love to take a break, though; preferably in Winter sometime, and hopefully in my country of birth, but who knows (global pandemic and all that).

Overall

• I really like my internship! The people are super chill, very knowledgeable and the perfect mix of systems-mindset, research-minded / innovative and customer-focused.
• So I have no complaints; both RLOS and my current internship are pretty awesome!

And that’s it