Cracking boredom

I’m still dog-sitting until Monday evening.

• I’m working through Hbook and a small tutorial on Sat solvers tonight, as I’m already a bit burned out after the flurry of activity when I got home. (dog happy to see me, etc).
• My friend at work and I worked through two more questions during lunch, and tomorrow we’ll work through two more. I started porting the answers (as I understand them) to Haskell. As for the book and the questions… I think they’re okay, but to be honest, some of the algorithms seem a bit generic. I think they’ll be fun to solve in Haskell. It feels kind of CS college grad 101.
• An engineer friend from a company I really like told me about another book, which I promptly bought this evening. The algorithms are a lot more interesting. And this engineer works on stuff like spatial algorithms, so pretty hard-core stuff with graphs and quad-trees.
• The code in the book he recommended is in C++. So that’s another win! I’m writing C++ this semester. It’s the Design of Algos one by Skiena. I think that’s a lot more in step with what I’d prefer to study. I’m currently watching the Big Data Data Structures Stanford lectures during the day so I don’t fall asleep at work lol. I won’t go into detail, but it’s been difficult for me to focus. I can’t focus. It isn’t challenging. Apparently my peers don’t seem to have a problem with that, but all I can think about is going back to school. I want to solve impossible problems. My talk with my friend on algorithms today just lit me up (not the questions from generic CS 101 book). Man, I had so many questions. Actually, the last time I spoke with him, a question he asked me really stuck with me. For weeks. It was just so interesting! Today he asked me something else I had never thought about before. I came back to my desk and had to quickly google it. To find something..anything on it. I came back to my desk and it was like I was seeing fireworks. I was alive. And then I just couldn’t focus on the task they gave me, because it was just…
• But back to the book, though… I feel like the one we’re going through is a bit more average in terms of what it covers because it has to appeal to a variety of roles. The Skiena book has more logic and mathematical algorithms, so it lends itself towards people who are interested in research or building systems with a certain way of thinking about how the parts come together. I liked what I saw immediately and had to get it.

I try to push myself every day

• Some days are tougher than others to keep at it, but it’s really not difficult for me to put in time to code every day. I’d love to continue to have progress in this project. I started looking up (two days ago) parser combinators. I figured out how to get an http response, although I need to work through a system that gets both http and https. After that, I’m going to fully delve into parsers and see if I can figure out how to model a simple AST and parse something like JSON. I know how to do it in Python, but Haskell..she is another beast.
• I also snuck in some time to look at some Tsoding videos. I see what all the fuss is about. He’s fun and great at explaining “Haskell rank”, as he calls it.
• Unfortunately, not all employers allow these questions in Haskell, or worse, Rust. The drop-down is often completely devoid of any choice for Rust. But oh well, that’s the company’s loss. They’re missing out on some awesome talent between those two languages alone.

Anyways

• I’m missing out on a JPL lecture tomorrow, but I’ll probably catch the stream at home.
• Oh yeah..that Scala course started back on Coursera. I mayyyy do some Scala on Sundays, just to learn a bit of it. It can’t be that different from Haskell, right? And it might help! But only a couple hours a week. The rest is for Haskell and my PRs in Rust. Anyways…Back to Haskell!