Recurse Center Blagg – Jan 29, Day 20

(Great British Bake Off voice) Well, it’s fundamentals week here at the Recurse Center. Or at least obscure fundamentals? Fundamentals which are less likely to be useful than things I already know? In any case, so far this week I’ve:

• Worked my way through the excellent Learn You a Haskell tutorial, successfully seeded my brain with functional programming, maybe I’ll become a mathematician now. The typing is disgustingly elegant, as promised.
• Read the original rsync paper and the Lucene: The Good Parts essay to gain an appreciation of succinct documentation. I much prefer being verbose, so this is a real vegetables situation.
• Thought about mind mapping apps for a while; got a kick out of Domino, which comes out of the Bitsy scene of all things and uses a templating language called Pug that looks sort of like a static Emmet.
• Played with some 6502 assembly, having previously had a high-level understanding of how NES memory mappers worked but not really having reviewed the instruction set in detail before. This turned out to be great prep for…
• Participating in Tim Gfrerer’s CTF appreciation society, which involved a lot of decompiling x86 instructions and poking and prodding around for overflows. Stayed with this one for a few days afterward too as I wanted to get more in the habit of reading C and the Nightmare syllabus was quite in-depth and fun. Also proved myself handier than I realized where setting up VMs and shell environments was concerned; I’m quite helpful with ops stuff given the opportunity!
• Read through Ashley Blewer’s delightful Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus that’s doing the rounds this week; enjoyed the linked RFCs in particular.
• Reviewed my vim best practices because, in a decade of doing software development, I don’t often take the time to do that, and that’s what Recurse is for! I then shared this on a morning call and it turned out 2 or 3 other people had the same idea of “downtime,” which seems … troubling.

Note that I have very little of my own to show for all this! That’s fine! I’m out of ideas! Sheesh!

I also paired with Hank to demonstrate the finer points of string escaping. I should probably get back to an actual focused project next week, as I’m clearly going broader and shallower than ever at this point, but… I already shipped a few things this month and I’m enjoying the break from that. No good reason to burn out right now. Still, with only two weeks to go… gotta get myself featured on Joy of Computing, right?

Ideas are percolating.