Jun 21, 2022 17:12
· 784 words
· 4 minutes read
weekly-reviews
Free And Open Source(FOSS) Work
We had a round table with William E. Byrd.
He showed us some of the cool things he has been working on, in particular mediKanren—a system for bio-medical reasioning—and some of its cool use-cases.
It’s written in a lisp!
This article shows some of the interesting ways it has been used.
Gave a presentation—during my weekly stand-ups—on the case-attributes ontology I generated. This was well-received.
For this week, I’ll submit a patch to the relevant repository and see if I can replace some SQL queries with RDF ones in GN3.
For this week, I’ll see if I can fetch this and this datasets, upload them somewhere in the GN infrastructure, match it with a genotype file, run pre-computed mapping (correlations), update metadata and link out to RDF.
I may have to break this task further into more manageable do-able sub-tasks.
I successfully set-up an NNTP server to fetch mail from popular mailing lists from gmane.
I’ve also been able to configure my GNUs newsreader client to read and send mail, specifically for mailing lists.
However, I haven’t had success with making notmuch search through the fetched news items.
Regardless, this is a big first step for me on my path to being a more active contributor to some of these bigger FOSS projects.
I intend to set aside some time every day to skim these lists.
I reckon I have a lot to learn.
I’m trying to get into the regular grove of triaging GN’s issue tracker on a daily basis.
I’ll try to improve on this in the coming few day.
That would mean defining [at least to myself] how that looks like.
Grad School
Classes officially began on Monday.
The time-table was shared some time on Sunday.
Classes will be hybrid in nature; lecturers who are based abroad will have their classes in zoom.
Otherwise, there will be physical classes with the allowance of a virtual class for students based outside Nairobi.
Unfortunately, we have classes every other week-day.
In previous semesters, we had at least one day off.
I guess this is because of the coming elections which will eat into our time.
For this semester, I’m going to be more pro-active.
In addition to taking more meaningful easier-to-digest notes, I want to get into the grove of regular revision.
Before every class, I’ll take a break so that I’m fresh—classes are 3 hours long and I need all the energy I can muster.
Later this week, I’ll meet up with some class-mate to have some form of group discussion, and if feasible, hack on free software ;)
The goal of all the pro-activity is to make things easier on myself and to have a more balanced life/work/school balance.
Results aren’t out yet.
I expect that they’ll be released some time this week.
Long Form Reading
Made little progress in: “Getting All The Love You Want” by Harville Hendrix.
Tried to read SICP.
I’ll put a more concerted effort this week ;)
Personal & Miscellaneous
I’ve been regularly practising my typing.
My goal is to hit a speed of over 100 WPM.
[The Kenyan] Parliament had passed a controversial ICT Practitioners Bill with the aim of “regulating” the industry.
Also, some “coding curruculum” was shared in some mailing list.
You can view it here.
Went to the hospital. The “bad cold” I thought I had turned out to be atypical pneumonia.
Was given some strong medication, and now I’m feeling much better.
A former university class-mate’s company made it to the Ycombinator. Read more here.
At one point last week, as part of my work-break here at the Nairobi Garage—a co-working space—I attended some event themed “web3.0”.
As usual with events surrounding crypto, buzz-words were thrown around, and that made some people [not me] smile.
It was my birthday last Saturday.
I never celebrate it.
This being the first time in my adult-hood to do so willingfully, we went out bike-riding at Karura forest, and thereafter went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant.
I wrapped up the night by going to a game-night hosted by a dear friend.
This was mad fun!
This little hack sped up my GNU Emacs signifantly.
No more calling home (elpa/melpa) on start-up.
Such a subtle bug!
I’m getting into the habit of having a clear and “START/STOP” routine for most of my routines.
This prevents “tunnel-vision” [at least for me] when working on things.