Week Notes: 27

Sep 5, 2022 21:50 · 672 words · 4 minutes read weekly-reviews

This entry - an exception - is less of a week entry, and more of a monthly entry as I get back my grove to writing my weekly reviews. Many things stressful things have happened, but nevertheless, we keep going.

Free and Open Source (FOSS) Work

  • Lesson learnt: Never as a rule of thumb use “car”, “cdr”, “caar” and friends when writing scheme code - they can be a readability nightmare. Instead, prefer to use the match syntax.
  • Had to have a conversation with my boss on how to be consistent with work. We settled on regular daily mail patches that Arun can review to give feedback. I love this format. I haven’t been able to be doing that daily, but I do that regularly.
  • I’ve started getting into the grove of writing design docs for work I think will take more than a week; and also doing short 30-min sprints for my broken-up tasks.
  • One of the dev servers is out because of a hardware fault. Nothing much I can do on that front, but regardless, I’m sure it’ll be handled in good time.
  • Submitted and merged these PRs: #721, #725, #728 and #729. #728 is based on this doc.

Grad School

  • Did some long-ish 4 assignments and one projects.
  • Finished some 4 hour long CAT.
  • Fixed my R install by removing the guix-installed one, and using the one provided by Arch Linux. I also did the same with autoconf.
  • I won the DSA grant and that’s big news
  • Met my assigned SU supervisor. We agreed that I’ll begin work on my introduction and problem objectives on my dissertation. I haven’t done much work on this, but I plan to pick this up as soon as I can.
  • I have a group project due. I’ll be working on that in my spare time as I prepare for finals.

Long Form Reading

  • Made some little in progress in SICP.
  • Made good progress in “How to Read a Book.”
  • New book I want to start on once I clear my queue: George Polya’s “How to Solve It.”

Personal & Miscellaneous

  • Fixed some long-standing issues I had with missing icons on my system. The fix was simple: guix install adwaita-icon-theme
  • Embraced quiy [some niche ontology] for folders in my systems - helps with fuzzy searching: “lq”: policies; “rqr”: tasks; “rq”: research; “oq”: language/system-tool; and “jq”: configuration. This is in addition to using “,” for my user-scripts.
  • I noticed that the Nairobi Garage’s - Spring Valley - was blocking my ntp packets. In the process of figuring this out, I also noticed that they blocked many useful ports (including port 22). The staff was very helpful - they wound up providing an alternative WiFi access point for member’s use.
  • Elections happened; and were disputed in the supreme court. The end result is that Hon. William Ruto is now the 5th president of Kenya.
  • I broke up with my [ex] partner. This has been such a painful experience for me and I’m still dealing with [in a positive way]. I was concerned about how it would affect my other aspects of life. So far, I’ve been dealing with it in a decent way. Important questions I’ve been pondering - with help - are: What did falling in love do for me? What have I learnt from this relationship? What would I do differently?
  • Lost my wallet. Only important things that I lost were access pass (already replaced), my student ID and my national ID. I’ll be replacing the latter and former some time this month.