RC day 1

RC began with a tour of Virtual RC, an online space that emulates the physical RC experience with all its serendipitous conversations. Then I attended talks by RC employees about the program and how to get the most out of it. Finally we broke into small groups and I briefly met a few other current attendees.

I found a study group following Cryptopals, a series of programming challenges that introduce you to real-world cryptography and breaking said crypto. I didn’t attend the group, but I solved the first three challenges using Clojure. I’ve never programmed in that language and haven’t used a Lisp in a while, so it took time to get through them. I might work on the problems more but probably not in Clojure. I like Lispy syntax but missed static types and couldn’t find high-quality documentation for the standard library.

After that I looked at an old project called Literate Diffs. The pitch is literate programming for Git diffs. PR authors should be able to reorder chunks in their PRs and add commentary around them. I think this idea has the potential to make code review a lot easier for reviewers (with a little investment from authors). I might resurrect that project this week or tackle the idea from a different direction (a file format? A browser extension for GitHub and similar sites?).

Honestly it was a slow day! I’m switching from QWERTY to Workman and still don’t have the hang of using Vim with this new layout. I’m using a package called vim-workman to let me use my QWERTY muscle memory in normal mode, which is helping a lot. In fact, this afternoon, I opened a couple of PRs on that repo. One was a documentation improvement, the second a fix for an issue. I filed another issue that I might take a crack at solving tomorrow.

I didn’t pair with anyone today. To hit that goal for the rest of the week, I’m going to have to put myself out there more than I did today. But working on vim-workman gave me some ideas for what to do this week. Maybe I can build some tools to make myself more productive as a programmer, then do a presentation on them at the end of the week. Or even present on my Workman journey and the software I’ve used to get here.