Recurse Center Day 2: Pairing Is Great
Today was the first "regular day" of RC, wherein the schedule was structured as it will be for the remainder of the batch. I started the day with two goals:
- Make the process of publishing new posts to this blog as frictionless as possible.
- Work on the password manager that I wrote in Rust.
I didn't complete either of these tasks, but I made progress on #1 and was really productive in some other ways.
The first half of the day was a total drag. I thought the the last iteration of this site's design was pretty ugly (unfortunately I am not blessed with a good eye for design), and I knew if I didn't make changes immediately, it would hang over my head and make me not want to share my blog posts. So I bit the bullet, spent a few grueling hours revamping things, and came up with a simple and minimalistic design that I'm content with. It's not the prettiest thing, but it works. And it's faster too! There's way less CSS and it no longer makes a request to fonts.google.com.
I also made progress on making it easier to publish posts on this site. V suggested that I could use Travis CI to push to my server, but I wanted to learn more about git hooks, so I opted for a different approach. I set up a bare git repository on my server. I added a post-receive script to that repository so that when I push to it from my local repository, it cleans up the necessary files and moves them to where they need to be. But I'm dealing with a blocker that's driving me mad. I switched from bash to zsh a few weeks ago, and I think something weird is happening with variable expansion and is mucking up everything I do that involves my ssh keys. I'm over it so I don't feel like writing about it now, but I'll say more about it tomorrow if I can't find an RCer to help me troubleshoot it.
The best part of today was an accident! I happened to be sitting in the room where a weekly event called Code Dojo was scheduled, and decided to jump in. Basically V picks a small programming challenge, then people pair up to work on the problem for about an hour, then we reconvene to share our code. I paired with Harold, who was a most excellent navigator. We worked on this HackerRank challenge and came up with an O(n^2) solution. A couple of other groups came up with something much more clever, but I didn't fully understand it until I came home and implemented it myself and my roommate Lyn helped me intuit why it's a much more elegant solution. I love living with RCers! Here's a gist with both solutions.
Other cool things that happened today:
- [Fenimore] shared that he found out about Cryptopals because of the solutions I posted on GitHub. He's already solved a few of them, and we're planning to keep chatting about them tomorrow. It's been a while since I wrote the solutions, but I'm glad for the chance to revisit them and check my understanding.
- I met another person who's into weightlifing. Is there some common personality trait between programmers and weightlifters? Because I've met at least 10 people at RC who are into lifting. It's awesome.
Tomorrow I'm going to figure out this weird problem I'm having with ssh, work on my password manager, and try to pair with someone on a small programming challenge.