March 14, 2022

Daylight Savings

It's 6:20pm as I write this, and it's still light outside. People generally seem to like the extra few hours of daylight in the day, but I've always had no problem with the early and extended night that comes with Winter. What I especially dislike is when the sun stays up until 8:30 or 9pm in the middle of summer; this really throws my entire rhythm off.

I spent this weekend writing some more open-source code. I never really enjoyed starting my own projects from scratch – working on an existing system feels like more of an interesting challenge for me because of all the parameters I have to consider. Why was the system built like this in the first place? How should I implement this behaviour so it's idiomatic with the rest of the system? These are questions that are different for each open-source system, and it's interesting to get breadth of experience as I go about exploring them. This weekend, I've started implementing a user session store for the Scala Package Index, so users aren't signed out whenever the service is redeployed. This involves creating a SQL database to store user sessions and credentials. My lack of experience in SQL-based systems is really showing. Maybe I should've taken 304, or something.

Last Friday, the Splab had a movie night with Systopia ¹. We watched "The Disaster Artist" and some folks played a bomb disposal game. We had more socials during the first half of the year (probably because we were all excited to be in-person again), and this was a welcome return to form. That said, I'd like to take a bit of a break before we have another one.

This coming week, I'll have to prepare a UDLS for grad visit day. I thought about re-using some of my old slides, but then I thought it wouldn't be too fun. A topic I'm thinking of right now is "Movies and Media Shot at UBC," but that sounds like a lot of work spent tracking down photos.

I'm tired so this is all I'm going to write for this week