Doing Nothing, for Once
This weekend, I did absolutely nothing. By “nothing,” this time, I mean nothing related to work or research. I feel pretty guilty about this, but it is what it is, and I needed a break from going into the lab for the last two weekends straight.
The emails I’ve been getting for my TA coordinator side-job have been slowly decreasing in frequency. I think this job has taught me a valuable lesson; I don’t think I’ll be looking for any “management-level” positions any time soon. Not that the TA coordinator job is a management position at all, I think it’s just a convenient position to dump a lot of management-like responsibilities onto.
Most of last week was spent poking my head in and out of the POPL 2022 sessions that William et al. were streaming in the lab. It’s amazing how much lingo one picks up from half-listening. I learned what strong/weak normalization is, as well as the PL definition of confluence (NOT the wiki product by Atlassian). Most (if not, all) of the technical details went over my head, but there was an interesting talk on Scala 3 that consisted of the presenter literally walking us through a pdf version of their paper.
On Thursday, I met with Tim from JetBrains Research regarding the results from my reachability question survey and my paper prototype. I hate presenting with a passion, so I made sure to have two cups of coffee before I presented to make sure I could give a somewhat serviceable presentation. It also didn’t help that Tim was on the other side of the globe, so I had to present pretty early in the morning.
All that said, he seemed pretty impressed (or at least, didn’t completely dismiss my ideas) by the work, and said he’d catch up this coming week from members of the IDE tooling and usability arm of JetBrains Research. If stuff pans out, I think collaborating with an industry research lab would be pretty cool. I’ll be spending some of the upcoming week refining my paper prototype and creating some new views.
I think that’s it for now, I’m gonna go back to doing nothing