Long (Long) Weekend
This weekend, I was taking care of Gary and Peeka, who are the cats of one of my coworkers from an internship long ago. This usually means I pack up my bags with some essentials, and cat/house-sit for a few days. I'm always surprised that my coworker and his wife trust me enough to stay in their home with their two cats for any period of time, but I won't complain.
Gary is the one on the left, while Peeka is the one on the right.
They're both incredibly well-behaved cats, although Gary routinely woke me up early (5am) with his meowing every day I was there, but he's so cute that I'm not even mad. They're also quite cuddly, meaning I got to watch some Netflix with a cat or two on my lap. It's probably the most relaxed I've felt in a very long time.
On Saturday, I met up with some members of my research group. Unfortunately, Gail was out of town for the weekend, so she couldn't make it. Times when all of the software engineering/productivity group members are together are few and far in between, so I made the most of it. Arthur and Giovanni are very close to finishing up their PhDs; Arthur actually asked me to give some feedback on the introduction to his dissertation, so I'll probably be doing that tomorrow + earlier next week. Alison is well into developing her source control history plugin, so I've also been helping her with disentangling the source code of the IntelliJ platform. Collaborating and seeing what other folks in the group (and the wider lab) are working on is one of the things that I enjoy the most about grad school so far – I'm happy that I'm able to do it.
I'm pretty much wrapping up the initial development of my plugin, and it should be live on a private link on the JetBrains Marketplace. This means I'll have to start designing a user study to actually see whether my plugin is better than the current tools that developers use right now to answer reachability questions. It's pretty crazy to think that I've been working on this for nearly 8 months, it certainly feels like much much less time than that.
Today, the weather was nice, and my coworker's apartment puts me in a position where I'm dangerously close to some craft breweries in Mount Pleasant, so I went to 33 Acres with a friend. I tried their Passionfruit Popper, which tasted to me like an ale with very strong notes of passionfruit. Whenever I'm in this area, I feel a pretty strong wave of nostalgia wash over me. I worked for a summer nearly three years ago at Hootsuite, and 33 Acres was literally the next block across from the old Hootsuite building (below)
As was a number of craft breweries that I would get to intimately know during that summer. These places became a summer haunt for some of my friends and myself. I still remember the sticky-hot nights spent outside underneath a lamppost while sipping (probably) more beer than we should have. I'm definitely planning to enjoy those experiences again this summer, and maybe organize something for the SPL around here, as well.
I also visited Harken Coffee. It was a while since I last just sat at a coffeeshop and drank coffee while doing nothing else. The barista at the counter definitely knew what they were doing, and there's nothing I like more than someone who's passionate about the work they do.
That's it for this long (long) weekend, see ya