Reading Week
So, yeah. The image above really sets the tone for this week's newsletter. This past Friday, our first project for CPSC 539: Program Verifiers and Program Verification was due. In this project, we were responsible for building a SAT solver. My partner and I began working on it toward the second half of January, since we both seemed to be keeners.
All appeared to be going well, except on the Wednesday right before it was due, we discovered that our SAT solver was unfortunately broken. It was so broken. In fact, it was actually useless for any SAT examples beyond the ones provided in the project starter - my hubris with Scala and false confidence in our test suite ("the tests run, it must be correct") had finally caught up to me. Thus began two nights of absolutely horrific and frantic work to get our SAT solver to a state that we could submit.
Eventually (and with a lot of great advice from some of our classmates), my partner and I got it working, and we were finally able to say goodbye to this cursed project and say "hello" to reading week (break?). I should also mention that it snowed like crazy on Friday night (classic Vancouver, snow when we least expect it and never snow when we're prepared for it).
This week is UBC's "spring break." I didn't even know this was happening until early last week, so I'm overjoyed to get this small reprieve from school. That said, I still have a lot of stuff to do. I foolishly signed up for a cross department reading group for software engineering between UW and UBC, and I realized that I'm preparing a paper on the 22nd. I'm also interviewing for another summer position on Wednesday so I'll have to polish up some code I wrote back for the application in January. I'm really wondering how that interview is going to go, since I foolishly wrote my application in Scala and the company I'm interviewing for is known to be a big Ruby shop. Hopefully I can convince them of the power of types in an hour.
I'm realizing that my newsletters are getting out later and later on Sundays, that's probably due to me getting lazy. I hope this doesn't mean that I stop writing them at all but we'll see. Hopefully I sound somewhat intelligible to you, the reader.
Have a great week!