The end is nigh (that's how you say it, right?)

I almost forgot to write a newsletter today (got bogged down in coursework), but here I am, typing away at the keyboard.

This week in First World Problems, I ran out of chemex filters. For those of you who don't know, a chemex is an incredibly ostentatious piece of fancy glass that wannabe hipsters use to get their fix of flavoured bean juice (pictured below)

So naturally, I own one. After seeing one of my coworkers (if you're reading this, Hi Clay!) grind some beans and make coffee with it each day at work, I decided to get one for myself when things went online in March.

Starting the day off by methodically weighing out exactly 42g of coffee beans, grinding them by hand, and then pouring exactly 700g of water was pretty nice. I think I enjoyed it more for the activity rather than the actual boost of caffeine. These days I just boil some water, open a bag of tea and down it.

It looks like the filters I use are produced by the chemex company themselves in Massachusetts, and their factory has been shut-down for a while. Hopefully I can get my hands on a box soon, but the tea will do for now.

School is winding down, our course project for CPSC 513 (formal verification) is nearing its end. I've enjoyed going back to writing some Scala, and I've learned a lot from my team members and from the codebase I'm working on.

Something specific I forgot about was how powerful pattern-matching is In Scala. Turns out I was doing this

listOfStudents match {
    case grad: GradStudent => ...
    case underGrad: UndergradStudent => ...
}

and then manually de-structuring each object, when I could have simply matched on the type (and structure) itself

listOfStudents match {
    case GradStudent(id, ...) => ...
    case UndergradStudent(id, ...) => ...
}

a lot of boilerplate code went away.

This week should be the second-to-last post for 2020. I've got something pretty close to my heart to write about for next week's newsletter. Hopefully I can spend some of the week fleshing that out.

Until then, happy holidays!