Recurse Center: week 9, day 4

On the plus side, my bike doesn’t go “fut fut fut” when I brake anymore!

On the plus side, I have another day where I have good live test data for trying to print weather alerts, like air quality ones! Because the air is sort of dangerous. Again. Sigh.

On the plus side, it’s a new month and so I cut up last month’s amazing page from our Japanese frogs calendar (I bought it in Japan, it’s got frogs doing things on it, they’re amazing) and I am going to glue them to things. (This is a real, plain plus-side.) (If you are curious what it looks like, kind of, these are the same frogs in a previous year’s calendar. Google translate => Japanese phrase in Google image search => second result.)

Went on an amazing dosa quest with Steve to the vegan Dosa Man, and ate dosa and samosa (<3 <3) in the park in the shade and ran my mouth and Steve kindly facilitated the transformation of “me running my mouth” => “part of a conversation.”

Came back and spent some time doing awesome things with LEDs with Ranjit — he built a little Muybridge-inspired lantern, and we did terrible ideas and good ideas to it, and he makes hardware hacking seem more accessible than anyone I have ever met. Also now I know what that void business is about at the beginning of a C function (or method, or class, or whatever it is)! Neat. It’s just where you say what the function returns. And if it’s nothing (i.e. the function just does things, but doesn’t return anything), then the answer is “void.”

Julia Evans (awesome RC alum and programmer and Python community person and omg yes) has some post that I can’t locate about how saying “I don’t know/understand that” (at RC, in the world, etc.) is awesome because it gives you SUPERPOWERS for learning new things! If someone is telling you about something, they probably know something about it, and they can probably teach you some things. And I keep telling this to people, and because it’s Recurse, we talk about how it’s cool to say “I don’t know” and learn new things, and, yay.

I also finally, toward the end of the day, got more emoji into my weather program (yay!), but ALSO I got optional weather alert information to display (or not display/crash, depending on whether there are any active weather alerts for that location). How fun!

Would you believe I feel like I accomplished almost nothing today? It’s true. “I just did, like, a thing to my little weather program; it was kind of silly, mostly.”

But I am going to go home at a reasonable hour and maybe even get to bed before midnight. It could happen!

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