Yesterday was a bit more wandering than usual. I still have to finish (actually, start) the last chapter in the UPenn course (Monads). I hope to finish it during the weekend.

I started with reading Typeclassopedia, in the hope of getting comfortable with Functors and Applicatives and to get introduced to Monads. But, I got distracted before I got to the end of the part on Functors.

During the check-ins, Laura and Denise mentioned that they are both facing problems with OAuth, and would like to pair on it. I decided to join them, since I’ve had reasonable luck with OAuth, though I knew I didn’t understand it very well. While they were working on getting it to work on OSX, I was trying to write a simple Python example to do it, and was getting a weird error about the response_type being not supported. I was using rauth in a way very similar to what I had done for statiki but the Hacker School API server wasn’t letting me through. I could debug it only a little before lunch, and a little bit after lunch. And realized that the response_type had to be one of code or token and not json or empty. But this is a required parameter, and I expected rauth to do the right thing! I got back to it at the end of the day, and went through the RFC for OAuth2 and wrote up a simple Python script to implement the whole thing, without using any 3rd party oauth libraries. I think I understand the whole thing much better now, and will soon write up a blog post on it.

I spent about an hour or so on reviewing Nava’s code (along with Tom, Amber and Patricia), that generated and solved mazes. We tried to make small incremental changes to her code, and improve it, hopefully giving her a sense of how to make the code more intentional.

Thursday evening presentations! People here have been working on such cool stuff! Maze solvers and percolation probability calculators, phone gap based mobile applications, a cool Midi based music generator, an emulator for MSP430 in Clojure, an event logger in ObjectiveC that can log to a web server and can be used by multiple clients to debug communication related issues, a HTTP server written from Scratch, a web server in Swift, a pattern matching based library in js, a heuristics based puzzle solver, and a web editor for jekyll! Holy cow! These presentations are extremely inspiring and will probably be the thing I look forward to the most, for the next 10 weeks.

I can’t believe it’s already end of week 2. 10 more to go!