Recurse Center, 2014-06-23

The Apprenticeship patterns book is very interesting! I shall continue to read it and start create daily/weekly rituals from the actions prescribed in the book!
I was reading this post on git gc, reflog, etc. and wanted to see what the default values were for some of the configurable variables. But, the git config command didn’t help. Developer/code defaults are also a part of the “config” system, and any tools to inspect config variables should display them, if no other values have been set explicitly!
“If experience is built upon failure as much as success, then you need a more or less private space where you can seek out failure.” – Apprenticeship Patterns.
Our check-in groups changed, but 3 of us from our last check-in group are together again!
Most of the day was spent with Git. In the morning, I learned that setting push.default to nothing will prevent pushing any branches without specifying explicitly which branch I want to push.
Also, later in the day, Alan gave a presentation mapping the internals of git to the commands, trying to give everyone a better mental model of Git.
I spent some time trying to get jedi integration for emacs. It should’ve worked out of the box, but I’m not sure the ELPA repositories have proper dependency/version management. Seems to be the problem, everywhere! Dependencies of a package get updated, and the package starts acting up…
Chaitu sent me a link about solving mazes using Finite Automata, and I spent some time trying to write a simple solver, and compare it with Nava’s breadth first search. But, it looks like we broke her code during the refactor. I may get back to this, at some point.
I also spent a few minutes talking to Kyle, while he was trying to implement a simple version of the NTP protocol. The algorithm it turns out, is pretty simple.
I started reading a little bit on crypt-analysis for Simple Substitution ciphers, and I’ll try implementing one of the algorithms today.
The day ended with yummy pizza and video watching! We watched –
- Bret Victor, Inventing on Principle (54 min)
- Gary Bernhardt, WAT (4 min)
- Guy Steele, Growing a Language (53 min)