So now I am at the end of day 3 of this batch - which means more than half is over! A lot has happened that I want to write about, although I have made very little progress on the side projects I planned to work on. Like the previous post, I am organizing this one by theme.

Interaction with Recursers

This is going really well - again, by my own standards. Yesterday I had a nice long chat with a fellow Recurser on build systems, C++ and PHP in the modern era. I also attended a group music listening session late in the night, and it was very therapeutic for me. As I realize time and again - music has a profound effect on my life.

The project

The project I am working on is homesocial, as I mentioned before. I started this nearly a year ago and hadn’t touched it beyond an initial proof-of-concept.

I spent Tuesday (day 2) simplifying the way the browser-based client finds the server. Instead of making the user specify the server’s IP address during logging in, I used the URL from the request made to the client.

Today I added a timestamp to each post, and sorted the feed based on them. This took some time, because I was sending an integer from the client, and the server was finally writing a floating point number to the database. I finally found out that JavaScript’s Date.now() method returns a value in milliseconds which was going beyond 64 bits. Sqlite stores an integer as a floating point number if it cannot fit into 64 bits. The simple solution was to send this to the database

Math.round(Date.now() / 1000)

Other work

Building that Rust project

I finally succeeded in building this Rust project. The errors were due to a git submodule whose files weren’t copied to my local repo. I didn’t even know that something called a submodule existed - thankfuly the Git book explained pretty well.

Pushing out a project to Heroku

I had been building a demo of a website for browsing (not searching) Indian Classical music recordings on YouTube. While this is far from complete, I needed to make it visible since I wanted to demo it to a few people. It took me a while to figure out Heroku’s use of the PORT environment variable, but after that it was quite easy to push.

Trying to extract weather data

I got started on this idea which I had long ago, about organizing weather data by temperature and not by location. I am trying to see if the NOAA’s CSV files can help me. They seem to be the best free option available.

How I am feeling

For a large part of these two days I felt a bit guilty about enjoying my time in the batch like a vacation instead of treating it like a sprint. I think I managed to get over these feelings and start pushing myself. Some counseling from my wife definitely helped, and so did two hours of music last night!