How are you?

It’s a common conversation starter. Most of the time I respond genuinely.

Great! How are you?

It amused a few people this week. They commented on my seemingly endless supply of positivity. This post will be a reflection on what I did this week & the mindset I had while I did it.

On the first day at the Recurse Center, it’s customary for those currently in batch & returning alums to give advice. Some advice I heard when I started my batch & this time was to do more pair programming, attend events or workshops, stick to your planned projects, or deviate & work on the projects you find here that seem so cool! I think advice like this is given based what has worked for the person giving it & or what they hope they will do for themselves. & that is certainly true for myself too. I said,

Spend your time the way you want

This is frequently a challenge for me & it’s something I would like to do better at. I want to live up to the expectations that I have for myself & I want to live up to the expectations that I perceive other people I care about have for me too. I want to spend my time giving back to those that have given a lot to me. Working on Rust open source & event planning is work that I love to do! It fulfills some of those goals.

I have a handful of interview I’m preparing for & a stack of emails that I want to respond to thoughtfully. I find that work harder to do quite often. But it needs to get done & I need to allocate time to do it now! It’s a priority, at about the same level as the fun work I enjoy doing. I can’t push it off forever.

Part of that work was preparing for a Haskell interview I had. A made a list of blog posts & papers I wanted to read & prepared by writing some Haskell code. The stress of preparing & the negative emotions that were coming up resulted me in getting really upset. I tried to press through that feeling for 3 days because it was work that had to get done.

Wednesday night I decided to reach out to my Rust friends & tell them I was struggling. I told them I wanted to find the joy I have for programming since I seemed to have lost it over those few days. We found some issues to work on & I was so happy. I got to pair with QuietMisdreavus, Eliza Weisman, David Barsky, & Michael Gattozzi on Rust code! It was a lot of fun & I felt like it was really valuable.

I got a PR merged for rustdoc! It allows extern crates to be inlined for Rust 2015 code for Rust 2015 code. I got a version bump for rustls in tower-grpc-interop merged. I’m making more progress on an issue on tower-grpc-build. I’m helping out with another rust wasm issue. Lastly, the code I wrote to create new types for keys and clear values on drop was merged in x25519-dalek & I’m working on another issue in curve25519-dalek!

I was asked,

What makes contributing to Rust projects so enjoyable? Is it the code of conduct?

In part, it’s the code of conduct. Another thing that Rust gets right is making sure that contributors know their contributions are welcome (& sometimes even helpful guides on how to get started or how to format contributions). All of these issues were ones where mentorship was/is being offered. I got an incredible amount of feedback on the x25519-dalek PR & I learned so much from it. The rustdoc issue also provided a lot of useful mentoring notes!

It’s so much more difficult to write software quickly when you decide to provide this mentorship. It helps people move up though & I think it’s an incredibly kind gesture. Stepping back into this space gave me the energy to push forward & do everything else that I needed to do this week. I’m thankful for all the people that put effort into making contributing to projects a pleasant experience.

Little Pieces of Joy

My time in NYC itself has also already been much more positive than it was in the first half of my batch. I want to call out the little things that came together to make this week so wonderful:

• I live in a peaceful, quiet room in Clinton Hill now
• I can walk to RC & walked home a few nights this week
• I spent my time walking on the phone talking to close friends
• I got crepes with 1 of my new batchmates
• I removed my dead name from all my GitHub repos
• I had some very nice pairing sessions with Haskell folks
• I met a lot of nice, new people this week that I’m looking forward to getting to know better
• My friends listened to me & supported me when I felt like I needed it