strugee.net

Posts from February 2017

RC week 5

This is week 5 of being at the Recurse Center.

Day 15

Arrived ~10:20, departed ~16:30, arrived ~20:00, departed ~23:30, total time at RC 9h40m.

Somehow managed to get up early and arrive at my checkin early, despite being dead-tired (I couldn't get to sleep so I was running on ~5 hours of sleep). Spent most of today working on my HTTPS presentation, but took 30 minutes to an hour or so off to make a couple small improvements to my website - mostly just trimming the projects page and adding information to the contact page about how to communicate securely with me. Left for a while to have dinner with a friend and returned via the subway[1] to work on my HTTPS presentation some more.

(Note 1/31: I felt quite productive today, but in hindsight really didn't get a whole lot done since I was just so tired.)

[1]: which truthfully made me feel unreasonably accomplished since my phone died right as I looked up directions, but I got on the right subway and figured out I could transfer and take a closer line halfway through and eventually made it back anyway

Day 16

Arrived ~10:20, departed ~23:10, total time at RC 12h50m.

Spent - no joke - basically all of today working on my HTTPS presentation, which in addition to actually writing the content entailed reminding myself of how things like e.g. TLS False Start actually work. Reminding and/or properly learning (for False Start in particular I had a vague idea of how it worked before, but didn't really understand it).

Took about an hour off in the evening to help repaint a large stretch of wall in the space as part of the cleaning party. Then went back to HTTPS. Highly productive day.

Day 17

Arrived ~11:30, departed ~17:40, total time at RC 6h10m.

Caught up with some GitHub stuff in the morning before teaching HTTPS. We went for an hour and a half and still skipped the entire section on TLS performance because HTTPS is complicated and hacky and also really terrible. (As Claire put it, "I'm now terrified of browsing the web." Me too, Claire. Me too.) I think it went really well, even though it was a little overwhelming for everyone at times.

Spent a bit of time watching YouTube videos on how Diffie-Hellmann works and how Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDHE) works - we'd touched on both of these during the presentation and I needed to put them in Zulip. The one on plain Diffie-Hellmann was just a refresher, but the one on ECDHE was something I'd previously tried to watch several times and had always been too confused. But, this time I got it! Whooo! So that felt awesome.

Left early to go home and sqeeze in some laundry before closing out the evening by going to an RC-organized talk on Crystal.

Day 18

Arrived ~10:30, departed ~14:30, total time at RC 4h0m.

Did just a smidge of work on pump.io before going to Abstract Salad Factory, then heading home to catch my flight to Brussels.

Friday

Not at RC. Total time at RC 0h0m.

In Brussels for FOSDEM.

Executive summary

This week had its ups and downs. I was really productive on the HTTPS stuff, but other than that I didn't reeeally get a lot done.

Total time at RC 32 hours 40 minutes; cumulative time 230 hours 45 minutes.


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