A pretty good summer

This semester has been very busy, which makes me think of the last time I wasn't busy: this summer, when most of my days were spent pushing commits, spending time with good people, and strolling under the giant maple trees in Kafadar Commons. This is likely my last summer off until retirement, so maybe it's worth writing about.

Field session

Field session, or Advanced Software Engineering, is a special class in Mines's computer science curriculum which pairs teams of students with engineering projects proposed by companies and individuals. Students can either choose their teammates or their project. Based on advice from students who had previously taken the class, I decided to build a team, reasoning that a good team can work through a bad project, but a good project can't make up for a bad team. So I chose Grant Lemons and Nathan George, two friends who proved to be talented, hardworking, and fun to spend time with. Turns out, we were assigned a great project. I was quite fortunate to have both!

Summer field session is very different from other classes because it's only 5 weeks long, but a time commitment of 40 hours per week is expected. I liked this format because it allowed me to treat school like a full-time job. When I came home, I was done. None of the working-after-dinner nonsense of a regular semester!

The class improved my technical skills significantly. Our project lived in AWS, and I had to factor the processing pipeline into pieces and translate each piece into a cloud resource provisioned with OpenTofu, our infrastructure as code tool. Grant recommended the IaC route, and it was an excellent choice because it allowed each team member to experiment with their own instance of the architecture, and since many more lines of code were dedicated to infrastructure than actual business logic, our velocity significantly improved. For the same reason, the ability to track our infrastructure changes under version control proved crucial to our development process. Finally, this choice allowed us to transition from our personal cloud accounts to our client's account very easily.

Though I've dabbled with Nix for a while, it wasn't until this summer that I fully appreciated the power and convenience of declarative configuration. Additionally, writing our CI/CD pipeline deepened my understanding of DevOps and taught me why companies dedicate entire teams to deployment strategy.

For both reports and presentation slides throughout the class, we used Typst to typeset and generate PDFs programatically. We greatly appreciated its speed, language design, and ease of use. I have since adopted Typst both for other classes and for personal use. I highly recommend it. It gives me what I call the Vim feeling: it's so powerful that it feels unfair, as if I shouldn't have been allowed to do that complicated 20-minute task in 15 seconds with two lines of code. Besides, the near-instant compilation times and the fact that it is a full programming language makes it a clear winner over LaTeX. I'm excited to continue using it throughout my career.

The summer's efforts were well-rewarded. Our client, Swim Tech, was pleased with our work, and additionally, our final presentation earned a students' choice award for Best Technical Presentation!

Fourteeners

I climbed my first three fourteeners this summer: Grays Peak, Torreys Peak, and Mount Bierstadt. Though I've lived in Colorado my entire life, my time in the mountains has previously been limited to high mountain lakes or scenic trails, destinations ideal for being alone with one's thoughts in nature. However, my roommate, Jose, has been getting into fourteeners and was gracious enough to invite me. I found them to be a fun way to experience the mountains, albeit for completely different reasons than usual. Climbing a fourteener is a social event; everyone faces the same challenge and encourages each other to surmount it. That said, the three mountains I summited are probably the three most crowded in Colorado, so I don't know what the experience is like at lower-traffic mountains.

I enjoyed trying a new way to experience the mountains, but I think I prefer the other way better. There's nothing quite like finding a remote lake and being all alone with a friend or family member for the weekend.

Chasing hobbies

Field Session ended pretty early, and my only other commitment was TAing for Data Structures and Algorithms, so I had plenty of time. Ever since my emancipation from Mines's meal plan, I've been keen to learn how to cook, and this summer afforded me a great opportunity to hone my skills. I iterated on recipes for grilled cheese, mac and cheese, stir fries, hashed browns, beef stew, steak, spaghetti, etc., etc. I was surprised by the extent to which techniques of starkly different dishes overlap. An understanding of heat and seasoning applies universally. I am now at a level where I can make some dishes well and others OK, and I can improvise something reasonably tasty with whatever is in the fridge and pantry, which was one of my main goals when I started. Considering I have only been cooking in earnest for a year, I am quite content with this progress. It's really satisfying to make something delicious! The only downside is that I have gone from being willing to eat anything to being fairly picky because I critique my own food critically. Next, I hope to broaden my repertoire and cuisine familiarity.

Ever since I've been at Mines, I've struggled to balance piano with everything else I want to do in college. I love playing the piano, but I don't have the time to get good at it or the capital to afford an instructor. However, the first constraint no longer applied during the summer, and I really enjoyed learning some new pieces and listening to repertoire with which I was not previously familiar. I've been following Ben Laude's Chopin podcast as well as letting YouTube recommend obscure yet highly underrated works by Liszt and others. I'm listening to the infamously massive Busoni Piano Concerto as I write this.

I spent a lot of time refreshing my website, but I already blogged about that, so I won't elaborate here. Suffice it to say that I did a much better job of upskilling this summer than the last, and I made sure there was plenty of green on my GitHub profile.

Summary

Aside from the activities described above, I spent a lot of time traveling with and to family, seeing friends from high school, and attending various events. All of these made for a quite enjoyable few months. It's quite a while until next summer, so it remains to be seen what that one will be like. For now, it's time to focus on school!