I really hope to contribute to a project where I get to do C programming, or if not that, C-style C++, or if not that, modern C++. Unfortunately, this semester has been insanely busy, and I have also been going through some issues in my personal life, so I have been really struggling to keep up with my workload. However, I hope that my life will have some balance soon, and that I can successfully catch up on everything. But at least until Spring break, the fact that I am so behind on my work will probably be in my way. I’ll probably do really long, insane bursts of work at inconsistent rates, rather than small, consistent work that’s better for a team setting.

Working like that is also a habit, in general, that I am trying to change. I sort of am most productive when I have way too much work and I’m basically sleeping only every other day. I hope that in this course and in my work with my group that I can figure out a more balanced and structured work-life balance.

However, I also know that I can contribute a lot of work really fast when it needs to be done! I do consistently find that software development is a slower process than I anticipate, and that I need to spend a lot of time thinking about the design of a system and the structure of my code before actually writing it so that the code stays maintainable (obviously), but I deeply enjoy the adrenaline rush of crunch work.

Although I have a pretty bad sense of time, I think that I am good at allocating work among different people. It’s just that I am very bad at estimating how much time is needed for different tasks. Actually, I’m writing this at 4:48 AM because I have been sewing and stuffing tubes that also have metal wires put into them the entire night, and I have a soft sculpture that I was supposed to finish tonight that I will likely need until tomorrow night for (I am considering March 2 4:50 AM as the night of March 1 in this statement). That being said!!!! Because I always need more time than I have, I have become very good at knowing exactly when to scale back, figuring out the most time-efficient way to approach a problem/task, adapting this strategy when I realize that it wasn’t actually the most time-efficient method, and deciding what specific things have less effort put into it in favor of the greater vision.

I also have not made a ton of open-source contributions so far. I have added a song by the artist xxharbit3s to the RYM database, which was actually pretty cool, since I’ve been a user of the site for many years and I have never done that before, and I have added the deli that is very near my apartment to OpenStreetMap. I was surprised that it wasn’t correctly being displayed before, since it is seemingly a fairly popular deli. I have sort of been hoping that I could find contributions I could make simply by finding bugs in software that I use regularly, but that hasn’t really happened. I did find a bug in OBS, where if you have multiple windows of the same application name, you can’t do a Window Capture of each thing separately, since it thinks each window is the same thing. However, I looked at the issue tracker on OBS, and it was already there (and has been for a long time). What’s interesting is that there is also already a working fix that hasn’t been merged into the main release/master repository. It has also become pretty clear to me that any contributions involving code are a lot more involved than something like these two things I’ve described, so I haven’t done any of those.