maybe but it’s raining tomorrow

i am doing some teaching over the summer now! notably: 

• helping with virtual mop, though i told the organizers i’d be busy during weekday work hours and nobody has sent any details yet. i’m mostly looking to interact with students and not do much in the way of actual olympiad teaching unless students specifically ask me for that. it seems generally disorganized this year but i am not too worried because i think most potential virtualizations of something like mop will look about the same anyway
• apparently i’m giving a 1h guest lecture for everaise academy now! i looked at their list of lectures and it already seemed pretty math-heavy so i’m talking about a few applications of math in biology. some topics i’m currently planning to cover include: why inbreeding leads to the buildup of bad traits, how transcription factors locate dna and connections to randomized local search algorithms (this is actually super cool and the subject of one of my systems bio psets), if i have time then the math behind evolution in asexual vs sexual populations. so basically i’m getting carried by the bio classes i took this past year 😛 but the math-bio high school presence is basically nonexistent and maybe i can inspire more people to think about interdisciplinary work. i expect this to take roughly 4h of prep but this might be a drastic underestimate as i’ve never given a bio talk before. let me know if you have other suggestions for things i can cover (preferably something where the bio content is understandable to an ap bio student and the math content doesn’t require college math)
• also helping with virtual sparc, since apparently i’m a staff member now even though i applied to be a jc and got rejected already. this is cool though as i basically have free reign to organize whatever classes i want! i’m currently looking mostly at activities relating to building “healthier mindsets” including: practicing curiosity, exploring negativity towards others, managing obsessions. should be a lot of fun even though i feel pretty unqualified to be running any of these activities 😛 we’re also organizing merges with various other camps so i imagine this’ll be a significant commitment for the rest of the summer

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my internship is going alright- meaning i’m making progress but it’s hard and much less rewarding than the other things i’m spending time on, though i guess i am learning a lot about how large software companies operate. everything is vaguely understandable and honestly if i didn’t take web.lab over iap i would probably be toast right now (nothing about webdev in particular; just my fault for general lack of project experience). i’m working on some new features for aws codebuild. it’s extremely busy and sort of stressful though i think i just need to be more productive during actual work hours and think less outside of work hours

• the first week was almost entirely just installations, configuring environments, and various tutorials on all the internal tools amazon uses. luckily everything was well-explained, a benefit of large companies i guess? i also asked my manager if he wanted to talk and he basically said “don’t bother me until after week 2 oh and if u have questions ur mentor can probably answer them” 😐 
• in the second week i stared at the codebase for a while trying to figure out what was going on and understanding different tools not covered in the tutorials, which was surprisingly difficult as everything was scattered over multiple packages (no documentation surprisingly i thought places like amazon would be more rigorous about things like code-commenting standards?? 😦 ) and made a total of 1 commit. i also had to start learning scala as we’re using that in place of java for large parts of the codebase; not actually sure why. my impression is that it’s like java but more confusing and with slightly more flexible syntax
• the third week just finished and i finally understand most of the code or at least i’m confident i can understand it or find relevant content when i need to. finally made some nontrivial changes but now i need to write tests and whatever which will probably take an entire week 😦 i also finally talked to my manager (on a typical day i only talk to my mentor + team members) and at some point he said (paraphrased) “out of the candidates that passed the interview we thought it would be cool to hire you because of your contest awards even though we don’t actually care about math haha” so i guess that’s how i got off the intern waitlist 😐 
• and i also witnessed literally the worst conversation ever where someone on my team asked “it’s friday, anyone have plans for the weekend?” and the very impressive responses were “no.” “no.” “waiting until the next long weekend.” “no.” “maybe but it’s raining tomorrow.” like man is working full-time this terrible my weekend is literally packed 😐 i am kind of sad that there are no other interns on the team i am directly part of because everyone else is old and hard to talk to ugh
• i have more respect for bezos now after watching some internal enrichment videos in which he talks about things like solving company problems and how to be less wrong. the guy gives good advice and has obviously learned a ton and this is not something i considered previously, probably because of media portrayals of him as a one-dimensional villain

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more things i’ve watched recently:

• the office. this series is wayyyy too long (73h) for me to watch in its entirety so i tried speedrunning again and finished in ~15h which is still a large number of episodes. from what i saw the characters and their developments were extremely well-written throughout the course of the 9 seasons and it is mostly a style of humor that i enjoy (turntables is the greatest line in tv), though i can definitely understand why people think it was 2-3 seasons too long. it’s only around a decade old but you can already tell it’s very clearly from a different era based on the subject matter and lack of pc and general filming style, which i liked. not sure if i’d recommend it or not mostly just due to sheer length but if you’re willing to skip things like me or are just not busy then probably? 
• rick and morty seasons 1-3. i haven’t found a convenient time or place to watch season 4 yet but this show has been genius ever since pretty much the second episode (pilot was a bit dull). it is a pretty fresh satire of literally everything: parenting and modern family structures, movie/narrative storylines, bureaucracies and governments, our relationships with pets/animals, etc. so yeah it’s great! 

so uhh tl;dr summer is just beginning and i have way too much to do in july