Yesterday, I got stuck on pipes. And after poking away at it for hours and watching NOTHING happen, having no tools for communicating with the system to give me clues about why, I was convinced that I had a bad mental model for pipes.

Yesterday, Kamal and I got to the bottom of a fascinating bug (he wrote it up excellently here). I read OS code for the first time, and it was super exciting. I felt like an OS ninja.

Today was a find-my-groove-back kind of day. At the end of last week I had been feeling like I wasn’t making meaningful progress, and I found myself jealous of people who were pairing a lot, getting help from lots of folks and making REAL THINGS.

Today I woke up early, so I got to take a bit of an extended coffee walk through the village and NYU’s campus. Before check-ins I had culled a subset of Project Gutenberg data to play with for the Twitter Literature bot I’m hoping to unleash next week (@ILitYou has claimed the Twiterature name, sadly). John also helped me iron out some tricky shell parameter expansion, which led me to the zsh docs.

I have been working through Data Science from Scratch with Jesse Chen. Every day we read through and implement a chapter, and usually extend the work in some way. The algorithms are pretty straightforward, and the code is very clean. I highly recommend the book to folks who are interested in the basics of Data Science.