Summer Lost
Although I originally had a lot planned this summer, I unfortunately couldn’t go through with the vast majority of it. I was really looking forward to building a mobile projection interception system and creating an analytics tool for nginx servers – particularly because my own website runs using nginx – but greater external factors unfortunately caused me to have to re-appropriate my time elsewhere.
I could beat around the bush for a while, but the most significant and real reason, frankly, was the housing crisis. From early morning to midday, I was teaching at Brown Youth Academy, an awesome experience that I absolutely need to blog about in the near future. For the rest of my day, I was calling landlords and property management firms; sending in applications; refreshing Zillow, Hotpads, Craigslist, Facebook groups, etc.; and desperately asking all my contacts if they knew of any places with openings. Living through the housing crisis was one of the most nerve-racking experiences ever, and I’m so happy that I eventually was able to find a place with only a couple of days to spare.
I guess it wasn’t totally lost. I did actually manage to finish building my PC, although I never had enough time to fully rice it out and I still have to make time for that when I find pockets of leisure these upcoming few months. I didn’t get much progress on updating my “Zero to Hero Hacking” repository except for a few writeups for competitions that my team ranked highly in this summer. The book I was working on is, for now, an abandoned project due to the lack of the necessary time to work on it. I did actually end up making my website theme available to all: “hello.xyz” – a win in my book.
The other project that I started, “switchlib” – a Python library for interacting with network switches – is on hold since I no longer have a lab environment to test the library in and also lack the funds to build a lab environment with a wide variety of switches.
With the fall semester giving me a full workload and free time being increasingly difficult to find, progress on these endeavours probably won’t be achievable until my next break in the winter. Until then, I’m just focusing on work, classes, and my organizations.
Happy trails.