Today not much happened. But a lot of thoughts are on my mind, about whether that’s okay. So what did happen: I attended in-person checkins. I have mixed feelings about that. I like the accountablity part. It made me be at RC at 10:30h. It made me pair on my project. And I had a chance to learn what others are working on. Now for the things that made me worry a bit:

I have the feeling that the exchange of the batches made things to be more worrysome. I have the feeling that I worry more about my productivity and also I think that others are worrying more. That makes sense for me, because I have now started the second half of my batch. Which means, in a bit more time the whole thing will end. But what does not make sense to me: I feel that the new batch is also worried a lot about their productivity. I base this observation on the checkin this morning.

The checkin is of the form, that participants are encouraged to announce where they could need help, and then find somebody else who could help out. During the checking a directed graph forms on the whiteboard, which visualizes who will help whom. I had the feeling that we had difficulties to build this graph, because there were reservations to offer help. Maybe it’s not a big thing, maybe I’m overthinking it, but I feel it was not so friendly (spoiler: the next day was way different).

Then I spent most of the day (some of it with the help of Nasreen) perfectionizing a not yet existent Flask based web API (for the books project). It was interesting and fun, to set up pytest and travis CI and other things in the right way. But in the end I was rather frustrated that I did not code anything “real”. It was a shining piece of nothingness. Anyway, here it is.

During the day I discussed starting Linux from Scratch with a bunch of people. I’m kind of interested learning more about the internals of the GNU/Linux operating system, but I’m not sure if this book is the right way to learn it. The problem with working through this book could be, that the solution is, as above, very susceptible to perfectionizing. I would want to create a very minimal “CTF-enabled” GNU/Linux distribution.