2022-08-17
Today I pair programmed with Ben on a Toki Pona to English translator - it was a lot of fun!
Toki Pona is a minimalist contructed language, that only has ~120 vocabulary words! So a lot of words have multiple meanings (eg. soweli means animal, cat, dog, etc), and often multiple words are used to convey one meaning (eg. jan pona, literally "good person", means friend).
I find the ambiguity and subjectivity of Toki Pona to be very charming, and it was a lot of fun to play with that with our translator. We choose a random word when multiple translations are acceptable, which led to multiple iterations of a translation diverging.
We have a couple more grammar rules to add, I'll probably post some translations once we've finished.
I also had a really good coffee chat with Manuel today. One of the things we talked about was blogging, which inspired me to think about my blogging practice.
One of my goals for my batch is to practice working in public, so I've been publishing a blog post every day. This is going pretty well: I've been enjoying writing more and reflecting on what I'm doing day to day, I feel more comfortable publishing something less polished now, and I'm glad I'll be able to look back on this record of what I'm doing at RC.
The downside is that I often run out of time and end up writing when I'm already a bit tired. I also feel some of the posts I'm publishing are a bit clunky or insubstantial. I'm ok with quality issues, as the alternative might be zero posts. I might stop posting every day though if it gets to be too much, but for now the slight time pressure is helping me be less precious about what I'm publishing.
One thing I've been struggling with is: am I writing a log of what I did today or a post inspired by what I did today? I've been trying to strike a balance, but have perhaps been tending towards logging as it's more straightforward. Going forward I think I'll try to write posts instead, even if they're short, and I'll stop noting everything I do. I think that will be more interesting to write and read.