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Last weekend, I graduated from UIUC with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. Thus brings an end (for now, at least) to my formal education career. It still hasn’t really hit me yet that I’m “done,” but I am looking forward to traveling a bit this summer, and then starting my full-time job in the fall. This will be kind of an unorganized post, as many of my ideas aren’t completely formed yet, but I wanted to write down some reflections on my college experience.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been working on-and-off in Haskell for my programming languages class. I’ve written previously about my preference for declarative functional syntax, but I’d never really spent the time to learn a pure Functional Programming™️ language.

Every once in a while, you “discover” something so banal that it’s become a cliché, and yet it still feels like some deep insight. It’s a strangely humbling experience.

One of the most interesting rabbit holes to explore on Twitter is #plottertwitter. Under this hashtag, you’ll see a variety of computer-generated artwork and videos of plotting machines that sound like they’re being controlled by ancient floppy drive motors.

iOS Shortcuts is one of my favorite additions to iOS in its past several iterations. I used its predecessor, Workflow, for a while, but I didn’t invest too heavily in it because there was a nagging feeling in the back of my head that Apple would kill it at some point. However, they did the opposite!

As of January 16, 2019, GCP’s Cloud Functions now natively support Golang! This post will briefly cover why this is a big deal and how one can begin to use Go in their cloud functions.

2018 was a wild year. A lot happened. I lived in 4 different cities over the course of the year, worked 2 internships, and did a few weeks of traveling. It was a hectic year, but also one of the best in recent memory.

I attempted to read more books in 2018 – and it paid off! I read several enjoyable books this year. Here were my favorites.

I’ve been following a number of people that use iPad Pros for “real work”. I’m going on vacation for a couple weeks to Europe and I wanted to leave my laptop at home. That being said, I still wanted a “lifeline” computing device so that I could do some light writing or SSH into a server if necessary.

At ReactConf 2018, the React team introduced a new set of APIs called “Hooks” that allow you to write large swaths of traditional class-based React components as functional components.