A Month into GSoC
It’s almost been a month since the start of GSoC’s coding period and the work, I’m glad to write, is progressing at a steady and satisfactory rate.
The Developments
The last time around, my first ever not-so-meaningless contribution to open-source had just got merged, and I was really happy about it. But what that also did was, get me over the initial anxiety and intimidation I might have been feeling towards open-source. This, I think, has also helped speed things along.
While I started working on the optional features of my project around 2 weeks ago, I had to scrape the initial implementation because it turned out to be very, very slow and therefore had to be completely replaced with a better and more efficient approach, which was a bit less straightforward. But now, two weeks into experimenting and iterating, a new pull-request has been opened with the newly implemented efficient version of the feature, and while it's still a few minor commits away from its final form, the core functionality works as expected and, if everything goes as expected, which is never a guarantee, a hefty part of my proposal’s objectives will be complete.
And while this does not guarantee anything, I’d be lying if I said that I am not hoping for something exciting to do as I might have time to try out other things. What exactly, I honestly don’t know, but if I find myself in that minority who actually like what there doing, it’ll be an absolute privilege, which I’m looking forward to and wishing for.
The Goal
What follows might be a very steep change in topic, but is one, that I think lies at the root of many seemingly normal activities. This is just something that has been on my mind lately, and what writing is, if not a tool to better understand yourself?
I feel like an invisible aura is building around me saying that you are at a stage in life where you need to man up, where you should have everything together and figured out, but whenever I try and assess myself in this context, I always, without fail, fell short of it and by a good margin. While the contrasting opposite of this would be saying that I am everything I ever wanted to be and have nothing to work towards, would be outright arrogant and even dangerous, there must be a balance somewhere, right?
But why should I have it all figured out, what’s even the need? And while statements like these can be argued against using something like, because everyone is doing it, and this is the way, they give the vibes of being in a pipeline you’ve been pushed into and now have no option but to pass through. And this, I think, many will agree, is not a very desirable situation.
This need to progress towards something also spurs off many questions, one of which is “the why ?”. The why, is an oh-so-difficult question to answer that honestly makes me feel frustrated at times, not knowing to what end all the efforts are being put.
While it can be argued that this is a ridiculous thing to think about, and one should not set overly optimistic expectations, this, I feel, contradicts the notion of elegance that I somehow have associated with the fundamental workings of the world. If someone asked me to comment on the secrets of the Universe, I’d be very comfortable with using the words elegant and sophisticated, even though I basically know nothing about it? Why? Is this just a desire to find meaning in everything, or is there something else at play?
