I have found myself in a small dilemma. A student saw me on campus and made conversation with me. She was a very interesting individual, though that would be too long to type out the bizarre conversation we had. If it helps, she told me her Chinese mother is a lawyer who studied philosophy, and the student herself is into Marxism. Her father is from Germany. I said cool, so is mine! She then asked if I had family members who were Nazis, and seemed unusually excited to ask this question. Usually people ask as a joke or some brief curiosity. Not sure how to feel about that.
She became very excited after finding out I'm a CS student! She wanted my help in developing something similar to "Bloomberg Terminals." I do not know what that is. After brief research, due to strict licensing and such, I told her this is impossible. She kept asking me things like what kind of people will she need? What about the API? The VPN? I said, I have no idea (not good at vague and open-ended questions that can go any way). All I do is write little scripts and study hardware. I am not an app developer, I am not a SWE. She will probably need a backend developer, and a frontend developer. She stares at me and says nothing. I send her resources and who to contact, I felt bad. Clearly she is driven and I wanted to support her. She asks for my schedule, asks how to contact me. I get an email last night requesting to meet on a Teams call so she can show the prototype "her people" made. Is this how it feels to work in the industry? Someone with little to no knowledge in a subject throws buzzwords at you, you have no idea what they're saying, you try to figure it out, they hit you with the fluoride stare, the conversation ends and you're not sure if they left satisfied or not, and suddenly you're being asked to join a random Teams call.
I think I am ok with being unemployed if so. Anyways. I finished my little perl script to automate the math questions we're asked in assignments related to run-length compression. Will probably do something with calculating the # of bits required to transmit via Huffman's compression depending on some other factors next.
Stupid nitpick question: Is it better to use <STDIN> or <>? <> looks cleaner, but being explicit is better if I want to design secure code. I do love my nice formatting and clean code though.
