Today was fun! My lexer is pretty far along: it lexes itself :D. There are a couple corner cases I need to handle for semicolon insertion. Lexing is more straight forward than I imagined. My only prior exposure to the dark art of lexing was writing out the syntax for a Cool language lexer to be fed into Flex. I actually brought food today (OATS, yay :D), so my energy levels were higher today than they were yesterday. I felt a dip in energy come 5 pm, though. I powered through til 5:40 working on the lexer, when I had to stop and take a break. I started working on my side-side project, a standard library in C, which is different enough that I thought it would help me get on track, or at least waste time productively. I think it worked a little, but Dana suggested we get soy chicken stuff (which came first, the soy chicken or the soy egg?) from Whole Foods. The walk was nice, Dana’s super cool, the soy chicken was 7 bucks so we didn’t buy any and got bagels and strawberries instead (my first NY bagel tasted suspiciously like the bagels back home…), spent time blabbing (blab blab blab), walked back, and I felt reinvigorated and finished up the lexer.

The room was nice and quiet when I got back, too :) Music helps me focus on tasks, but it impedes making design decisions because it stifles my thoughts. When there’s noise, I need to play music or else my focus gets drowned out in the sounds that are happening around me.

Overall, today was rewarding. I had underestimated the impact of being around such awesome people.