Ryan's Little Home

The time was the summer of 2020, when I decided to fly to Korea to be with my family after my internship was canceled from COVID-19. Thinking that I need to do something to make the summer useful, I decided to start a side project with my co-founder/sister Chelsea to add to our experience. We soon found a problem that we were already quite familiar with, which was around English teacher recruitment in Korea, and started to make a website to tackle this problem. Little did I know, what started out as a mere side project became something that would be the biggest pivotal point in my life.

James Boudain, a diligent worker for the glorious state sets out to do his daily duty. What seemed like another beautiful day of work, quickly turns dark as Boudain encounters series of unexplainable occurrences ...

I know it has been a year since I last posted, but here I am! It’s been a hectic year and I am sure 2020 has been a hectic year for you too, whoever is reading this post right now. Well, given the situation right now in the US, few months ago, I have decided to fly back to my home country, South Korea, to be with my family during these uncertain times. Ever since I started college, I have never stayed in Korea for more than two months. However, this time, it’s been almost 4 months staying in Korea consecutively, since I came here while my spring quarter was still in progress. There was no reason for me to stay in the states given that my school had gone entirely remote for that quarter.

It's been more than a month since I posted a last update on my compiler. Even though I had a very hectic month, I was able to make some breakthrough. I was able to implement a basic conditional, arithmetic operations, variable declaration, and function declaration/calls that allowed rlang to finally perform a recursive fibonacci algorithm:

Past couple of weeks have been a very hectic week for me. I just started my new summer internship, so I needed some time to settle into my new workplace and living space. Although I've been lazy on writing my blog, I did not stop working on my compiler. I did have some success putting some things together, such as basic functions, arithmetic, and variable declaration, but making these work was not a smooth journey for me.

Some people say they either don’t have enough time to work on side projects or actually do not have time to work on them. But this is not the case for me. Turns out I have a lot of time just laying around so I decided to work on something big that I can learn a bunch from. It didn’t take me long until I decided to learn how to create my own programming language. How did I arrive at that? I mean, I would definitely learn a lot from working on a compiler and having my own programming language sounds exciting doesn’t it? A few weeks back I started learning Golang. So I decided to write my language in Golang.

About a month ago I got my first ever personal RaspberryPi. Just like a kid who just got his first bike, I was filled with joy and excitement and wanted to play with it 24/7. But as a full time student, I was often far from home, and I had to contain myself from running back to my apartment to play with my Pi. I found a good solution to tackle this. I decided to create a reverse SSH tunnel from my Pi to a GCP VM instance, so that I can SSH into my Pi from the VM I already had remote access to. This is very useful, because the alternative would have been port fowarding on my home router and this often is very cumbersome to do and manage. So let me share how I did it.

Whenever I find myself in a pile of tasks I need to do, I always take some time to sidetrack myself. More often than not, taking a step back from all the busy work helps me, because it allows me to reorganize myself and do the tasks better when I come back to them. Perhaps this is just an excuse to justify myself procrasinating, but in my opinion, taking an hour or two everyday to take a real break rather helps than not. Seriously, I encourage you to do the same.