I have to be honest about something: I'm enduring a kind of hardship at the moment. For five years my cadence into polytech, uni and the odd employment, has been slowing. Luckily, from 2023, I have begun to persue study, at Massey again, getting B- grades for two papers: applied statistics and programming in Java. This article is a break from my more technical kind of writing style.

The COVID pandemic has, as with many, has been a source of considerable anxiety, although I consider myself blessed to have been affected by it relatively lately with mild severity, thanks to living in New Zealand.

Back in 2018, I worked for a promising tech startup, Nyriad, which had spawned out of a need to process large amounts of data for the Square Kilometer Array project, and was making major inroads to challenging RAID storage, by providing much greater resiliency through higher parity and other advanced GPU accelerated algorithms.

In retrospect, I think I was out of my league, and lacking maturity and wisdom requiring proper mentorship. My performance as a intern was terrible, taking several weeks to implement Conway's Game of Life due to overthinking. I did finish it, and also my final internship project, or at least, where the product owner was satisifed. Jira was awful to interoperate with, and caused embarrasment for the final result of my project.

As of writing this, I've been working a graphing tool called nggraphing, available here: https://gitlab.com/bgc-nz/nggraphing. I've integrated MicroTeX for rendering a subset of LaTeX with Qt, and have ordered a book from PaperPlus NZ titled: " Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference". I've adopted ANTLRv4, because writing PEG's with Boost Spirit X3 was too difficult. I think the takeaway elements for these side projects has mostly been about sharpening by craft, and improving my problem solving ability in a domain I enjoy.