One of the most common occurrences while working on the compiler has been being off by one. So far I've found working on the compiler itself is a lot of fun, until you get that dreaded segmentation fault. The number of times I've found myself looking in parts of memory which I shouldn't is quite fascinating. It's one I've come to be most fearful of. Need to replace the symbol table, no problem. Move around in the stack to accommodate for local variables in the function. All of a sudden my program is looking for operands to opcodes in the Sahara. Yet it feels a lot like programming. You are actually interacting with the computer. You can see how something is handled all the way down to the machine. It's fucking awesome. I'm understanding the need to choose the right data structure, implementing it and seeing the difference it makes. It's all good fun, even when I'm trying to run the same code through the debugger for the twentieth time this hour.
I'm glad I decided to work on this and more glad that I followed through. I have to thank the discovery of twitch for that one. Even though there is hardly anyone showing up, I feel obliged and motivated to want to show up and work on the compiler. Especially when I least feel like it. Also gives me a valid excuse to wake up at 0400. I've tried to move my day ahead to as early as possible, streaming is the only activity that's helped cement it. I've been successfully able to wake up a minute before 0400 for about three and a half months now. Most mornings now, I'm awake before the alarm rings. It hasn't gotten easy yet but I have a reason to wake up in the arse end of the night. It makes all the difference. Dare I say it, streaming is making me a slightly more disciplined person. There is gold to be found in places least expected.
Positivity
Recently I've found myself to be quite the pessimist or realist as some intellectuals would say. I have to say I don't like it. I preferred my old optimistic self. Shit happens either way, at least I want to have a better outlook on life and know that things always have a way of working themselves out. In most cases I become the person who works out the problems in my life, but it all starts with believing it's possible. So I'd like to practice taking a positive approach in my day to day interactions. I used to be quite the positive person, somewhere in the last couple of years I lost sight of that person. What I'm finding is that my younger self had the right ideas all along, just lacked the key skill of execution. I'm finding that I'm reverting to my original thinking which I had discarded because I thought the world was right. It might be about some things but when it comes to my own life, I know best.