Lev Lazinskiy

Using Skills

I’ve been feeling a little demotivated lately because I have not applied my Computer Science skills as much as I want to in a long time. I get a lot of satisfaction out of the work that I do but I don’t always have the opportunity to grow my technical skills.

A few weeks ago I discovered the OSSU Computer Science curriculum and I started working my way through some of the courses because I seem to have forgotten half of the things that I learned in college. This exercise was worthwhile because I remember more that I expected and have been more inspired than ever to actually do something with the knowledge that I have.

Earlier this week I read Paul’s blog post about porting dark from OCaml to F#. I forked the repo and started poking around to see if there was something I could do with my new found inspiration.

After a stumbling through a few things while getting started, I am really happy that I was able to make a small, but useful, contribution to the porting effort.

I went from not knowing OCaml, F#, or dark to shipping a PR in two days. I still don’t know OCaml, F#, or dark but I am optimistic that I can continue to figure things out. :)