Week 16
Started the week off with a holiday on Monday which came in pretty handy. I thought I would spend the majority of the day resting until I decided to go fix something in the car. This gradually turned into one of the numerous problems a car could develop. I spent the majority of the day (and unfortunately some days in the rest of the week) on this and couldn’t rest as much as I thought. So much for wanting the car to be problem-free. 🤷🏽♂️
I finally started making headway in a little secret project I started about 2 weeks ago. After scratching the surface a bit, I had some confidence to make a task list of all that was necessary to be done for a PoC (Proof of concept) in a week and share it with the team the following week. I was able to go down on the tasks throughout the week and have the PoC working as expected. This project is based on PHPSandbox itself so the core features are fairly straightforward in implementation. I feel strongly that one more week of work on this idea should get it ready for testing by the rest of the team. I wish I could disclose more about it in this report but since it's secret, for now, I won't.
For tease, a part of building it involves parsing GitHub readme files to be able to copy the code blocks or even modify them. It was quite fun and challenging at the same time. I also had to deal with slotting Vue Components into the code blocks to add some actions to the blocks.
I've been a fan of Star Trek, Star Wars, and space adventures generally. I started watching Star Trek: Discovery about two years ago and I've liked most part of it. I started the fourth season in March and now had the chance of finishing it. There are quite some fascinating things I found about the season - The idea of the edge of the galaxy and diplomatically making first contacts. Our galaxy is at least 100,000 light-years across and to speak of getting to the edge (and actually leaving the galaxy) is just so remarkable to see.
Most space-related movie/series instalments that I've watched are confined to events within a Galaxy and Star Trek wasn't any different. This time they took it further to events beyond our galaxy.
I’ve always asked questions about making first contact with alien species (if they do exists).
- How do we communicate with them?
- What if they don’t even process languages as we do?
- How would we tell them we are here in peace?
- And many others.
It was good to see Star Trek: Discovery address these questions showing not just the political aspects of making first contacts but also in terms of the technicalities involved in learning to communicate with an unknown species.
I also discovered that currently on earth, there are protocols that are already in place to help in communicating in cases of contact with an alien species.
While watching I tried to relate this a lot with Arrival, another movie about first contact where humans tried to communicate with an unknown alien species. Being able to communicate with them eventually causes the communicator to have a non-linear time perception and premonitions. For those aliens, their language causes them to know the future.