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Jiayi (they/them)
carabinerr@proton.me
to neocities

17-02-2026: Existential academic to-do list

I have reached a point in my pursuit of academia where the only thing that keeps me going is my graduation. I wake up each day knowing that one less second of this endless hell of deadlines and exams makes my life 0.000001% better.

All passion and hopes I had for computer science and maths when I first got into the program seems to have been carved out of my body with a teeny tiny sharp spoon that just keeps digging into me and before I know it I'm a bunch of holes rejecting all the water in me till I am left looking like a dehydrated sponge:

I am trying to regain my interest in this field, not as a career goal, because that will just cause me unnesecary stress, but as a creative outlet. Right now, the thing keeping me going is working on this simple website that is like a canvas for my future plans for other tech-related projects. I think I will keep a list of that somewhere on here sometime, when I have the motivation.

Many factors play into why I am burnt out from this degree: financial pressure, expectations of going to uni in the first place, getting good grades, my crippling neurodivergence, constant assesments, AI, feeling like I am runnning on a limited time-line etc, etc.

It helps talking about the stress and overwhelm I feel, with loved ones (friends, my gf Joey), as well as writing it down whereever I can find a pen and paper or a keyboard, but in the end I know what stresses me is falling behind on my work, so I am putting down here, the things I need to do for the next month or so.

There are two main things occupying me in terms of school right now: The course 'Programming Language Design' (PLD) and my bachelor thesis project Fasto, I will split the list accordingly and come back to cross things off each time I finish one thing.

Some contextual stuff: I have my exam in PLD from the 23rd of March. Each lecture contains exercises and readings. I want to understand the content of each lecture before that. I am not gonna include prepping for future lectures in this to-do list as it serves as a back-log. Only in the case that I am falling behind on a lecture will I add it on here.

For my bachelor project, the goal is to at least finish the interpreter and start extending the compiler before that date.


PLD To-do list

  • Overview of Assignment 2
  • Finish tasks in Assignment 2
    • Garbage collection
    • Dynamic scope
    • Paramter passing
    • Lazy evaluation and memoization
    • Closures and defunctionalization
  • Read feedback on Assignment 1
    • Resubmit in any case
  • Revise the lectures I am behind on and take relevant notes
    • Lecture 2: Implementation strategies
    • Lecture 3: Syntax
    • Lecture 4: Memory management
    • Lecture 5: Scopes, functions and parameter passing
    • Lecture 6: Functional languages and control structures

FASTO To-do list

  • Fix implementation of Channel()
  • Write down process for parser and lexer and publish it on neocities
  • Read through Fasto documentation
  • Reread chapter about interpreters and symbol tables
  • Extend the interpreter:
    • Channel()
    • Send(chan, int)
    • Receive(chan)
    • Await(pid)
    • Spawn(() -> int)
  • Error printing for Channels