semantic/weekly/2016-05-16.md

May 16th, 2016

What we were even doing here

This was our inaugural weekly.

We’re sort of looking at this meeting as a retrospective on the previous week. We’re very aiming very roughly at ~10min, but since we’ve never done this before, and since Rick is starting new this week, we’ll see how it goes.

We went in first name alphabetical order, and shared three things from the last week:

1. What went well.
2. What went less well.
3. What we learned.

Retrospective

@joshvera:

• Diff summaries! We now have a functional way of mapping diffs to their summaries. Tricky path to get to it, but pretty simple completed.
• Also worked on alignment stuff. Tricky stuff, possibly undecidable stuff.
• We’ve been learning about recursion schemes, and different ways to tear down and build up finite & infinite data structures in versatile & structured ways.

@rewinfrey (on his first week with us! 🎉):

• Last week was wrapping up some work on a tenant scoping problem. Handed that off to @bryanaknight.
• Ran through semantic-diff setup, and stack test is all green.
• Also spending some time configuring Atom for Haskell &c.
• Excited to be here! 🎉 (Ed: And we’re excited to have you! ❤️)

@robrix:

• Diff summaries went well.
• Working on alignment also went well, thanks to 🍐ing w/ @joshvera.
• I was reminded that at its best, 🍐ing is a “greater than the sum of its parts” sort of thing.
• Forgot to note that syncing up w/ @jbarnette on the meta-discussion around alignment was incredibly valuable. I spent a lot of time Writing Things Down last week, and I’m very glad I did.

The above took us 8min. Nice!

Metaretrospective

Since this was our inaugural weekly chat, we also did a retrospective on the retrospective:

• @joshvera observed that even if he’s not working closely with @rewinfrey & @robrix, he’ll have some idea of what we were working on, but less of an idea of what we learned; it’s both more interesting & harder to discover.
• @rewinfrey pointed out that this can help us discover unknown unknowns; “I learned x” gives others a chance to say “have you heard of y, which supersedes x?”
• @rewinfrey further noted that this is sort of a “what would be worth learning?” question, which sets us up nicely for this week. It’s a good chance to confirm that goals for the week are useful!
• @robrix was very glad to get the above feedback; this metaretrospective was super valuable.
• @robrix later realized he forgot to set down what the goals of this meeting are (in his opinion), which would be worth talking about.