recurse center

Wed Jul 18, 2018 · 3 min

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This post is coming about 2 weeks late but:

1. I applied & got into the Recurse Center, YAY!
2. 2 weeks ago I started my batch (Summer 2)

My plan going in was to learn more about the following topics:

1. Strongly Typed Functional Programming
2. Low Level Programming
3. Contributing to Open Source projects

This is a fly by summary of what I have done in my batch so far:

I have been mainly focused on the first goal of learning more about strongly typed functional programming, working through the Haskell Book and doing all the exercises for all chapters. I am currently on chapter 15. The book has been a fantastic resource and really helped drive home the fundamentals which are needed for building real projects in Haskell. The small Haskell exercises / projects I am doing at RC are kept here.

I also gave a 5 minute presentation on folds and unfolds (the slides for which can be found here).

I also worked with Omar on a parser to parse chemical formulas using Parsec, which was my first exposure to using parser combinators and monad transformers and a fantastic exercise.

I decided that the first project big project which I want to work on during my batch is a BitTorrent client in Haskell. A possible second / alternative project is enabling the nix package manager to install packages from the bittorrent network. Both of those require learning about how bittorrent works / how DHTs work, which I have begun doing by studying a combination of specifications and reference implementations (listed below):

I have also learned about a number of miscellaneous things like how OCaml's module system works (at a high level), how rust's traits work (and how the are very similar to Haskell's typeclasses). I also learned that the state monad is not adding any capabilities that are not already present in folds.

Resources

BitTorrent Implementations:

1. Python: https://github.com/jefflovejapan/drench
2. Python: https://github.com/borzunov/bit-torrent
3. JS: https://github.com/kzahel/jstorrent
4. Erlang: This is a pretty massive file which is going to take a while to understand / untangle. https://github.com/jlouis/etorrent
5. https://www.libtorrent.org/

BitTorrent Specifications:

1. https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0000.html
2. https://wiki.theory.org/

DHT Information Specs / Projects:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia
2. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1332107/how-does-dht-in-torrents-work
3. https://github.com/allanlw/dhtplay
4. https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme
6. https://github.com/jlouis/dht
7. https://github.com/kevinlynx/dhtcrawler2
8. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1181301/how-does-a-dht-in-a-bittorent-client-get-bootstrapped

Nix + BitTorrent:

1. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/tests/bittorrent.nix
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13436026
3. https://github.com/shlevy/nix-plugins