Day 21 as a NASA JPL intern on the Psyche Mission
Apologies this was meant to be for 6/24. Imposter syndrome has been REAL YALL. I mean I know this feeling never goes away but damN CAN I GET A BREAK FROM THIS FEELING FOR ONCE? I think it’s just because this was the day before Josh had to leave and it meant that I was going to be on my own now. No more office hours. No more randomly just asking him for help on the most simplest piece of Python. I have to to take all the knowledge he’s given me in the past 5 weeks and finally apply it. That man has provided me with so much foundation and I need to make him and the rest of my team proud and so that’s what I will be focused on doing in my second half of this internship. Today was spent rewriting and reviewing the notes I never got to review for the past few weeks. Josh and I’s very last office hours consisted of him explaining one of the most complex tools he’s ever built that’s taken him a little less than a year in the making to complete all of the requirements. A high level description of it is that it searches through a log that comes form one of the components which comes in binary form. And Josh has to be able to take this log parse it and categorize it in an excel file. Seems easy to the naked eye but there’s a lot of constraints that comes with it like logs coming from different components need to be parsed differently so there’s multiple algorithms dealing with that. The way he explained to me I just kept thinking that there was no way I would have been ale to figure this out by myself. I was truly mesmerized but it also made me realize how powerful code truly is.
One of the things that Josh has said that will always stick with me is that we could make anything happen with code and it’s so true. The reason why we went through this specific project specifically is because one of the testbed engineers requested for a tool that had to do with may be wrapping something around this existing script. Before making any changes to it, I needed to understand how it even worked. This is going to be fun to work through so we’ll see. He also blessed me with a zip file that contains all of the code that he’s ever worked on during his time here at JPL and so I’m excited to dig through it. EEEP. I got this.
