For most of my life, programming was more of a hobby than a career aspiration. In middle school, I spent countless hours tinkering with frameworks like GameJS, creating random projects that would hold my interest for a little while before being forgotten. In high school, this hobby turned into a useful tool for building utilities…

As I reached the halfway point of my Outreachy internship, I wanted to share what I’ve been working on for the AArch64 back-end in LLVM. My first task involved optimizing two large shifts and a vector combine, which could be narrowed down into a single combine and vector shift. The Problem We start with the…

It is important to figure out your target audience when developing software, writing a blog post, or even discussing with coworkers. Understanding who you are communicating with and adjusting for it gives value to your message. My blog’s target audience consists of tech-savvy people, future employers and queer individuals, with posts often tailored more or…

Talking about struggles is really hard. It requires vulnerability and honesty, which is not easy when you don’t like yourself and believe you haven’t changed from your past self. You end up telling yourself you struggle because you deserve it due to past actions, and the world reinforces this belief by hating you for who…

There have been many points in my professional life where I was stuck struggling on a simple issue for weeks or months. I even have a fun fact on my GitHub profile about the one time I spent a couple hours fixing a syntax error. Struggling is just a part of getting better at a…

Hi, I am Sophiellie. I’m a geeky trans woman from Romania. During my Outreachy internship, I’ll be blogging about my experiences and potentially other unique ideas I have like discussing Pokémon GO from a tourism perspective (YES, I studied tourism in high school and will put it to good use), talking about pride, or whatever…