Recurse Center - Midpoint📝

This past Monday marked the midway point of my time at the Recurse Center (RC). RC has been nice, and I’ve been learning a lot.

I was going to write a lengthy post about my time here and what I’ve been learning, but I think I’ll split it up into a few posts. There’s too much for me to verify and review otherwise. This post will lean towards my experiences and thoughts.

I mentioned this in my last post, but I came in with a lot of different projects I was considering working on. Here’s what they were—I’ll mark the ones that I ended up focusing on over the past 3 weeks.

• AI/ML. I did decide to study AI/ML. A study group for it started up pretty quickly, so it was an easy choice for me to join. I hadn’t heard of the course before, but I’ve been liking it a lot.
• iOS/Swift. I decided that this would be my first big project. It felt achievable to write an app, and I thought it would make me a better engineer if I was able to ship something end-to-end.
• Other Projects. I’ve been doing a bunch of things I didn’t plan on! There’s this thing at RC called “impossible stuff day”, so I wrote a lexer and parser in Rust (true to its name, I did not finish on time). And I’m also working through cryptopals.
• Something hardware related? This was really close. It didn’t feel like I could get a meaningful amount of progress done in six weeks.
• Threads and processes. This basically meant advanced Rails and my project Disqualified. This is what I do for fun in my day to day, so it didn’t feel like a meaningful project to do at RC.
• Data structures and algorithms. I decided that this felt a little too focused on “getting a job”, at least for now. I’ll do this eventually, regardless of my being at RC.

I had some unexpected travels and a cold during my second and third weeks, respectively, so I missed out on some of the social aspects of RC. I’m finally feeling better, so I want to ramp back up on those calls—and maybe check out some meetings that seem interesting, even if they aren’t related to the goals I have in mind.

Unrelated note—I got an email today from someone who uses Disqualified. It kinda made my day; I never expected my little background job processor to be run outside of my own deployments! I’m excited to go back to that project. I have lots of improvements I’ve been wanting to make.