I'm going to the Recurse Center!

published: 12 August 2024, tagged: Recurse Center

Today is my first day at the Recurse Center! For anyone who hasn’t heard of it before, it’s a 12 week programming retreat: essentially, I have the next three months to work on whatever projects I like, and try and learn as much as possible, alongside a group of extremely cool people with exactly the same aims. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to attend, and I’m so excited to get started.

I first heard about RC through Julia Evans, and later again from Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya, both of whom wrote regular updates during their time at RC. Reading about their experiences was by far my biggest inspiration to apply, and now that I’m finished with my maths degree, I’m finally starting a batch myself! It only seems right, then, that I should pick up the torch and write about my own experiences here. Perhaps, someday, someone will read this and it’ll help them decide whether applying to Recurse is the right choice for them :)

So... what are you actually going to do?

Well, one post I found really helpful deciding how to set my goals is this one from RC alum Ray Fong on maximising your time at RC, so I’m going to steal a couple of their ideas: first, keeping my plans flexible so that I can change what I’m doing if something piques my interest; and second, having distinct technical and non-technical goals. First, the technical:

• My friend Cosmo, author of one of the world’s strongest chess engines, has been trying to convince me to write a chess bot of my own for years now. Now that I have 12 weeks set aside for this sort of project, I think it’s finally time to take them up on it!
• I’d love to know more about programming language design, so I’m planning to go through Crafting Interpreters and potentially make some more interesting languages. The end goal here is to play with interesting type systems (linear types, session types, dependent types, and so on) so I’d like to make myself a framework to play with them in.
• A few other little things I’d like to tackle if I have time: I’ve always been fascinated by modern multi-process OSs, specifically how their schedulers work, so I’d like to try and make my own toy one. I’ve also been meaning to play about with theorem provers like Lean for a while, and see if I can figure out how they tick.

As for my non-technical goals:

• Above all, I’d love to make some new friends. RC prides itself on being a diverse and inclusive community, so it seems like the perfect place to meet some wholesome, friendly programmers who share some of my interests.
• I’d also like to take some time to look after myself. Doing a maths degree has left me feeling very tired and burned out, and I’m hoping RC will be the kick I need to get excited about making things again. On top of that, I’d like to try and improve my diet and get some more sunshine and exercise while I’m in my batch.

So that’s my plan! I’m a big fan of working transparently, so I’ll make sure to post links to anything I’m working on in case anyone wants to look at the code. Plus, I’d like to write weekly updates on this blog; partly to keep myself accountable, but also so anyone can follow along. I’m so excited to get started, and to all the Recursers reading this, I can’t wait to meet you <3