RC 2024: halfway already!?

published: 26 September 2024, tagged: Recurse Center

That’s all, see you next week! :)

— An overly optimistic Lucy, about four weeks ago

So, uh, it’s been a little while. The last few weeks have been a bit tough on me for reasons outside of RC or programming in general, and to be honest I’ve barely had the energy to work on my projects, let alone write here. I don’t think the weekly update format I’ve been aiming for so far works very well for me: it starts feeling like more of a chore, something I have to do rather than something I do because I want to. I do want to keep writing here, and more regularly than I have been, but I think in order to do that I need to give myself a little more flexibility. With any luck, it’ll help me be a little gentler on myself and I won’t stress myself out of writing anything. If anyone has any advice for dealing with this sort of writer’s block, I’d love to hear it.

Another thing that’s been getting in the way of me writing these posts is feeling like I don’t have a lot to write about. I’ve been making slow progress over the last few weeks, but a lot of it doesn’t feel interesting enough to write about. I’ve learned lots of little things along the way, but I don’t have progress that feels like it’s ‘worth’ showing off here, if that makes any sense? I recently read Nicole’s blog post on content-driven development, where she talks about projects getting stuck because of overwhelming task lists – a sentiment to which I can deeply relate – and reframing them in terms of sharable milestones. She says that being able to split projects into deliverable pieces can help with project direction (if it isn’t worth explaining to other people, maybe it doesn’t need to be there yet?) as well as generally staying motivated. It’s a great post, and I’m looking forward to trying some of her ideas in my own projects.

As for what I’m actually planning on doing, I definitely want to branch out into a few more projects so that if I’m losing momentum on one, I can pick up steam again working on another. I’m going to keep working on my chess engine; in the spirit of content-driven development, I’d like to finish the move generation so I can actually watch it play a game of chess (if not a good one quite yet), and potentially put it up on my server for people to play against.

Another thing I’ve been interested in for a little while is building a debugger, and there’s a group at RC already working through a course on that so I’d quite like to give that a go. It also seems like a good project to test Zig with, since Anya has been speaking very highly of it lately and says it seems like exactly the kind of language I like.

I think I’d like to have one more, slightly more artsy and creative project going as well, for when I’m in that kind of mood, but I’m not sure exactly what I’d like that to be yet. I have a few ideas, but I think I’ll save that for next week.

One more thing I’d like to do: there are a handful of new faces in the category theory group so we’re doing a bit of a reset, and since Milewski’s book has proved to be a bit confusing and lacking in detail, we’re going to try and pick a different book to go through. So, along with the others, I’m going to sample a few different textbooks and see if any stand out as being particularly approachable without mathematical background. I’m not sure if I’ll follow through on this yet, but learning about homotopy type theory and univalent foundations is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, so I might pick up the HoTT book again and see if more of it sticks than last time I tried.

halfway there

It’s an exciting time at RC at the moment, since this week marks the end of the Summer 2 batch and the beginning of Fall 2. It’s been bittersweet: I’m really enjoying meeting all the new people and I’m so excited to see what they get up to, but it does also mean saying goodbye to a few friends. I’m so grateful for the time I got to spend with all the Summer 2 folks, and I’ve met a few people I really want to stay in touch with as they go off and do other things.

Being in the second half of my batch also means I need to start thinking about my own life after RC, and in particular, it’s time to start looking for a job. I’m not sure if I’ll post anything about that here, since I don’t expect my job hunt to be particularly interesting, but it does seem like that’ll be a notable part of the next few weeks.

For now though, I’m still very happy to be at RC and I’m feeling optimistic about what I can do with the next six weeks. I’m not sure quite when the next post here is going to be, but with any luck there’ll be something interesting in there! And thanks so much to all my friends at RC who’ve helped me make cool stuff over the last couple of weeks, I love you all <3