starting recurse center (w2'24)

I just finished my first week at Recurse Center, a self-directed community-focused programmer's retreat, which started on January 3rd. I'd found out about RC sometime in 2022^[1], and thought it was Very Cool, both in its values and goals, and in the idea of being able to spend a whole 12 weeks with other people learning and hacking on various things. But I didn't think I would have 6 to 12 weeks of vacation or free time any time soon, so I put it on my mental bucket list.

Then I quit my job last year^[2] to take a break and figure out where I wanted my career to go next, and found myself staring down at a lot of free time. After some traveling, I applied to Recurse Center in December. Fortunately, I was just able to squeak by into the Winter 2 batch.

The first week (which was more like half a week) was very hectic and jam packed with events, chatting with people, and reading way too much Zulip. I RSVP'd for far too many study groups^[3] than I had time for and spent some time this weekend figuring out which ones I could actually feasibly attend.

In any case, now that things have calmed down a bit, let's talk about goals.

Coming into Recurse Center I had a couple of vague goals, but didn't have a big project I wanted to focus on specifically. The goals that I put down in my intro were as follows:

• building some small webapps to learn Javascript/Typescript, possibly related to language learning, or just some fun/cool art or data visualization
• make my own personal website and blog following IndieWeb standards, and actually write some blog posts^[4]
• dipping into gamedev with Godot, or experimenting with interactive fiction
• learning about LLMs/generative AI/NLP
• going out of my comfort zone with topics such as low-level or systems programming, and programming language theory
• meet new people and pair program a lot!

I don't expect to work on all of these, of course. In fact, after this first week and thinking about how I'm going to manage my time, I think my actual goals for the first few weeks should be:

• building some small fun webapps to learn Javascript/Typescript/webdev
• meet new people and pair program a lot!
• blog about what I'm learning
• dabble with other topics in my free time or when I am bored/stuck

Tomorrow, there's going to be a workshop on "building your volitional muscles" which might also help with goal-setting. I'm excited for week 2!