"Don’t give up on it. Just stick with it. Don’t listen to people who always tell you it is hard, and walk away from it."
It has been a whirlwind of a week for my first week at Recurse Center. The first two days were largely meet-and-greets with breakout rooms both in person and online for the folx who were remote. Everyone was so nice, and it was clear that RC had picked a group that was passionate about coding and learning. There were so many different ideas and projects I talked with other Recursers about, many sparking my interest in something new or stirring up long-forgotten ideas and projects that seemed worth working on. In a totally open and self-directed setting, it was overwhelming to try and focus. This is where those volitional muscles come in handy, along with thinking deeply about what excites you and why.
There was a pair programming workshop on day two, which was a ton of fun. I was paired with Jamine Palatnik to program the classic Conway’s Game of Life (something I’d not done before). We used Python for that. You can see a recording of the final product on Jamie’s blog.
I spent days three and four far less focused and productive than I’d hoped to be. The other factor that I feel contributed to my feeling overwhelmed, aside from the stream of new faces and ideas, was the in-person office environment itself. I’ve worked remotely since 2014, with a brief few-month stint in an office in 2017, until this week. Combine that with coming from living in a small rural town, with rice fields and about five neighbors total, to a city like New York; I think I can give myself a little slack.
I did manage to get a few algorithm problems done and started on a Royal Game of Ur CLI game. I found it especially helpful to come in earlier in the morning before the bulk of people arrive. This gave me a small win for the day on an algorithm problem and also provided quiet time to collect my thoughts, set intents, and do a little bit of journaling.
As for what I hope to accomplish over the remainder of my time at RC, for now, I’m committed to:
Write more on this blog & be more public with my learning. Max had an interesting take when we were discussing the shared about blogging to try and just commit to smaller “microblogging” posts. I think it’s a pretty good one and might see how I can incorporate it in for next week with Mastodon.
Build a mini-operating system. Excited to test and deepen my OS knowledge and get to use RISC-V and C some more. Piya and I will be using the book Operating System in 1000 Lines as a jumping-off point to study and discuss the topics.
Algorithm problems. I will continue to try and do a couple each week from https://cses.fi/problemset/, selecting from the various areas of algorithm types.
Performance Engineering @ MIT (6.172). A group of Recursers is going to work on this course. I liked the fact that it uses C/Assembly and focused on how we, as programmers, can try to get the most out of our hardware with threading, parallel processing, and data packing, etc.