I just finished a 12 week batch at the Recurse Center. I attended in person in New York City, from January 6 to March 28. I had a wonderful time and I wanted to talk a bit about it.
I have been programming since I was 8. I would consider myself to be pretty good at it, and even though I've been working full time for a few years now, I still spend a huge amount of time outside of work hacking on side projects. At the same time, I live in a pretty small town of about 60k people, and I don't know anyone in person that programs for fun like I do. It can get a bit lonely, and I was really excited to meet people who are into the same stuff that I am.
I drove down to NYC from Eastern Canada; a 12 hour drive. I got sick a few days before and I was still recovering from that, which made the drive a bit miserable. Once I arrived, I very rarely left my Airbnb while waiting to get better. As a result, I missed the first few days of batch (or more accurately, I attended them remotely).
I was a bit worried I'd have missed the wave a bit; that everyone would have decided on their social circles by that point. However, I found the RC hub to be one of the least cliquey spaces I've ever been in! Making friends was super easy even though I was late. I'd go as far as to say there weren't really even social circles in the traditional sense; everyone was everyone else's friend by default.
I found it easy to hit the ground running; I wrote my Ruby BASIC REPL and immediately presented it at Thursday presentations. This was a project I had thought about for a few months at that point and it felt good to finally write it.
Simply put, everyone at RC is incredible. In the last few months I've met some of the smartest people I know. At the same time, you don't have to be a genius to get accepted; there are people all over their programming journeys there!
I don't think getting intelligent people is the hard part, or even the important part. What's far more important is getting people who are pleasant to talk to and work with. In a lot of spaces occupied by tech people (or smart people in other disciplines) it's not uncommon for some people to be arrogant, rude, or just in general not a lot of fun to interact with. The Recurse Center has done an extremely good job at keeping the environment positive. I think the social rules are a big part of why this works so well. The social rules were extremely rarely enforced by anyone, but I found that just having them there really set the vibe.
The RC community in general is amazing, and I'm glad to be a part of it. Alumnis regularly come into the hub and they're always great to meet. I would seriously consider e.g. going on vacation with a random RCer without meeting them beforehand.
I would generally be in the hub for most of my waking hours on weekdays. I'd generally arrive before 10am and leave around 9:30 - 10pm. This definitely was more than expected; the core hours are only 11am - 5pm and a lot of people conform more closely to that. I was usually one of the first to arrive and one of the last to leave.
Typically, I would spend the first few hours doing heads-down focus work while people trickled in. It was similar in the late hours of the evening when there were less people to talk to (and those of us who were still around had drained social batteries).
In the middle of the day is when I would get the bulk of my socialization done. There was certainly lots of programming happening here too - both solo and pair programming. If I needed a break or felt a bit stuck, I'd either strike up a conversation or find an interesting one to join. This is what I might call my "slacking off" time, but I also think it's where I grew the most. Even the "dumb" conversations were very enlightening (do you know how you'd toast a QR code onto bread? Because I do!) and gave me a lot to think about.
Near the end of my batch I also started programming on the subway. I had a roughly 20 minute commute each way so this gave me a bit of extra programming time; so long as I could find a seat!
At the end of every day I would be exhausted, but in a really satisfying way. I was regularly sleeping over 9 hours a night, although as the batch went on I found my sleep time gradually getting reduced.
The Recurse Center gives you lots of opportunities to present! Every Thursday there are technical talks, every Wednesday there are non-programming talks, and throughout the batch there are a few other opportunities to present.
I did lots of presentations during my batch; they're a great way to keep yourself accountable and show your batchmates what you're working on. This is especially useful for finding people to pair with! And of course, practice presenting is never a bad thing either.
The Recurse Center makes its money as a recruiting agency. As someone who's happily employed in Eastern Canada, I figured this aspect of RC would be irrelevant to me. However, about halfway through my batch, I changed my mind. I wanted to stay in NYC and getting a job through RC would certainly help with that.
I found this process to be pretty great through RC. I was matched with employers I found legitimately interesting, at a much higher rate than I would have found if I was cold-applying. I didn't feel any pressure from RC, and they were super helpful with weighing my options. And in the end, I did get a job! I'm actually taking a break from packing up my house to write this blog post; I'll be moving back to NYC in the next few weeks.
I highly recommend doing a batch at the Recurse Center. I'm sure I'll be doing another one in the future. Even as someone who programs a ton anyway, I got an immense amount of value out of my time there.
And if you do apply, use my referral link! I get nothing from this other than the satisfaction of bringing you to the program (:
Hope to see you at RC soon!