[RC] Week #2: Finding my rhythm and learning Zig

08 Apr, 2026 #rc, #coding-retreat, #snippets

Context about what “Recursers” do day-to-day

As a remote recurser, RC provides me with the following structure that helps me stay in the loop:

• Coffee chatbot that pairs people for a quick 1:1s.
• Events for moderated pair programming, which is the key to the retreat. The format is: intro, then a few hours of programming and demo at the end.
• Project presentations and demos. These are scheduled via an internal app where folks can sign up for a 5 min presentation.

Overall I find this structure really well measured, it’s not overwhelming yet provides regular social accountability with a touch of kindness.

Log of my progress since the first week

• Completed half of Ziglings - tiny coding problems to learn the basics of Zig.
• The article that prompted my interest in the “Writing a software calculator problem”.
• Android code archeology to find a version of alculator written by Hans J. Boehm that I want to rebuild in Zig (code).
• I got into the rabbit hole of tracing work on calculators and ended up reading this fascinating paper from Jon von Neumann et al: “Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument (28 June 1946)”.
• Discovered https://ziggit.dev which looks like an actual place where Zig development happens. Stumbled on the blog post by Matklad, The quote - “meta meta: … Reading Ziggit is part of trick-acquisition routine for me”

What remains challenging is finding time to communicate outwards via writing / pairing up with people to discuss ideas.