Recurse Center Week 1

What am I Even Doing Here?#

Today, I wrapped up my first week at the Recurse Center, a programmer’s retreat designed to get you to work at the “edge of your abilities”. Recurse Center (RC) lasts 12 weeks (or 6, if you do a “half-batch”), which feels like simultaneously a long time and a very short time!

Thanks to neurodivergence, I’ve got a very messy relationship with time, which has been exaggerated a little more than usual over the last few months since I left my last job. Turns out not having a strong external structure to center my days and weeks around left me feeling very “floaty” with all the days blending together. This kind of relationship with time makes it hard to get stuff done, because there’s either “now” or “not now”, and it’s easy to constantly push everything into the “not now” category. RC is interesting in this way because it feels like a bit of a middle ground between the structure of a capital-J Job and the free-flow that is my default state - there are recurring meetings/study groups and systems like daily check-ins, but at the same time a key point of the philosophy is self-direction. This middle ground is already proving to be a helpful way to strengthen my “volitional muscles”¹, as RC puts it.

That said, in order to strengthen those muscles, I’ve got to actually do the work! I’ve decided to make a goal to post to this blog at least once a week on Fridays to recap the week and what I’ve been up to, as a way to reflect on how I’m spending my time. Of course, I could do that in a private notebook, but this way I can trick myself into thinking there’s a little “outside pressure” (even if no one actually ends up reading this!). So without further ado… here’s week 1!

Week 1 Recap#

Mostly, this week has been a lot of meetings, getting to know people, and getting adjusted to having a regular schedule again. I didn’t end up talking with as many people as I wish had (mostly because Anxiety), but it was still a lot more talking to people in a week than I’ve done in quite a while. I’d like to start reaching out to people a little more proactively, but also want to be careful not to push myself too hard; I have a tendency of going full-steam-ahead on new things and quickly burning myself out.

Figuring out what to work on during my batch has been a whole process. I came in with several ideas, and added a few more things to the list this week. This is a non-exhaustive list of projects² that I’ve considered:

1. D&D/5e SRD character creator TUI
2. Figma-like tool but for TUIs
3. IRC client (and maybe server too)
4. iOS RSS reader
5. Rust
6. Distributed systems (specifically maelstrom looks like an interesting resource)
7. Choose your own adventure text game TUI
8. Some kind of desktop app with wails and Svelte.

Until today, I hadn’t made any progress on any of these, mainly because I felt like I had too many options and kept changing my mind. Starting things is almost as hard as finishing them. Today, however, we had a workshop on building your volitional muscles where we wrote down all our ideas, the “why” we wanted to do them, and then, after reflecting, we wrote down what we actually want to do. I really liked this workshop and found that I had 3 main “why” answers: the project sounded fun, it was something I wanted to learn for learning’s sake, or it was something I felt would help advance my career goals in some way. With that, I decided to pick one project/idea to fulfill each of those “why"s. I went with:

1. Something fun: the 5e character creator TUI
2. Something to learn for learning’s sake: Rust
3. A skill that could advance my career goals: Wails & Svelte³

Of course, all of this is subject to change - maybe next week I get nerd-swiped or come across a way more interesting idea! But for now, this is what I’m planning to work on. Stay tuned for next week’s post, where I hope to have some more interesting things to share about how the character creator is coming along.