Recurse Center Halftime Reflection | Dan Lu

I’m halfway through my 12-week batch The Recurse Center (RC) and thought I’d at least reflect on what it’s actually been like. Having graduated from NYU this past May and remained in the city, I’ve been fortunate enough to get accepted into RC this past September and attend in-person at the RC Hub.

tl;dr: My RC batch experience has felt like a multi-swimlane “choose your own adventure” hackathon of sorts, where the projects, people you work with, and the durations are entirely up to you. Because of the self-directed learning environment and community of nerdy and generous people at RC, this becomes a very energizing place for me to learn all sorts of programming.

Three quick things before getting into it:

In the style of The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, I italicize the parts that describe the gist of what I want to convey

Unformatted text provide additional details for curious readers, but feel free to skip :)

These views are strictly my own, at this particular moment in time. They don’t represent the views of RC members and faculty, and even more so, probably not even myself in the near future after the next six weeks of my batch. Still, I hope it gives others a taste of the RC experience.

Unlike most things I write, I’ve decided to include the background section at the end of this post.

It’s an optional appendix-y thing to read. It covers the lead up to RC after I graduated from NYU with a PhD. The main purpose of this blog post is to reflect on the RC experience itself and less on what I did before that.

What I expected RC to be like

RC labels itself as a “writer’s retreat but for programmers,” yet I am unfamiliar with the event model of a retreat. Before RC, I thought it would be a sort of “architecture student studio” but for programmers to explore their own coding projects and exchange their ideas formally or informally within a shared workspace.

In architecture schools, students generally share a large studio workspace. Even if they are in the same design class, eventually, everyone ends up working on their own design projects exploring their own ideas. Imagine the desks slowly getting filled with wildly different drawings, cardboard, and foam models of various shapes and scales. Yet, even if each student’s ideas are quite different, the nature of the shared studio space is such that eventually informal conversations between students could still end up being very informative and educational discussions. Architecture schools refer to this as a “studio culture” and point to it as a fundamental aspect of architecture education.

Since my college days, I have been to various makerspaces at NYC in search of this kind of studio culture vibe but for broader “designer/maker/tech” folks who want a space to work on their projects. I had also went through a one-month creative tech + arts “unschool” program called ITP camp. To me it was the closest thing to the studio culture, though way less formalized and more free-form. RC also referenced its influence by the “unschool” movement, so I initially felt confident understanding it that way.

People at ITP come from various sides of the art-tech spectrum and give workshops to teach and share what they know. All the while, people work on whatever projects interest them and showcase them at the end of the month.

So overall, going into RC, I figured my batch experience was going to be some cross between ITP camp and architecture student studio but focused very much on computer programming.

Little did I know…

What RC ended up being like

…I was kinda right! (haha, no real plot twists here)

I’d say that in a broad-strokes high-level sense, RC has been like ITP camp but with greater emphasis on programming instead of creative tech and arts. But there are so many “smaller” details that add up to a significant difference between what I expected and eventually experienced. I’m honestly still figuring out what those differences are, but I’ll say for now that RC seems to have reduced a lot of friction points that normally occur in other learning environments.

This is not to say that RC is better than ITP camp or other programs out there, because that ultimately depends on your goals and priorities w.r.t your career and what do you want to learn. This is also not to say that there are no “creative tech people” at RC, since creative coding is a big part of RC.

Overall, I am grateful to be in such a welcoming place where I can share my unfettered excitement about programming topics, while I also develop my ability to direct that excitement effectively towards helping others learn toward their own interests and ideas. I ultimately see RC as a great place to figure out:

What do I actually want to learn?

How do I best help others learn what they want to learn?

Having been in various roles in academic research, general industry, makerspaces, and unschool-like programs, I have found RC to be very...