A new chapter at the Recurse Center

I just left my job of roughly 3 1/2 years last Friday to go be a massive nerd at the Recurse Center (a self-directed programming retreat in downtown Brooklyn) and I could not be more excited about it.

It is such a privilege to be able to quit my job and take three whole months to make this happen. I’ve been financially preparing to make a break like this happen for a while, but that hasn’t stopped me from taking moments over the last few days to be eternally grateful for the fact that I can actually make this a reality.

Since it’ll be a reality tomorrow, let’s get into it!

Why Recurse, and why now?

I had been at a level of “burnout-lite” at my job for a while, and it hit a point over the last few months where I had to do something about it. I looked into a lot of the opportunities I was being suggested by recruiters, but none of them seemed like the type of opportunity that would meaningfully change how I was feeling. Because of this (and despite the prevailing sentiments about an unstable economy) I broadened my search to other options and the possibility of quitting my job outright.

I had been aware of Recurse for about a year and a half before applying this past August, learning about it first through a family friend and then through seeing it mentioned on numerous cool people’s websites. It seemed like a truly unique and special place that warranted a closer look. I talked with a handful of former Recursers at different tech events around NYC, and the vast majority of them brought up (unprompted) that it was one of the best decisions they ever made. There was such a love and passion for the space that made me start to think “hey, maybe this is what I was looking for all this time!”

More specifically, I was drawn to Recurse for a few reasons:

1. The Recurse Center filters more on the intention, passion, and openness of the people attending (see their self-directives) than simple years of experience or “job description” factors, which attracts a wide variety of very different people who are all wonderful to be around and have deeply varied passions and skills. The handful of people I’ve met so far (even before starting) have been so open and knowledgeable that briefly talking with them has already helped to bring back some of my passion for programming.
2. I’ve been wanting to explore job opportunities outside of the venture-backed startup ecosystem for a while now, and this seemed like the best place to learn (at least anecdotally) about many people’s experiences, from freelancers to startup founders to big tech workers to everyone who falls outside of those buckets. Even if I land back in the early stage startup world, I want it to be a decision I’m making and not just the default from my past experiences.
3. I’ve found myself deeply unmotivated to work on personal projects outside of work, and it’s something that I value having very deeply. Plus, there are lots of things I’ve found interesting and valuable to learn about, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to set the time aside to learn them. I’ve been mentally organizing and trying to prioritize them all for weeks, and I can’t wait to sign myself up for way too much by trying to work on all of them at the same time.

What do I want to work on?

Like I imagine most people at Recurse, this is a rabbit hole. Here are a few of the broad strokes:

Working on existing projects

• Serial, an RSS reader that was primarily designed for organizing and watching videos. There’s a lot of work to be done here (and ~20 or so people that use it every day) so it would be great to keep working on this. I think it’s the most personally useful of the projects I’ve made, and I’ve been using it for two-ish years now in roughly the state it is today.
• OpenIPA, a foreign language to IPA web app. I’ve already found one Recurser interested in pairing on this, and it’s something I’ve meant to get around to updating for so, so long. I’m very excited to talk with people who know far more than me about languages and linguistics on this and to get it to the best place I can.

I might experiment with some other projects like Tone Sandbox, Listen Together, or overtone.fyi depending on interest from other musicly-interested Recursers, but those are a little less definite right now.

Learning new things

Here are a few of the big things I’d like to learn over the next few months:

• A new programming language. Rust is all the rage at Recurse, but my current frontrunner is Elixir for it’s deeply cool and useful concurrency model. In the end, it’ll all come down to what I can meaningfully shoehorn into a project – I’m not ruling out going all in on a dark horse like Gleam.
• A better ability to architect performant and (possibly distributed) backends and database schemas. This desire is mainly born out of my RSS reader project, where I’m leaving a lot of performance on the table. I’m definitely a frontend-leaning full stack engineer, and having more knowledge that I’m setting up systems to be as effective and future-proof as possible would be such a leap forward.

Some more “of this moment in time” focus areas

We’re living through a pretty interesting time in history right now, and I’d love to do my part to contribute what I can to making it a better time for people to live in. Here are a few related themes I’ve been thinking about when working on projects over the next few months:

• How do you build software that works for “the village” or community? More concretely: we typically build software to be self-hosted by one person or hosted once by single company. What does it look like to architect software for a few tens to a few hundreds of people, all hosted and maintained by someone they know and trust? The closest analogue I have to this is the Fediverse, but I’d be very open to learning other people’s visions for what this could look like.
• How do you, either personally or in your immediate community, “escape the algorithm”? The most direct attempt at this I’ve made is through my RSS reader project, but I’m somewhat at a loss for ideas outside of that specific protocol. There are a lot of walled gardens out there, and I want to become more familiar with different approaches to try and scale them or knock them down in order to “de-enshittify” the web.

Things that are just for fun

Since this is also supposed to be a retreat, I’d like to focus at least in part on some things that are truly just for fun. Here are a few of my initial ideas:

• Learn how to work with eink screens
• Make a Decent Sampler plugin
• Build a hyper-specific or truly useless small social media platform
• Create a non-standard interface for a project, inspired in part by the people over at Folk Computer

A moment of vulnerability

This is the first time in a long time that I’ve been truly excited to wake up on a Monday and start programming. Somewhat serendipitously, I turn 26 tomorrow on the first day of Recurse. As I enter the back half of my twenties, it feels so nice to feel like I haven’t betrayed how I have been feeling, and to take action on my best bet towards building the life I want to have. I want to be working on things that I feel proud to tell people about, and now I feel like I’m on the way there.

Here’s to the next three months!