Halfway through the Recurse Center

At the end of last year, I quit my job to attend the Recurse Center, a “writer’s retreat for programmers” in Downtown Brooklyn. I’m halfway through my batch now, with six weeks down and six weeks to go. I came into Recurse with a lot of ideas, some of which I spent time on and many of which I didn’t (but that’s part of the joy!)

How’s it going so far?

So far, things are great! I would highly recommend this experience to anyone who empathizes with any of the reasons that I chose to attend.

More specifically, I had a few overarching goals my time at the Recurse Center:

• Meet a lot of cool, talented, and diverse people in the NYC tech scene. This has absolutely happened, and continues to happen every day. I’ve had conversations with people spanning hardware, software, web applications, machine learning, weird (cool) performance art installations, and everything in between. I feel like I’ve met more people in the last six weeks than I have in the last three years of living in New York.
• Cure my “burnout-lite” and become excited about software engineering again. I’ve made a lot of progress here! I spent much of my first six weeks working on small, one-off projects (details below), and another chunk working on Serial. I’m in a much better headspace now, and that continues to improve with each passing week.
• Explore job opportunities and career trajectories, both inside and outside the startup ecosystem. I’ve been in the startup ecosystem for my entire career so far, and I wanted to be able to either return with the confidence that it was the right fit for me or spend some time at a different kind of company to gain some perspective and learn what works best for me. This is a work in progress, but I’m going to be spending a lot more time on this going forward.

What I worked on

The most consistent thing I worked on was Serial, my RSS reader. I reworked and vastly improved the importing experience, and made progress on improvements to the data flow and data fetching performance.

This was not groundbreaking progress or the true overhauls that I had envisioned, but I’m also not unhappy with it. There’s a big emphasis at Recurse of working on things that you want to work on and not that you just feel obligated to work on, and the amount of time I’ve worked on Serial reflects that. It’s a project that I’ll keep coming back to (as I use it every day still), so I’m not too worried about it falling into obscurity.

In addition to Serial, I worked on a lot of one-off projects in my first six weeks. Here’s a collection of them:

The projects

A collaborative drawing app

that technically uses Phoenix LiveView, but leverages very few of the features that you would traditionally use it for.

A browser extension for a “terrible ideas day”

which takes the idea of a dark mode extension to its logical conclusion. In this case, you have to navigate a pitch black screen with a flashlight, using a crank to refill the battery when it runs out.

A beyblades-inspired two person party game

using the unique spinner inputs on the RCade

me and @henryfellerhoff.com made beyblades

[image or embed]

— cysabi (@cysabi.github.io) December 7, 2025 at 11:25 PM

A port of my Theremin app

which the RCade’s poor Raspberry Pi is trying to keep up with running, as it leverages a hand recognition model that’s really meant for a computer with a GPU. Depending on how you look at it, this also doubles as a whale song emulator!

You can find the original version here, which will run much better on your (presumably) not GPU-less computer.

A music game lovingly called Bad Orchestra

which poorly emulates a variety of instruments, and allows you to duet with someone to your heart’s content.

Here’s a demonstration, which lends itself more to Bad Jazz:

Everything else

I wrote a program to read MPE data off of a fun synthesizer I bought a few years ago, using my very tenuous understanding of Rust.

Relatedly, I spent a bit of time gaining a basic level of understanding of Rust and Elixir, working through a good portion of the Rust book and a good amount of entry-level Elixir exercises. I wouldn’t call myself truly proficient in either of those languages, but I could now limp my way through a new project with them in a pinch.

The next six weeks

My goals are primarily the same for the next six weeks, but I have a few small tweaks and additions. I want to:

• Be a little more heads down, working deeper on a smaller number of projects. There’s a common experience at RC where you’re first six weeks are either more social or more heads down, and the last six weeks are the opposite. I don’t need the pendulum to swing entirely to productivity, but I’d love to come out with at least one substantial new or improved project.
• Refresh my job-seeking materials and search. This will be a process (and doesn’t need to be totally wrapped up in the next six weeks), but I want to take advantage of RC’s in-build recruiting support and see if their partner companies are a fit for me. In addition, I want to be able to better articulate what I’m searching for in a little more depth than “something related to web technologies and I’ll know it when I see it”.

Wrapping up

My first six weeks at the Recurse Center have been a delight. My only criticism is that they’re moving too fast, but that’s always the best problem to have.

Talk to you in six weeks!