This evening I received an email from Recurse Center in Brooklyn, New York. After a written application, one interview and one pair programming session they let me know that I won’t be considered for their Spring 2020 batch.
I’m obviously disappointed, Recurse Center (or “RC” for short) seems like a wonderful place to spend time with other programmers working on your own programming exploration. For background, RC do 6 or 12 week “educational retreats” of community-based, self-directed learning in their programming area of interest, and its all free.
I had been hoping to spend time there contributing to Swift-based open source machine learning libraries like Tensorflow For Swift or SwiftAI as well as giving a hand to others where I could. The distance and cost of travelling and living in New York was also supposed to be forcing function to ensure I squeezed the most out of my time there. However I also figured it was a bit of a long-shot as the center has a strong reputation among programmers and my programming has always been in service of data science work, as opposed to full on software development building sites, apps or infrastructure.
But no matter. I can still work on making these contributions from home. And while it will be more difficult to meet and sit alongside 60+ talented programmers here, it’s not impossible. Onwards and upwards!
For those curious about some of the programming done by participants at RC I highly recommend you check out their blog, Joy of Computing, as well as their twitter @recursecenter for examples of some of the wacky, beautiful or just darn useful programming creations coming out of the centre.
