Recurse Center Week One

I just found out about a week ago that I was accepted to RC, after a protracted interview process. It was very welcome news but also a bit unsettling, because I knew it meant potentially having no income for the next 12 weeks or more, and it meant I didn’t really know what I would be focusing on during 12 weeks of self-directed learning.

So here I am at the end of my first week at RC, and what has happened? Well, it was a distracting first week. Leaving my job and forging bravely ahead on a new career path as a software engineer has its challenges. Figuring out how to make it work financially has its challenges. A pandemic has its challenges, though it has given me the opportunity to join RC remotely, which helps a lot with the financials, not to mention family obligations. I’m still trying to decide how I will spend my time at RC, and I feel like I’m just now able to really begin to focus on that, on the Friday of my first week.

I need to set up a time with the career counselors and retreat facilitators at RC to help with guidance.

Here are my ideas about how I will spend the next 11 weeks. I want my plan to have dual tracks: a practical track where I make myself a better software engineer job candidate, and a labor of love track where I work on a project out of my own interests.

  • Start working through The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music, by Miller Puckette. There’s a study group going through this book, and I’m hoping it will inspire a music-related project idea for me.
  • Decide if I want to dig deeper into Node.js or learn Python/Django back end programming Decide if I want to learn React, or dive into a new language like Go or C++
  • Should I learn an object-oriented language? Should I read up on object-oriented JavaScript?
  • I think I should learn how to build an API
  • I should learn something about containers and Docker/Kubernetes
  • It probably would be good to learn more about Unix/Linux/nginx

I’m going to make a new blog entry each Friday during the batch, as a way to reflect on what I’ve done, what’s gone well, what could go better, and what I’m planning to do next week.