Post Holiday Reflections on Recurse

2023-01-06

I think that I am a bit late to the party in writing this, and a lot of that comes from the completely unrelated fact that I could not get myself to make a site I liked.

But I'm here now, and the journey of making this webpage presentable isn't todays topic, perhaps for another time. I want to talk about RC.

Recurse for me was originally a means of escape. I had been stuck in a job that did not fit me well at all, and I was in the middle of a rather bad mental health spell. As a result I wanted nothing more than to get out and finally find a way into programming as a job. I don't think I really knew what else I was looking for at all. I knew I loved programming, and I knew that I could talk about it forever, but at the same time I also knew that I hadn't really written any code that I cared for at all or found interesting in months. I was starting to develop a deep impostors syndrome around my ability to write code.

All of that changed the moment I hit the first day at Recurse. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who made interesting projects and did interesting things and had a drive to work on programming just like I did. In the past I had had an inkling that these were the kind of people I was missing, but I honestly had kind of thought that I would never meet them. Immediately my drive to work on my projects was back in full force. I dug up old projects, remade them, and improved them, all through the help and motivation of all of my fellow Recursers.

I honestly never really made any good formal notes about my time, since generally thats just not how I think about things. I've always been rather in-the-moment, and rarely really put things down in a way that means much later. (Writing this is an attempt to fight past that.) I can't conjur to mind all the wonderful pairings, coffee chats, and interest group discussions that I was a part of. There are moments that come to mind but to only mention them I think would do a disservice to all of the other wonderful moments.

The least I can say is, I love programming again, and now more than ever.

Thank you RC for that.