Well, I hoped to actually have some coding content this week, but when I tried to make something for a Useless Stuff hackathon, I actually failed to do that, hilariously. Specifically, I couldn’t find any good automatic way to do text to speech to music vocals, despite a lot of looking around at stuff like Vocaloids.
So instead, I’d like to talk in my final weekly blog post about the wonderful community that I’ve been chatting with and coding with during my time in batch here at the Recurse Center. And in particular, I’d like to say why it’s different from other online communities and coding environments I’ve been in.
One thing that I noticed from the very beginning was how kind and helpful people are at Recurse. It’s not like I’ve only ever coded with jerks in the past, so I think that means that this place is exceptionally good in that regard. Virtually everyone I’ve talked to so far have been really friendly and welcoming, and that changes the day-to-day feel here a lot. I feel like people want me to be here and want to help me, a lot, and that makes me want to do a lot more, both on my own, and for them. I was surprised at just how much, actually. The warm environment was one of the key factors in making me productive here.
Another important bit, related to the first, is that everyone’s energy is infectious. Since this place is built around people following their own volition, it often ends up creating this buzzy energy since lots of people are doing that at once. It’s a bit of a bummer when you organize something or are part of something where interest dies after a couple of weeks, but I think it’s small price to pay for the fact that, when you’re in a meeting or chatting with someone, it’s because you know they generally really want to be doing that. If anything, it can be kind of overwhelming at times, because there’s lots of cool stuff happening at the same time! Of course, it’s not like that ALL the time — no experience is, or could be — but I feel that excited energy here more than in most places I’ve been.
Also, knowing that other people will be kind and support me has led me to take more chances and push harder than maybe I would have in other places. It’s not always easy to ask, but all of you have to do is say you want help, or would like a pairing buddy, and I’ve noticed over and over again that someone (or several someones) will respond, either on Virtual RC or on Zulip. This lead me personally to try out Elixir + Phoenix, and category theory, and especially to stick with them through many difficulties, which I almost certainly wouldn’t have done without people helping me a lot with those things. And if you fail, there are lots of other people trying hard things and failing and pivoting occasionally, so it isn’t weird. (By the way, in my experience people don’t usually seem to keep failing here, so normalizing failure doesn’t seem to encourage it, either.)
And people here are really smart, but wear it lightly. In a lot of other coding environments I’ve been in, a lot of people seem to want to explain things in a way designed to make you feel they’re Really Smart, and maybe make you feel that you’re Really Stupid. They throw around a lot of uncommon buzzwords and feign surprise and make pedantic corrections (aka “well-actually”s), and many times seem to be doing it for negative reasons, like insecurity and imposter syndrome and gate-keeping. Here, people basically never bring up their past jobs and work unsolicited, even when it’s really impressive (looking up batchmates on LinkedIn is sometimes a bit of a shock!), and the people here have been very consistently been generous with their time and inclusive in their demeanor when explaining complex concepts and technologies.
Lastly, I kind of talked about this earlier, but I want to emphasize that the warm fuzzy feeling of the kind people here is amazing. It’s hard to put into words, but I feel closer to many people in my batch than I have in most online communities I’ve been a part of (and I’ve been a part of a decent number of them). In most of those other communities, I just can’t imagine people saying some of the niceties I heard at the end of the last batch, or writing me holiday cards, or teaching me how to bake muffins, or buying me lunch, or many other nice things. I don’t want it to seem like it’s some weird cult or anything — it’s not like the Nice Police are out there, forcing everyone to say and do kind things and ruthlessly putting down dissent. The kindness usually feels genuine and of their own accord, and the feeling from that is really powerful. It makes Recurse a fun place to be, and not just some people I chat online with once in a while.
I hope this gives you at least some sense of why the Recurse environment is special. Maybe this seems a little hard to believe, but at least currently, I’d say that pretty much everyone, including the staff (I would say especially the staff), wants you to feel like this place is for you and wants to help you become a dramatically better programmer.
Next time: A return statement summing up my time here at the Recurse Center.