Today is Groundhog Day, which means we're approaching the halfway point of winter. In my last post, Farewell Logical Position, I mentioned I was going to launch into the greatest Winter Arc of my life, and to try and keep up with this proclamation I kicked off the new year by joining The Recurse Center to be a part of their Winter 2 Batch.
For the full scoop, I want to outline how I ended up here and how things have been going thus far.
The Path to The Recurse Center: Dec 2024
December wasn't a wash - it was a reset. After leaving my previous company, I discovered I was more burnt out than I'd initially realized. While I had expected to dive straight into building projects, programming rarely topped my daily priorities. Instead, I focused on rebuilding my foundation: returning to a regular gym routine, spending time outdoors, exploring new books, and even venturing into baking my first multi-layer cake.
The month wasn't without its challenges. An underlying anxiety about the future led me to submit several job applications and go through interviews. However, I'm proud that I recognized when these opportunities didn't align with my vision and resisted the urge to immediately jump into a new role. This pause to reflect proved to be crucial - it's what led me to The Recurse Center.
The Application Process
In mid-December I went through the application process after a friend reminded me about the program. While initially nerve-wracking, it turned out to be a straightforward and thoughtful process. I spent two days working on my application, which consisted of short-answer questions and a small code sample. Since my previous projects for work weren't available to share, I wrote a Python CLI game of tic-tac-toe.
After getting past the inital application the interview process included two virtual 30-minute meetings with Recurse alumni:
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Conversational Interview - Had a great discussion about my background, my interest in RC, and what I hoped to get out of my time there.
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Pairing Interview - We explored my tic-tac-toe game and worked on implementing a CPU player. We never finished the feature, but set a general direction for implementation and started to refactor the code in the outlined direction.
Throughout each stage of the process The Recurse Center was quick to follow-up on the current state of my application. Once hearing back that I was approved to join, I instantly accepted.
One Month In: January 2025
With it being the start of February, I just wrapped up my first month in the program. To summarize it concisely, it's been an absolute whirlwind in the most positive of terms. The most unexpected thing about RC has been how energizing it is to be surrounded by people who are eager to experiment, collaborate, and share their work. I'm constantly being nerd-sniped, my project and reading lists are growing exponentially, and I'm always excited to learn about what my batchmates are working on.
Current Projects
My first month has focused on three primary areas:
- 🌳 PolyBranch - An exploratory LLM Chat UI built on top of ReactFlow. The core concept is enabling context control through conversation branching within an infinite canvas UI. I plan to write much more about this project soon.
- 📔 PromptCache - A web extension enabling users to store AI prompts in their browser. As someone who uses ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLM chat providers, prompt portability has become increasingly valuable to me.
- 🦀 Learning Rust - After years of working exclusively in Python & JavaScript, I decided to step outside my comfort zone and start learning a lower-level systems programming language. I've been working through The Rust Programming Language Book (Brown Edition), Rustlings, and joined an RC Study Group. While I've temporarily paused my Rust journey to focus on my projects, I plan to circle back to it in the coming weeks.
Looking Ahead
Looking ahead, I'm excited about my remaining time at RC, two more months of magic. My immediate focus is on launching initial versions of PromptCache & PolyBranch. From there, I'll either start a new project or expand on these existing ones with more features.