10/23/2023 - 10/27/2023
I am officially halfway through Recurse Center!
I applied to RC with a half-batch on my application, which I extended to a full batch only a couple days after being accepted. I'm glad I did. I can't imagine it being over already.
- I initially over-extended myself with how many group sessions / recurring meetings I RSVP'd
yesto. I quickly noticed that I wanted more and more time back to myself to just build and stay in the zone. In turn, I became more selective with what I committed to and found that it helped me narrow my learning priorities. - RC is a very effective way to challenge your creative side.
- RC is a very rare opportunity to collaborate with people across all ranges of experience and topics.
- I've gotten to work with people who have less experience than me and people who have far more experience than me, across topics that I know very well and areas I've never even heard of. In a single day I've gone from pairing on a web app, to implementing tcp, to creative coding in p5js, to learning emacs.
- Time goes by so fast.
In H1, I focused on building bite-sized projects, aiming for at least 1 small and 3 mini every week. I wanted the repetition of setting up projects from scratch over and over again. I also wanted to strengthen the muscle that starts developing without overthinking the logistics.
A small project is 2 days, a mini project is 1 day or less.
I learned that I'm very effective at overcoming blockers, so overpreparing for them doesn't really have the positive impact that my planner-personality wants it to have. The unexpected soldering in Week 5 is the perfect example.
If I had known from the beginning that my Raspberry Pi would require me to solder the headers myself, my mise en place nature would've probably led me to overinvest in understanding how soldering works, figuring out how to get the equipment, and potentially even buying a replacement Raspberry Pi.
I would've missed out on the effort it took to acquire soldering equipment from a neighbor via Facebook and learning how to solder through YouTube without practicing on something else first.
I found a lot of value in approaching H1 with a quality through quantity mentality, and now I want to explore the inverse.
In H2, I want to focus on building something with long-term vision. I don't exactly know what this will look like yet, but that's for me to figure out this week.
Outputting lots of small stuff has been impactful in so many ways, but it does miss the heavy and hard-hitting problems that big projects present.
For the next 6 weeks, minimum, I'm going to focus on a project where I have to
- implement security measures
- be concerned with scalability and performance
- optimize existing code
- write clean and documented code for the next person
- maybe hire and work with a designer
- beta test and collect user feedback
- think about scope and what makes for a shippable v1
I have an idea for a project that I'm excited about, but I'll be keeping it to myself for now.