✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Recurse Center: A Q&A for Past Me

dev.jdherg.com · 1,949 words · saved by 1 readers

This spring, I spent three months at the Recurse Center. It's an experience that's hard to explain succinctly -- the best attempts I've seen refer to it as "a writer's retreat, but for programmers." I also referred to it as my sabbatical: I had been working as a software engineer at the same company since graduating from undergrad three and a half years earlier, and I was ready to see what other parts of the industry were like. Spending three months at the Recurse Center sounded like a great way to transition between the job I was in and whatever I chose to do next. Between making the decision to apply and showing up for my batch, I did a lot of research into what the program is like. That research was mostly searching for the blogs of Recurse Center (or, at the time, Hacker School) alumni and trying to extract whatever tidbits of information I could from them. There were still some things that I was curious about, though, and I didn't want to spend all of my time bugging the few alumn

This spring, I spent three months at the Recurse Center . It's an experience that's hard to explain succinctly -- the best attempts I've seen refer to it as "a writer's retreat, but for programmers." I also referred to it as my sabbatical: I had been working as a software engineer at the same company since graduating from undergrad three and a half years earlier, and I was ready to see what other parts of the industry were like. Spending three months at the Recurse Center sounded like a great way to transition between the job I was in and whatever I chose to do next. Between making the decisio

Explore this link on the map →

related reading