Activities

RC is self-directed. There’s a shared calendar full of events every day, but it’s up to you how many you attend — you’re not going to ‘fail’ by missing events. I believe if it seems like you aren’t getting involved at all, faculty will probably chat to you about whether this is the right time for you to be doing a batch. This seems more than reasonable.

I probably should have put more effort into resisting my tendency to be a code hermit and attended a few more non-compulsory events. A common theme in chats with other Recursers though is that time flies really quickly when you’re on batch. I don’t think anybody gets to do everything they’d like to.

There are lots of ways to approach how you spend your time. Some people work on different projects every day while others focus more deeply on one or two projects throughout their batch.

General activities

There are too many of these to mention and they change all the time. Many are organised by faculty, but anybody (including other Recursers) can create events about anything related to programming.

To give a rough idea a few examples are:

• Pair programming exercises
• Impossible Day and Impossible Hour, where the idea is to set yourself a task at which you expect to fail
• Groups for working through classic coding books and exercises together (eg during my batch some people worked through The Book of Shaders)
• Loads of special interest groups for things like audio programming, GPU shaders, system programming, LLM usage, LLM coding/creation
• Meta activities to assess how you’re doing at RC and make best use of your time there
• Career analysis and planning

Coffee chats

This was one of my favourite parts of being at RC. You can sign up for ‘coffee chats’ for as many days as you like, eg ’every week day’, or ‘Mondays and Thursdays’. On days where you’re signed up to chat, a bot matches you up with somebody else and you have a little informal meeting/chat. As a fully remote attendee this would happen over Zoom for me.

I met dozens of people in thie way during my batch. There’s something magical about the way RC works, in that even though you meet all kind of diverse people with different tastes and interests, you are somehow ‘guaranteed’ that they will be intelligent, kind, and interested in whatever it is you want to talk about. The conversations range from pleasant 15-minute introductions and general chat, right up to multi-hour rambles across all kind of topics when you happen to meet somebody whose interests particularly overlap yours.

For me as a long-time self-employed, remote working, solo developer with a tendency towards introversion, the coffee chats were a valuable experience. Like a lot of people I get a bit socially anxious and I’d sometimes overthink and feel dread at the concept of being thrown into another face-to-face, with another stranger. But I pushed through those feelings and never once regretted it.

I admit that once or twice, I did make excuses to myself and skip a chat — especially towards the end of my batch, when time seemed to be flying so quickly. More fool me though, as it means I missed out on meeting more great people.

Presentations

Every week on a Thursday (night, for me in the UK) there’s an hour or so of short presentations. Here fellow Recursers talk for 5 minutes, with slides and demonstrations, about some code-related thing they’re interested in and/or working on at the moment.

The range of topics is incredible. Most of them were way outside my wheelhouse, but they all still somehow managed to be interesting. The 5-minute length helps with that as it’s a nice bite-sized chunk of time.

Virtual check-ins

Specifically for the fully remote people, a couple of times a week there are virtual check-ins. These are chill meetings with your batch mates to chat over what you’re working on, any problems you might be having and what’s coming up next for you. It’s very friendly and informal but helps you stay focused and get the most out of your time at RC.

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Obviously these are things that were available to me as a remote attendee. For people in the Hub there were some other activities available eg:

• Working together on hardware projects (this isn’t impossible remotely but I think more fun in-person)
• Social/local stuff like meeting up for lunch/drinks etc
• A very cool vintage electronics lab
• Meet and greets with prospective employers
• A library of tech books
• …chair stacking (I witnessed it myself!)