RC Culture

RC really is a beautiful thing to take part in; a very social experience, with lots of like-minded people to meet. The whole project is well thought out by people who are intelligent and have good intentions. They somehow manage to choose applicants that are both brilliant but also kind and welcoming (let’s not worry about how I sneaked in!). Whoever you speak to, you know you’ll be received charitably.

It’s made clear from the beginning that everybody is encouraged to message freely on Zulip, and that cold DM-ing is fine. Even this little detail is important. For some of us who tend towards over-thinking and can worry about being misunderstood, DM-ing somebody out of the blue can be fraught with ambiguity. Knowing that it was ‘accepted’ contributed to a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.

I met people younger than me, and older than me. Some with more experience, some with less. Many were formally educated in Computer Science, some were self-taught like me. Some were currently in education. Some were educators themselves.

I’m not sure, but I wonder if some thinking is applied to creating a mixture of people, per-batch, who are likely to have shared interests. For example on my batch there seemed to be a lot of people who were interested in visual or graphically-creative things. It may that a lot of us arty ones got thrown in together in this way on my batch… or maybe RC attracts those kinds of coders naturally.

Either way, it works.