Activities

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:18:07 +0100

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.

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!)

Being Fully Remote

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:18:06 +0100

I knew there might be some extra challenges with attending remotely. Time zone differences. Communicating solely via Zoom and Zulip (a messaging app a bit like Slack).

During the application process somebody had given me a friendly tip: as a fully remote person I should make sure I put effort into making myself visible by messaging people on Zulip, attending events etc. People who were physically in the hub would naturally bump into each other and chat, get face-to-face time and collaborate on physical/hardware projects. None of that applies to a remote participant.

As expected, I had a little, manageable, trouble with the time zone difference. Your batch is a full-time commitment and you’re expected to be there for full (at least 6 hours) days on average. The calendar events happen on New York time, which for me in the UK meant that the RC core hours started at 4pm and ended at 10pm.

I’m naturally an early riser, usually up around 5am and it’s not a quick or easy task to adjust your sleep schedule. This meant I’d be doing long days. I spent the first week or so finding my footing.

My daily routine

In the UK during my batch we were 5 hours ahead of New York. Eventually I settled on a pattern.


07:00 - 11:15	Morning coding	Work on whatever my ‘main project’ was. A good time to get in flow with something I was relatively comfortable with.
11:30 - 12:30	Body doubling	While very beneficial in itself, as a daily practice this also became a useful separator between my ‘morning coding’ and my ‘RC day’.
13:00 - 15:00	Food and nap	Make a point of laying down with the curtains drawn for an hour. Sometimes I’d sleep, if not I’d at least get a rest from the screen and a little body/mind relaxation.
16:00 - 22:00	Main RC day	Activities from the RC calendar, coffee chat and ‘outside my comfort zone’-coding.

Although I wasn’t pushed into it (there’s an understanding that people in different time zones may need to deal with things a little differently), I decided I wanted to be present until 10pm every day. I knew I was putting in the hours in the morning and getting plenty of code written, but still I wanted to aim for a ‘full RC day’ for my own discipline.

I managed to stick to this commitment pretty well, and on the few occasions I bunked off early it was by minutes rather than hours.

The later, evening, hours were sometimes a bit less focused than my morning coding — this core RC time would naturally be broken up by activities or chats, and I’d tend to be working on exploratory stuff, things that were more new and unfamiliar.

One small concession (or at least scheduling compromise) I made was that I avoided Zoom calls in the last few hours of my day. Although I can code ’til bedtime no problem (like most coders!), I did notice that it was harder to whip up the social energy for face-to-face chats in those later hours. This was partly because I worried that through tiredness I might have a flatter demeanour, seem disinterested… or keep yawning!

Ultimately though, everything worked out fine.