Learning With Others: Joining Recurse Center

Today I’m excited to join a community of learners. For the next 12 weeks I’m going to participate in the Fall-2 2023 Recurse Center batch.

What is it?

If this blog is “learning in public”, Recurse Center is “learning with others”. RC is a code retreat for self-directed passionate programmers. It’s a place to work on your own projects and learn new things, surrounded by other people doing the same.

My plan

I want to continue my journey from SWE to MLE and take the opportunities being surrounded by a community of learners provides to accelerate my own learning.

Learn (more) in public

The more eyeballs around the more power you can leverage from learning in public.

Teach to learn

Richard Feynman is attributed the quote “If you want to master something, teach it.”

I want to use my stay at the Recurse Center as an opportunity to teach what I learn to others. As a way to share joy with other, and selfishly as a way to solidify my own understanding of the topics at hand.

Learn from others

I am hopping to collaborate on projects, review material in a group, and pair program with others to learn from their experience and tap into their unique understanding. See a subject from a different set of lens.

Building Intuition and Analogies through pounds of clay

One more concept borrowed from Richard Feynman is to build Intuition through Analogies. What I wish the most is to leave the retreat with an intuitive understanding of ML. And I plan to achieve that by going through a lot of very minimal barebone toy projects.

In the RC community there is a term for that: “Pounds of Clay”. According to RC’s historians the term is a reference to this story and the driving hypothesis it to speedup your learning by finishing many small imperfect projects rather than one bigger “perfect” project.

How can I join?

If that sounds fun to you. Learn more about RC.