I met a lot of Recursers this week, with this one weird trick: I gave a bunch of stuff away (and sold some other stuff). For the most part, I only advertised it to RC, on Community. I didn’t want this stuff to go to waste and I knew that Recursers would be reliable and follow through on what they claimed, and I had a hunch that there’d be enough demand based on what else I’d seen posted to the NYC forum. ... Read more

Apologies for the clickbait-y title, but it gets to the heart of one of my lingering ruminations about the Recurse Center. Over the course of each batch, a pool of new knowledge collects within RC, distributed across the minds of each Recurser in self-directed study. Then, as the batch fades, much of that knowledge drains out of the space, leaving a vacuum to be filled with the fruits of the next batch’s labors. ... Read more

I just pushed the scripts and configuration for my Raspberry Pi automatic CD ripper to GitHub. It’s a project I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I even referenced it in The Great Big Project Hunt. It took a lot more time and effort than I was expecting, and most of that time and effort was spent on frustrating Google dives. The learning curve of Linux configuration can be steep. ... Read more

Every year in June, ITP hosts ITP Camp (henceforth “Camp”) just up the street from the Recurse Center at NYU. I’ve attended twice, and it’s been interesting to observe the similarities and differences between Camp and RC. I think many Recursers would enjoy going to Camp (and I’d encourage it). I also think many campers would enjoy and benefit from RC. Where they overlap and how they differ result in them being very complementary experiences. ... Read more

Now that my batch at the Recurse Center is over, I’m planning to build some products that I’ve had on the backburner. The first one is a collaborative email blacklist. I cofounded a company back in 2012. We incorporated, bought a domain, got some press, then raised venture money and got a lot more press. And each step of the way, the volume of cold marketing emails we received grew. And it sorta made me angry. ... Read more

I’ve always found it painfully ironic that despite attending one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence research institutions, my undergraduate experiences with AI and machine learning courses at Carnegie Mellon were disappointing. A lot has changed in AI/ML in the decade since I graduated. Last summer I did the (excellent) Udacity Artifical Intelligence course taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun (who, more irony, was at Carnegie Mellon when I was an undergrad). ... Read more

For the most part this blog is focused on my experiences at the Recurse Center, but I’ve had a few startup-related conversations since the start of the newest RC batch so I thought I’d point to something I wrote about that world. It’s on a useful/difficult topic for many early stage founders. Why it’s hard to raise money to fund growth experiments

A few thoughts that have jumbled together as the new Summer 1 welcome emails arrive: I look for people in the RC directory frequently, and it’s always a little disappointing when someone’s profile is empty. I wonder if there’s a way to get the contents of these welcome emails into people’s profiles, or vice versa. I also wonder what the connections/stats are for Recursers who send welcome emails, fill out their profile, or both. ... Read more

The Summer 1 welcome emails are arriving and I’m having flashbacks to the weeks before my batch began, and reflecting on the first half of my RC experience. As I said in my Mid-Batch Goals post, it took me about two weeks to ramp up, and then I really narrowed my focus and have felt productive since. Throughout the full 6 weeks, I’ve enjoyed being in the space and interacting with the other Recursers. ... Read more

There are six weeks left in my RC batch (Spring 2). That’s really not a lot of time. It took me about two weeks of struggling to ramp up, but the last 4 weeks have felt productive, which I attribute mainly to focus. I honed in on two projects, and am trying to treat each week as a sprint on either one of those. The downside of that focus is that I feel like I’ve missed out on some of the experience of RC. ... Read more