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.
While I’ve framed this as “reflections after six weeks”, another way to look at it is “things that didn’t go as expected”. And the biggest one wasn’t really an RC thing: after two weeks, I realized I need to dramatically lower my ambitions. Due to, well, life really, it had been almost 2 and a half years since I had been programming regularly, and I needed to get back into fighting shape before shooting for the moon.
Without further ado:
I thought there would be more group projects. In my head, I had imagined that Recursers would be constantly pitching each other to work on projects. Or at least as someone uncertain what to work on, I hoped they would – it seemed like a great way to learn something new. I don’t know if it’s a per-batch thing, or if I’ve just had my head in the sand, but I can only remember really one or two public requests to join something bigger.
Study groups didn’t work out. This is clearly not universal because there are long running study groups at RC. But the ones I was interested in fell apart. Everyone has different levels of experience, different goals, and different intents for time commitment. And no one wanted to take the lead or risk stepping on someone else’s toes. Which left things directionless. Perhaps someone who has done it successfully could make a wiki page on how to run a study group well.
12 weeks is not a lot of time. There are multiple approaches to doing RC, but this is the common denominator. It goes by fast. You will have to make trade-offs between breadth and depth. Every few days I encounter something at RC that, in the very least, makes me want to read an intro and a walkthrough, which is likely committing to a few hours of time. And that adds up. If I explore every interesting thing that comes my way, I’ll make no headway on my core projects. I struggle with it constantly. And it makes me eager to do another batch at RC, but that doesn’t solve the problem.