RC 25'F2 Day 1

Today was my first day at the Recurse Center.

The faculty welcomed their biggest batch ever. There's over 50 of us for the 2nd Fall batch. I understand it's normally more around 30. I wonder what makes for such a big change from the norm. Is it a changing landscape due to the impact of LLMs in the field? Is it the economy? A broader cultural shift? A chance in RC policy? I should probably just ask on the #small-questions Zulip channel.

I've been feeling nervous and excited last week leading up to today. I knew I wouldn't be alone, but I didn't anticipate it was such a common feeling that the faculty dedicated an entire "nervous and excited" section to it. The whole group took turns shouting out things that made us feel one way or the other. I appreciate the shared lightness cultivated. I also enjoyed getting to play with practicing the social rules. It's nice to feel allowed to call people out (and be called out) without making much fuzz about it. We all just want to help each other learn.

I started organizing an "Ideas Shelf" in Obsidian to keep track of everything that I'm interested in exploring while at RC. It's not yet exhaustive, but I hope to get a good ritual going on. After filling it out today, the list of Interesting Topics and People to Talk To stands out to me as a source of rich potential. I also plan on writing up daily morning check-ins as part of my writing and "Learning Generously" practice. I'll need to find the right balance between spending time with the check-ins and writing blog posts here.

Finally, it wouldn't have been a Day 1 at RC without some coding. I spun up a bare bones project for me to work through the The Book of Shaders one chapter at a time. And I also looked up resources to learn how to use MIDI controllers as input for the browser. I didn't accomplish much, but I'm setup for a productive morning tomorrow.

I promised myself to be done with things by 7pm each night, which is 3 minutes away. So, yeah. 'Night.