In An Octopus's Garden With You

2023-12-17

Reflections on the Recurse Center

The Recurse Center uses an octopus for an informal mascot, from an observation that the octopus emoji glyph looks like it's holding up its tentacles in support of the preceding lines.

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Under The Sea

The Recurse Center's batch plan is an immersive software intensive, with cadence and guidance provided by the faculty, and prompting and cueing for participants to be self-directed in choosing their work and objectives.

You may bring intentions of improving your skills for work, but the introductory frame of mind setting is that you should be self-directing toward points of curiosity and interest, to exercise via exploration.

People may shift from a more heads-down focus to a more social and connected approach during their time. You can't do everything, so the introduction provides support for reflecting on what you intend to do with your time, and how.

In An Octopus's Garden

The key themes to the Octopus's Garden are creative exploration and play, along with discovering and stretching your limits. Discovering what you want, what you can do, and how you can be more effective are the invitations to the participant.

Exploratory groups work together on reading technical topics, or working through progressive tutorials such as NAND to Tetris or Machine Learning Zero to Hero.

Creative coding has a weekly time block and a prompt to work from, a short phrase to spark a creative response expressed in software.

Impossible Things Day challenges a participant to make a day's worth of progress on a project they consider impossible, or beyond their reach. The day after Impossible Things Day is a point of reflection where possibilities may emerge from the struggle to do the impossible. Maybe a possible path appears, or maybe there's another thing there, even more interesting than the Impossible Thing.

With You

Part of how the RC faculty sets the scene for collaboration is demonstrating pair and ensemble programming. The internal groupware is equipped with automated matchmakers to set up "coffee chats" and programming pair partners to support the intention of collaboration and knowledge sharing among like-minded but diverse participants.

There are designated teleconference and screen-share channels specifically for working together.

There are regular opportunities for brief demonstrations of work in progress.

Each participant is encouraged to learn generously, to communicate respectfully and avoid statements that suggest that anyone else is unlearned or unwelcome.

There are groupware channels for requesting help, code review, or expertise on particular topics.

When advice is requested, avoid presuming too much or being dismissive of others. Avoid being over-presumptive with advice which may not match the asker's intentions and purpose. Leave space for others' viewpoints, perspectives, and background; let the asker determine what is helpful.

The Return Statement

It's customary for participants in the Recurse Center code intensive, when finishing their work, to reflect on what you're coming away from your session with.

Intentions

I came into my six-week "half-batch" with a set of intentions:

• Get PixieReport to a public release milestone.
• Pair on code, both my own and others.
• Take advantage of others' expertise on points of interest, particularly the Glamorous Toolkit.
• Take advantage of resume and job connection resources.
• Avoid spreading myself too thinly.

Results

• PixieReport now operates outside node-canvas as a browser + proxy app.
• Pairing was rewarding and effective for me.
• I learned enough of the Glamorous Toolkit to gain a better understanding of workflows for Moldable Development, particularly using the standard Lepiter database to collect work in progress outside the Pharo Smalltalk image.
• I tightened my resume, removing the pre-dotcom crash jobs, and sharpened the points for things I had created and provided. I was skeptical of the advice provided by the ResumeWorded service.

Affirmations

• Pair programming is both effective and energizing for me.
• People like my notes from meetings and working together, and find them useful.
• I leave a positive impression of my presence. I intend to bring this to my interactions with people, but it was a surprise how strongly it was reflected back to me.

Confirmations

• I need more exercise in coding, more muscles for basic "finger-work" with strings, arrays, collections, RPCs, etc.
• Alongside the fingerwork for fluent coding, I need to practice learning how to operate effectively in unfamiliar environments as I get familiar with them.
• Calendar prompting and working with other people provide structure to help me be more productive.
• Working from small and very specific examples helps me orient to an unfamiliar task. Reflecting with other people and asking them or myself for the smallest next step (under an hour) is a tactic for improving my effectiveness.