2 Days at recurse.com

31 Mar 2015

Today my second day at Recurse Center is gone. The idea of this post is to be a reflection of what happened during these two days.

The first day began with an introduction of what Recurse Center is all about: the facilitators, the Social Rules of the space and other details.

During this introduction session, each of the veterans RC from Spring 1 batch gave hints to the the Spring 2 batch participants. After the intro, the daily Check-ins occured. The truth is that there were many things I looked into this day, but nothing really deep. I just felt lost the entire day.

What I did yesterday:

• I got to know that there is a book about lock picking available here!
• Subscribed to the Eudyptula Challenge and fixed mutt in the virtual machine to try Linux Kernel.
• Checked what other colleagues were working on.
• Participated in a Trio Programming (Pair programming with 3 coders?) for an App written using Rails. The truth is that the other two programmers were really experient in Ruby and I was not.
• Finished 2 problems of Project Euler. I really felt lucky to do this since this was the only actual code I wrote.
• Attended a Speach about Consistency in Databases and what is the meaning of Consistency. This was part of the Monday’s dinner.

To close my day feeling “even more lost” I got phisically lost taking a train in the wrong direction back home. It took me 3 hours to get home in total.

Luckily, to heal a bit my ego from yesterday, I managed to feel more productive today. After the daily check-ins, I got to speak to a Facilitator (Mary Rose) who recommended me to do tic-tac-toe in Clojure. In order to achieve this task I began by doing the entire tutorial at tryclojure.

I learned then how to setup a Clojure environment for Sublime Text by following this presentation. I also learned about leiningen which for my understanding is the packaging tool for Clojure.

I also prepared a presentation about the Template Method for tomorrow and got to write this blog. Unfortunately, no progress yet on the game. Hopefully tomorrow I start with it.

To close this post it is imposible not to mention that Recursers are all very open people, and very polite. This makes a great environment for learning and try to pair.