recurse center: weeks 11-12

🎬 These final two weeks flew by in a flurry of emotions, connections, and moments both big and small. My planned focus on expanding my pixel town kept getting sidetracked, but perhaps that was exactly as it should have been.

🎵 Found myself diving into unexpected creative waters - like trying to recreate the Powerpuff Girls’ theme song drum break, which samples “Funky Drummer” by James Brown, in Strudel, the JavaScript port of Tidal Cycles. Having never played drums and with only middle-school piano experience, translating what I heard into code notation was super tough! But those moments of side exploration often brought me more joy than forcing myself to stick to The Plan™.

🏙️ Made it back to the Hub in Brooklyn for my final days! Taking the Amtrak up from DC, I arrived just in time for Demo-palooza. What a treat to experience this in person - from learning Azul to marveling at the beauty of both sorting algorithm visualizations and ecosystem simulations.

🧩 Pair programmed to fix the mysterious vertical bars in my pixel village that had been plaguing me since week 10! Turns out the issue had nothing to do with my code 😅 - a couple of tiles in the asset pack I bought were just a bit wonky, which we discovered after zooming wayyy in with MS Paint. Still puzzling why it only showed up on mobile and not desktop, but that’s a mystery for another day.

☕ Coffee chats galore! Had long-overdue conversations with batch-mates I’d been interacting with through check-ins for weeks but hadn’t actually chatted with 1:1. There’s something so validating about feeling seen and understood in these conversations - whether discussing civic tech possibilities, career paths, or just sharing a good laugh.

👥 In my final week, I decided to lean heavily into the social aspect of RC instead of continuing to spin out trying to work on my project solo. This turned out to be exactly what I needed - filling my calendar with pairing sessions, interest groups, and spontaneous kitchen table conversations brought back the joy that had been harder to access when I was putting pressure on myself to “finish” things.

🤖 Finally fully gave in to the tug of ai/ml (which I have dabbled in during batch but largely avoided in order to explore my non-professional technical interests more) when I joined a pairing session with two batch-mates who were simulating LLM agents with different goals and knowledge. We managed to get a conversation loop going between two agents and discovered that the dialogue made pretty satisfying progress with llama3.3:70b (which we managed to run at a usable speed on an M2 MacBook!). There’s something mesmerizing about watching these AI entities attempt to collaborate - almost like a digital petri dish of synthetic social dynamics. Though I had to drop early from our initial session, the exploration was engaging enough that I kept noodling with the code during my hub visit. I can totally see myself keep going with this after batch.

🔍 Chart Chat remained a highlight until the very end - from fanfic data explorations to chart value guessing games. I’ll miss this group dearly! The fast.ai study group, Svelte sessions, and all the other interest communities created spaces where learning felt collaborative rather than solitary.

💫 The end-of-batch reflection workshop brought it all full circle. I’m proud of the friends I made, keeping my social battery charged, and not becoming a hermit. It turns out there are a lot of cool and kind and brilliant and not bro-y people in tech, and it’s amazing to have found such a deep and wide pocket of them here at RC.

🎭 I’m not as sad about this ending as I anticipated I’d be at my halfway mark. This was a phenomenal retreat, my time was well and thoroughly spent… and now it’s time to take that next step. I may not have “finished” my pixel town in the way I initially imagined, but I’ve built a foundation for continued learning, a network of brilliant peers, and memories of a time when coding felt joyful again.

I plan on writing up a return statement. But until then… never graduate! 🎓