Recurse Center: week 4, day 2

Holy cats. How is it already week four, though?!

Got here nice and early again, read The Giant Python book a bit, was here for all of sitting group (yay), and spied The Healthy Programmer on the bookshelf, so that’s where my first piece of the day went. I actually skimmed through a whole book! Would love to go back and read it in more detail at some point; it’s not that it’s not relevant right now, but there’s other stuff I (perhaps paradoxically) want to be focusing on more actively right now. But maybe I’ll finally get a laptop stand for when I’m standing, and a separate keyboard so I can still type…

Wrote a lot about the essence (or part of the suspected essence) of Recurse Center today in my 750words, working through the ebb and flow of my “am I doing this right?” fears:

There is so much I could do, and as what I could do narrows to what I am doing, and what I have done, there is a certain kind of panic that sets in. […]

The big thing is just time, though. It’s just time. It’s just having a lot of time, so that not all the time has to be used perfectly. This is part of how so much CAN be accomplished here. In the rest of my life, all my free time has to be used well to be effective.

Actually got my blog added so our internal bot can be like, “hey, Liene wrote this!” It really was as easy as I thought, and even if I’d messed it up, no one would have actually cared. Yay!

Remembered to go outside multiple times today (once for lunch, once for a “get up and walk around the block” break, and once to head to the curious and fascinating DOOB pop-up a few blocks from here). Now I want action figures of actual people.

Started to read about finite state machines, and fell down a Turing-inspired Wikipedia hole instead, which took up most of the end of the day. “Whoops.”

Spent pretty much all day flailing around vim — I keep thinking that Ben Orenstein’s “you’ll get frustrated enough to find better ways!” (my words, not his) will kick in, but mostly I just fling myself against the walls and occasionally get a different tone, if you’ll excuse the absurd metaphor.

But! Vim. We hadn’t hung out much in about a year. It’s nice to be practicing these things again.

Stuck around surprisingly long after I intended to go home, discovering more and more ways in which Ann and I are twins, talking about the culture of technology companies and different kinds of diversity and nonsense behaviors and rad engineers that have encouraged us both and “how do I know if I’m doing learning right” and why I get that square on my Pebble watchface at certain times and and and. I’m going to get her to teach me things, and it sounds like that will probably be Mischief (capitalized for fun, not for branding).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *