“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
The 12+ weeks I spent at Recurse Center were some of the most memorable, most rewarding.
Like many people, I'm prone to falling into the rabbit hole of blog posts. And at some point, about a year ago, I slowly started to recognize a pattern. Many of the most interesting posts I came across were penned by authors who have attended Recurse Center, a programming retreat.
Having built many machine learning models, this predictive signal really intrigued me. There must be something special. So, despite never having the programmer or engineer or developer job title, I applied. Originally, I only planned to do a 6-week, half batch. But, and this turned out to be a common experience, those 6 weeks weren't enough and I ended up staying for the full 12-week.
Growing as a Data Scientist at RC
As a long-time researcher and data scientist arriving at RC, I felt an extra dose of imposter syndrome. There are so many accomplished programmers attending RC, many have created their own programming languages or companies. Some have written the books that I studied to learn specific technical topics.
But in fact, I found many Recursers with data science backgrounds. On any given day, you'd find events on PyTorch and Flask. There were multiple study groups on AI and LLM papers. I learned about many open data sets, and it was at RC that I first tried Observable.
So RC is for all sorts of background — it's a space where data scientists can also thrive, and expand technical horizons. Our common goal is to get better at our craft. For data scientists, the time, space, and the community at RC provide the perfect environment to grow beyond the usual boundaries of our field.
My Favorite Things at Recurse
Besides learning about Advent of Code and working on them with other Recursers, there are two structured events that I particularly enjoyed.
- Creative Coding: A weekly event where we are given a short prompt, and have 90 minutes to code up something, anything. It's like a cooking challenge: there's a theme, and you have all the creative freedom to prepare a dish. I really loved this format of coding as a creative expression. Over my time at RC, through Creative Coding, I got to play with stable diffusion (to create monsters!), made a Tetris game that messes with you, turned one of my favorite memes into 3D, created a mobile app, a Chrome extension, several web apps, plus also did some data analysis!
- Impossible Day: What would you do if you have one full day dedicated to learning whatever it is that you want to learn? What would your try to do? I have already been curious about making games, so I spent my first Impossible Day trying to learn Godot in one day.
Set Your Own Learning Goals
At RC, each person has the freedom to design their own learning journey. So being intentional and deliberate about your goals helps make the most of this time.
In my case, I wanted to expand my data visualization toolset beyond traditional 2D plots. This led me to learn Three.js, a JavaScript library for creating 3D web graphics.
Having that extra dimension opens up new ways to tell data stories. Even a simple bar chart can be made more fun and engaging (you can play with it here!).
And because Three.js can be combined with a physics engine, we can also build interactive 3D demonstrations of statistical concepts — like bringing Galton's Board to life to illustrate the emergence of a normal distribution.
These projects weren't just exercises in coding; they were explorations of how to make complex mathematical concepts more intuitive and engaging through visualization. Or at least this was how I justified learning Three.js as my goal – I did have a ton of educational fun, that's for sure.
Your goals might be different. And that's great! As long as that's something that aligns with your learning journey, career objectives, or personal interests, it's a worthy pursuit.
Interested in checking out if RC might be right for you? Consider applying!
