Interweb Alchemy

Recursing: a Sabbatical Story

Eric Allen
Eric Allen
Published:

The Recurse Center (colloquially referred to as "RC") is a truly unique and exceptional experience in a world where so many things are forgettable or an attempt to sell you something.

If you are reading this, I firmly believe that you should consider attending the Recurse Center because:

  1. You must be at least somewhat interested in the weird, niche, wonderful world of building software without business goals; otherwise, I have no idea how you ended up here. You may already be a Recurser.
  2. RC was the best thing I've ever done for my mental health and programming skills. If you enjoy programming or did enjoy it at some point in the past, RC will reignite that joy. If you're burnt out, RC will help.

It's hard to describe what's changed since becoming a Recurser. I'm going to try, but first, some backstory:

On 2024-04-12, around 11am in Boston, MA, I sent one last Slack message in the company's #general channel, closed my laptop, sealed it in a cardboard box, and dropped it off to be shipped back to the company.

When I sealed up that box, I felt a physical weight lift from my shoulders. Each step felt lighter. The world looked brighter. I would pursue my dreams, rediscover my passions, and forge my own path. My wife took me out to our favorite speakeasy in Boston, and we toasted to the end of one chapter - maybe even the end of a whole book - and the beginning of another.

I needed a break. I had burnt out years ago but kept pushing and pushing. At some point, there wasn't anything left to burn, but I kept fanning the embers and trying to find more fuel. Seeking a new role was exciting enough to keep things going, but there were diminishing returns. The joy of writing code and solving problems was long gone. Every workday left me drained physically and emotionally.

I was no longer myself, at least not the self I wanted to be.

Fast forward to 2025-03-31, around 10am in Charlotte, NC, and I walked into a new but familiar office, broke the seal on the packaging of a new, company-issued laptop, and started working again.

A lot happened in the 8,471 hours between those two moments. Things like:

  • My wife and I got married, surrounded by our favorite people, and enjoyed an amazing honeymoon.
  • I pursued my childhood dreams of being a game developer. (*That dream is still alive and well; it's just napping.)
  • We moved from Boston, MA, back to Charlotte, NC, which we left separately years ago before we met.

Taking 352 days off and meandering through your break like me isn't practical, and it isn't what I would advise.

Taking 12 weeks off to fully immerse yourself in the Recurse Center could be the perfect reset, though.

Note: RC also has a six-week "half batch" option, but speaking as someone who signed up for a half batch and was lucky enough to be able to extend their half batch to a full batch: Go for the full 12 weeks. It's so worth it.

Recursing

I spent my first week at RC in person at "the Hub" in Brooklyn. The Hub is a magical place where technology and nerdy stuff mesh into this atmosphere that feels like a startup that just got funding. The array of retro computing devices and other hardware that fills the space is amazing. There are Recurser projects on display as semi-permanent installations everywhere you look.

It's an inspiring space to inhabit for a little while and almost begs you to leave your own mark for future Recursers to find.

Unfortunately, after nearly nine months without a paycheck, the cost of temporary housing in New York City was prohibitive, so I attended the rest of my batch remotely. Fortunately, RC invested heavily in creating the remote experience during the pandemic, and attending virtually is just as worthwhile.

The best approach to RC is to "learn generously." In practice, that looks like:

  • Sign up for presentations. Every week, there are plenty of 5-minute presentation slots where you can give a lightning talk about something you learned or worked on. It's a low-stakes presentation environment where everyone genuinely wants to hear from you and wants you to succeed. If you're at RC and you're worried about presenting, hit me up on Zulip, and we can do some presentation coaching or dry runs to get you feeling confident when you're up there.
  • Get involved with your batch. Alumni and batch mates will host events like Non-Programming Talks (where you can present about anything except programming), book clubs, and discussion groups where you can share your curiosity; if something you want doesn't exist, start your own group or event.
  • Pair program. I hadn't really pair-programmed in years, but I thoroughly enjoyed each session. On day one, they told us, "At the end of a batch, everyone says that they wished they had pair programmed more." I'm here to tell you that I wish I had pair-programmed more. It's an interesting way to get different perspectives on problems and learn generously with your batch mates.
  • Embrace impossibility. One of my favorite recurring RC events was "Impossible Stuff Day." Once every six weeks, everyone takes a step back from their usual projects to think about something that seems beyond their capabilities and then spends the day working on it to see how far they can get, figure out how possible it might be, and fan the flames of curiosity. At the end of the day anyone can present what they worked on.
  • Check-in. Every day, most Recursers post a check-in about what they did, what they learned, how things are going, etc. Some of us weren't as disciplined, but reading others check-ins is a great way to get a sense of what your peers are working on, who you might be able to help, and who might be able to help you. Writing check-ins is a great way to take a step back and consider what you've done with your time at RC. After you finish your batch, the check-ins don't stop. There is a very active alumni check-in channel where you can keep up with your batchmates and other alumni.

Below, you can find a non-exhaustive, but thorough, list of so many things I did while I was at RC.

I'll leave you with these parting words about my time there, upon reflecting in my last check-in post:

I'm looking forward to being part of the RC Community, seeing what you're all working on, and catching up with you every so often.

This experience was amazing and I'm so grateful to have shared it with all of you. I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I applied originally, but now I can't imagine any other way I would have wanted to end this long career break.

On Monday I head back to the real world of standups, story points, and paychecks, but know that in my heart, I'll still be at RC and dreaming of pairing jams, impossible stuff, and presentations.

Don't wait. Apply to the Recurse Center today.

What I Did at RC

Many of the things I accomplished in my 12 weeks at the Recurse Center:

Projects

Other Work

  • Added support for Fate Dice to Roller, an unbiased TypeScript dice rolling library, during a pair programming session
  • Fixed a longstanding bug that prevented multiple, deeply nested functions from working in Roller; now you can use Roller to do something like roll 4d6 drop the lowest, repeat 7 times, drop the lowest of the 7 and use the remaining six rolls as the ability scores for a new character in a single line of roll syntax
  • Fixed a longstanding bug that prevented the handful of users of Work w/ Me from deleting accounts
  • Built several take-home projects for interviews, like this one that required building out an interactive User Interface (UI) using only HTML and CSS
  • Added MDX support to this blog, which is why there are fancy embedded demos in some of the newer posts, like []
  • Wrote about how I was approaching programming realism into Line of Sight a retro-inspired, isometric stealth game I'm working on under my side project and pretend game studio, Dead Villager Dead Adventurer Games
  • Wrote about how URLs are an Interface and added a fun URL bar audio spectrum analyzer to the Dead Villager Dead Adventurer Games site

Non Work

  • Participated in a weekly discussion group about AI with a group of other Recursers, where we dug into how AI impacted our lives, jobs, and communities, what that meant to us, and where, how, and why we integrated AI into our own work
  • Dozens of pairing sessions on projects in various languages, like prezento a Go-based, Markdown-powered Terminal UI (TUI) presentation framework built on top of the wonderful, playful Charm.sh libraries
  • Presented lightning talks on topics like BPE Tokenization and PeerJS for WebRTC
  • Answering questions from folks who were trying to start learning front-end development; guiding them through many of the foot guns that tools like React and Next.js provide
  • Started writing and journaling again, which has been critical to learning more, thinking more deeply, and actually getting some content published
  • Went through part of Andrej Karpathy's Neural Networks: Zero to Hero course
  • And most importantly, I rediscovered my love for programming and sharing that love with others