Week 1 at Recurse Center

This is an attempt to collect all the things I’ve learned, worked on, and experienced during my time at RC.

Day 1

Introductions and onboarding
Met a lot of passionate, kind, and wonderful people. Everyone had exciting backgrounds and projects they were going to work on.
As expected, there were many Rustaceans and wannabes.
Russell Webb’s Neural Network with Rust caught my eye and I will spend some time understanding it and learning Rust and NN in the process.
For now, I have decided to spend my first week at RC meeting people, exploring different arenas, getting started with pair programming, and going with the flow.
I have to also make a more concrete plan for learning Rust and diving into Databases.
I am looking forward to attending the Rust, System Design, and DDIA study groups.
Overall, this was a great start and I have high hopes for the coming weeks. Let’s go!

Paired with Anatol Liu as a part of pair programming workshop. We created a simple cmd line mastermind game and a solver in Python.
A few people reached out to me from my blog which kind of made my day
Watched Zero to Hero first video by Karpathy, which explained backpropagation clearly. His teaching is truly amazing (something to learn from)

Coffee chats with few recursers. Discussed Databases, Distributed Systems, Rust, the projects they are working on and advice for me
Started working on micrograd using Rust - https://github.com/psykomal/micrograd-rs
At this point in time I am just focused on completing as many small projects in Rust to have the concepts sync in quickly

Paired with Russ on his Neural Network project in Rust. Although some of the ML stuff went over my head, I got a view into coding with Rust
Attended the DDIA study group and discussed Ch 3: Storage and Retrieval. There was an interesting discussion on modeling SQL on top of key-value store. I realized why study groups work better sync in the concepts in the brain
The presentation event was amazing with some truly out-of-the-world content. The moldable dev concept was new to me. There was this out-of-the-world alien presentation to me which was truly mind-blowing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrrU5jPUYO4

Pair progrogrammed on a Columnar DB with Rust. I realized the struggle Rust puts you in, on your early days.
Cleared some of my confusion on Rust’s smart pointers - Box, Rc, RefCell
Reanalyzed my priorities in the volitional muscles workshop and became a bit more self-aware on my FOMO toward ML. That doesn’t mean I am putting it off. It will be another tool in my toolbox and I do plan to open up the layers of abstraction some other time. For now, all focus is on Databases.