First Day at RC

15 May, 2023

First Day Welcome Call

A summary of my first day at RC, mostly focused on what we covered in the first day welcome call.

Short welcome

Quick hello and welcome from Rachel and then into breakout rooms for group intros.

Group intros

I was in a room with three other recursers and a facilitator. We had a nice general chit chat and then went round giving intros covering our backgrounds, where we’re based and what we’d like to work on during RC. Everyone was incredibly friendly, good vibes all round - a lovely start to the day.

Fears & Excitements

Once we were back in the main room one of the facilitators shared a board with two sides, one for things were were nervous about, the other for things we were excited about. We were then asked to share what we had for either side of the chart. This went on for a while until we had about fifteen entries on both sides. I lurked and stayed silent because mine had been covered early on by others (fearful of: squandering this experience, excited for: the unexpected and spontaneous). It was incredibly reassuring to see such a range of hopes and fears on the screen, many of which I could relate to. I was really impressed with people's willingness to be open and vulnerable in front of others they’ve never met before, more good vibes.

Longer Welcome

This part was particularly wonderful. As if my mind had been read, we were treated to a short talk on why we were there and who RC is ‘for’. I wonder if imposter syndrome and self-doubt are prevalent at RC because this part perfectly addressed so many of the worries I’d had before arriving e.g. “Am I good enough?” “Will I be able to contribute?” “Am I the right type of programmer?” “Have they made an administrative error in admitting me but they’re in too deep now and can’t back out of it?” etc. etc.

TL;DR we were told “You are meant to be here, RC is for you” which was very welcome. A welcome welcome? Yes.

Self-directives

We then had a refresher of the self-directives. I think RC staff know that most people will have studied these carefully from the RC docs as they seemed confident that it was only necessary to lightly touch on a few key points for each.

Despite having read and re-read these, I still found it really useful to hear what they chose to highlight for the intro call:

Work at the edge of your abilities

• This is a time and place to learn lots, and learning the most happens when you’re right at the edge of what you know how to do - so do your best to find this edge
• Be careful about prioritising visible ‘progress’ at the expense of working on things that truly challenge you. It is tempting to work on something that is well within your abilities, so you get the feel good feeling of commits, lines of code etc. etc.
• Working at the edge of your abilities often means no visible external markers of progress because so much of what is happening is internal - this is normal so bear this mind.
• With the above two points in mind, try to vary the difficulty of things that you have planned - you don’t want to only work at the edge of your abilities.

Strengthen your volitional muscles

• Your time at RC is a great opportunity to practice distinguishing between what you want to do and what you feel you should do
• Start by noticing the work that excites you and feels like it requires less discipline to do versus the work that takes more effort to get round to doing
• It’s okay if you’re struggling to make the distinction - the struggle is the process of strengthening these muscles.

Learn generously

• You accelerate your learning through collaboration and learning in public
• Learning generously looks different for everyone, so experiment with what is right for you between…
  • pairing (see below)
  • blogging
  • presenting and attending presentations
  • organising and attending check-ins and groups
  • asking for and giving help
  • asking for and giving code reviews
  • etc. etc.
• Time is precious, but if you are generous with your time, you will feel as if you have plenty of time, and vice versa (I’ve already found this to be true even on just one call)

Special entry on pairing

• While everyone’s picture of learning generously looks different, pairing got its own shout out, because what RC found is that ‘not doing enough pairing’ is the regret of recursers finishing their batch
• This was followed by a plug for the pairing workshop tomorrow, which I am very excited about

Social rules (with examples)

This was done in a really fun and light touch way. Similar to the self-directives, it was more of a refresher because again there’s the assumption that we’ve read and digested their docs outlining these.

What I particularly appreciated was the exercise where the facilitators gave mini-scenarios of a person breaking a social rule, the other person calling it out, and then the person who broke the rule apologising. It was a great way to set expectations and get everyone comfortable with keeping each other accountable in a constructive way.

They also did a bit where a facilitator would make a statement that broke one of the social rules and we had to shout (speak?) out which one they were breaking. Again this got everyone comfortable with saying the right words, doing the good things.

More intros

We finished off with four (I think?) one-to-one intros in breakout rooms, and a final five person (four recursers, one facilitator) intro.

Rest of the day...

At this point I'm totally pooped but also very happy.

I spent the rest of the day converting my scrabbled notes into this post and also on a call with someone who I’d had a particularly fruitful one-to-one that was cut short.

We went over what he’s working on, a resource to help programmers to learn number theory (repo here), which is very cool. Very much looking forward to spending more time being a guinea pig as I’m interested in learning more after enjoying How To Think Like A Mathematician.

To top it all off, when talking about what I was going to be working on I noticed a typo in the OSS project I wanted to make any contribution to … so that might already be goal 1 of 3 with a tick against it. (Though obviously I would like to do more than change teh to the in their README…baby steps!)