Time at the Recurse Center
In January, I kicked off a journey of reflection and growth at the Recurse Center (RC) – a retreat where you work at the edge of your abilities with wonderful peers to pair program, study with, and grow.
My goals in participating were to learn and play with different programming languages, recharge, reflect – and most importantly become an alumnus. You see – I am a lifelong learner and look forward to the years to come of book clubs, deep dives, discussion and the community that RC nurtures. In other words – you never graduate!
As I finish my last week, I'd like to reflect on what I've played with and what's next.
A few of the activities and projects that I did over these 12 weeks are as follows:
- Generative knitted texture hats in Svelte 5 and TypeScript (website and blog post).
- Experimental journal that is local first (built with .numbers file + Python to make HTML+CSS). Here is the site and blog post.
- Indie Web Camp Carnival - Math-ffirmations in Latex.
- NopeRun - A fancy anti-streak timer
- Memory Birbs (JS)
- Hexagon poem
- Lost Signal - choose your own adventure (CSS+HTML only) (click around when you feel stuck)
- Generative 3d printable gems (python then p5js)
- Divergent Boundaries + pen plotting (d3 + p5js)
- Houdini generated Enneper surface -> 3d print and p5js
- PI visualization (featured in Codepen Spark)
- Genuary prompts: (p5js)
- Solving tools for puzzles: (p5js)
- Pairing sketches with Recursers (I spent a lot of time onboarding people with p5js - I love this library!)
- Frank (the opposite of a focus timer)
- 100000 of something
- Textures
- randomness
- webGl pairing
- Pairing in Houdini for Mandelbulbs, games, and shapes.
- Pen-plotter blur effect play
- Games:
- Bergs of Life (featured in Codepen Spark)
- Slug adventure
- Prolog play with sudoku
- I put a lemniscate shader on a raspberry pi with an iPad as the monitor
- heptagon - music + code
- Played with three.js
- Tested output from Maya+ Python(below) and p5js
- Toy for people at my makerspace to explore
- https://codepen.io/fractalkitty/pen/dPbjXmL
- Presentation on STEM education
- Haiku explorer (d3.js)
- ISS art (p5.js)
- 7th-grade math (vis.js - first time using it)
- Python drawing toy:
- Svelte 5 blog infrastructure - no content yet
- I also participated in other groups such as game-dev, critical AI discussion, morning meditation, category theory, puzzles, and more.
- I gave presentations on:
- RPG in STEM education
- Using art to learn Math and so much more
- Stream of conscious coding (your vibe sans AI and external outputs
- Experimental journal project
What's next
As you can see, the list is long and I have probably missed a few things. I have truly enjoyed my time in batch and I look forward to never graduating and continuing to learn and grow in this community. As I finish my last week I reflect on these last 3 months and feel like I have grown, decompressed, and made friends along the way.
Here are some of my plans for coding in the near future:
- I really enjoyed pairing and learning about how powerful Houdini is for 3d art and visualization. I plan to take a few weeks after my batch and explore the software more.
- I want to start a personal blog that isn't math centric for gardening, hot takes, deep dives, fiber, and more. I scaffolded one in Svelte, but am still working out the details of it. I hope to solidify what I am doing here and launch in the next month or so.
- I want to continue my growth with TypeScript, Python, d3.js and static sites. I hope to play with educational interactives, data visualization, and more.
- I plan to continue creatively coding in p5.js - I dream in this language.
As far as work goes – opportunity often comes from directions not anticipated, so I plan to listen, meditate, learn and play until I find the next thing. In the meantime, I will grow food in my garden, continue to blog, tutor, and find ways to enrich my community.
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