Backstory. I’ve had a handful of friends (of all experience levels) go through Recurse Center and each has had nothing but glowing reviews. RC’s premise seemed to promise an experience that I would enjoy, so I applied, interviewed, and was accepted in 2022.
<aside> 💡 Ultimately, I want to use this time to become an appreciably better problem solver. The implementation details are less interesting to me than developing the ability to solve increasingly difficult, general problems.
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PRIMARY: Undergraduate-level DSA and discrete math mastery
The things I’m doing in service to this goal:
SECONDARY: Expanding my thinking via different paradigm or level of abstraction
From “Building Your Volitional Muscles” orientation session:
| Ideas | Why | What |
|---|---|---|
| Learn basics of front-end engineering | Will expand problems I can tackle to “beyond just data”; enable me to build my own website |
Will also help with technical interviews/building confidence.
”finger work” as opposed to “brain work” | Read MDN guides + start coming up to speed on JavaScript | | Get better at C | “If you don’t use it, you lose it”
I want to improve fluency with the language (and implement something really fast someday) | Continue doing Exercisms | | Focus on learning fundamentals of algorithms/data structures | I am intrinsically excited to pick up the pieces to make any code I write better
I want to be able to finish all of AoC this year!
Will also help with technical interviews/building confidence. |
Daily LeetCode | | Practice math | I enjoy solving problems and want to become better at proofwriting / constructing arguments as well as filling in holes in my understanding of past subject matter | (built into finishing , ) | | Dip toes into functional programming | I really enjoyed the little functional exposure I got in ‣, and that paradigm fits really well with math; also a new way to stretch my brain to solve programming problems! | Work through Learn You a Haskell | | Read Designing Data-Intensive Applications | Will give me exposure to “data” paradigms/work I haven’t been exposed to doing mostly batch pipelining & analytics in my career to date
Will help with systems design questions for interviews | 1-2 chapters / week with book club |