Nick Bergson-Shilcock

Want to make ASCII art with wild abandon? Alex Yang says to try Vim:

there is a straight line from my @recurse.com batch in 2023 to speaking in front of ~400 people—including many personal and professional heroes—at @localfirstconf.com. plus three years of learning, making friends (both online and off) and having a blog that i'm actually proud of. apply for a batch!

15 years + 3,000 alums later, what started as a 6-person experiment is now a community of curious, kind programmers: engineers, artists, scientists, hobbyists, all united by a love of programming. If 6 or 12 weeks to focus on what truly interests you sounds appealing, apply! www.recurse.com/apply

the recurse center (@recurse.com) helped me fall back in love with programming as a tool for self expression, introduced me to dozens and dozens of kind and intelligent people, and then promptly found me a job when i needed one. and this was all free?

Every office should have one of these.

Happy 15th birthday to the Recurse Center < 3

I've been a happy Zulip user for 13 years. It remains one of my favorite pieces of software (OSS or otherwise), and I'm thrilled to see it set up for long-term stability and success. Thank you to Tim and the rest of the team for their many years of hard work that got the project to this place.

We’ve kicked off our annual alum reunion, Never Graduate Week 2026! Hundreds of RC alums gather at our Brooklyn hub to give talks, run jams, collaborate on projects, and so much more. Welcome everyone and thank you for coming! Stay tuned for more across the week.

Next week is one of the best weeks of the year. It's Never Graduate Week, our annual Recurse Center alumni reunion. And this year RC turns 15, so we're having a birthday bash (the cake will have electronics...). Alums: check out the full schedule and make sure to RSVP: www.recurse.com/ngw

A puzzle where every piece is a phone. A joyful moment from pairing jam demos at the Recurse Center. The demo was almost thwarted by all the iPhones trying to share contact details with each other. @recurse.com

What's it like being an unschooler? What are the weirdest projects people have done at the Recurse Center? What surprises people about our admissions criteria? I talked with Samuel Arbesman about these questions and more. Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/23Kr... YouTube: youtu.be/URxJxTu1WBY

Everyone's ragging on Allbirds' pivot to AI but it seems like a shoo-in to me.

15 years in and there's still no place else like the Recurse Center. Courses are rigid and don't provide community. Founder residencies are just about building startups. Working alone is lonely. Only RC provides community, lightweight structure, and freedom to follow your curiosity. @recurse.com

In 2020, the big question was when it would be safe to eat at restaurants again. Today, in the age of AI, the equivalent question is when it will be safe to use em dashes again.

Conspiracy theory: Banks and airlines discovered LLMs years ago and this explains their captchas.

"How did you spend your time off of work?" If you're lucky enough to have a chunk of time when you don't need a job, you want to make it count. Come learn how three Recuse Center alums chose to spend their time off. How to Make Your Time Off Count: luma.com/zfhxstgy

Someone really should write this and then never change it.

"Choosing learning over autopilot" A thoughtful, a concrete approach to coding rigorously with LLMs by an RC alum now at Netflix: anniecherkaev.com/choosing-lea...

unicode braille characters are 2x4 rectangles of dots where you can arbitrarily set any of the dots. That's 8x the pixels you normally get in the terminal! anyway here's a proof of concept terminal SVG renderer using unicode braille:

Wrote about being halfway through the recurse center, beyblades, and bad musical instruments: www.henryfellerhoff.com/blog/halfway...

Heh, sounds delightful. I had a very fun moment at Recurse Center where I was showing code to someone to discuss. He leaned in to look closer, “Is that Inconsolata?” and I said “Yeah, wow, good eye” and he said “I made it.”

What companies (in any domain) have done the following? Around for decades Profitable and growing Privately held, run by founders Expanded into new areas while maintaining a core mission Maintained positive, good brand Punch above their weight

Tech hiring in 2021: Awesome, this candidate is an 8/10. Let's hire! Tech hiring now: Unfortunately, this candidate is a 9/10. We'll pass.

Nice handle @recurse.com

@recurse.com's local host last night was awesome. Great talks, wonderful company. Frederic Kettelhoit's Komucha lang (github.com/fkettelhoit/...) was particularly inspirational. Love me a lang with an effect system.

you're telling me a duck typed this code?

New Yorkers hate dogs 🚫🐕 (we have the data) It's pairing jam day at RC and Chris, Brittney, Wilson, and Tajairi made a 311 noise complaint heat map of NYC.

🌱 Interested in coming to RC? Have any burning questions? Join us to learn more about what attending is like! You'll get to ask questions and hear directly from faculty and current Recursers about their experiences. We’re hosting an info session on Tues, Oct 21 at 5:15 ET. ⬇️

A fellow Recurser, Ivan Savov, just finished a book on Stats and has a post on it with some freebies: minireference.com/blog/noBSsta... #stats #recurseCenter #RC #math

🟢 This month we held Breakpoint: An Evening of Projects and Demos! 10 Recursers and alums demo'ed their work, including games, camera-based apps that read your feelings and scramble your face, a NY shadow-henge finder, a Chinese idiom finder, a fractal painter, custom programming language, & more!

📝 Interested in applying to RC? Join us to learn & ask questions about what attending is like: spending 6 or 12 weeks sharpening your programming skills and following what excites you in a collaborative community! We’re hosting an info session Mon, Oct 6th from 12:30-1pm ET RSVP: luma.com/mn3kjnkj

🦠Watch Peter Whidden's first public talk on Mote: an interactive ecosystem simulation! Mote uses a custom GPU-based physics engine to model hundreds of thousands of organisms, leading to fascinating emergent phenomena: a sandbox that is part game, part research. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hju0...

Thinking about applying to a Recurse Center (RC) batch? If you want to spend 6 or 12 weeks building what excites you (compilers! games! languages! research! machine learning! art!) within a community of thoughtful, curious peers, come join our info session this Thursday! lu.ma/86a0fqdn

This is a thoughtful post that echoes conversations I've had IRL with colleagues and friends. Also: "You should use AI-powered tools to complement or increase your agency, not replace it." ^ This is where I've landed for my own work so far.. Should help me do & think *more* deeply, not less.

We spent two months talking with RC alums and thinking deeply about how LLMs are changing programming and learning. Here’s what we learned, and how we're currently thinking about AI at RC: t.co/ddFj486ch8

This is one of my favorite projects anyone has ever done at RC.

Join us on August 13 for Localhost! 🦠 Peter Whidden will present Mote, an interactive ecosystem simulation with hundreds of thousands of organisms. His custom GPU physics engine models many simple behaviors at a massive scale, producing fascinating emergent phenomena. RSVP below ⬇️

⭐️ We're hiring a Career Facilitator! This is a full-time, onsite role in Brooklyn with meaningful work, good benefits, great colleagues, clear goals, and a healthy culture. Please share with kind, extroverted, and curious colleagues who have a background and interest in recruiting! bit.ly/4nku9ZI

On the bright side, at least Brexit is no longer the stupidest and most pointless act of economic self-harm of the century

10 years ago today. Time to do it again? (Just kidding.) www.recurse.com/blog/77-hack...

the qr show went well, thank you to alllll of the artists! volunteers! audience! @recursecenter.bsky.social for hosting! attached: handmade qr toasting matrix, qr toast, @omar.website visualizing qr’s without a phone, and our qr photo guestbook til next time! (send pics/vids if you have)