I'm attending the Recurse Centre this Winter!
08 Nov 2015
A short post - more of a status update really. I have a big project coming up over the next coming months: I’m going to be attending the Winter 1 batch at the Recurse Centre, an educational retreat for programmers! Today I flew into New York, and tomorrow is the first day of three months’ intensive programming (as well as meeting lots of interesting people!).
The Recurse Centre is entirely self-directed; you can work on whatever you like whilst you’re there, as long as you’re getting better at programming. They place a great emphasis on diving deep into topics, and taking the time to learn things that you wouldn’t normally (due to other commitments getting in the way). You are also encouraged to work collaboratively, and apparently many projects arise spontaneously. I’m joining a cohort (known as a ‘batch’) of 15-30 people from lots of different backgrounds and experience levels. Batches overlap, so that traditions can be passed on between cohorts.
I’ve long admired the RC’s attitude to cultivating an open, safe and inclusive learning environment. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading about their environment and social rules, including no feigning surprise, no well actually’s, and no subtle -isms. I previously organised the Cambridge chapter of codebar, which has a similar attitude to inclusiveness in the tech industry.
I’m planning on spending my time here practicing and learning skills that will help me along the data science journey. These include (in no particular order):
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Object-oriented programming and functional programming principles (to a greater depth)
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How to write production level code, including unit testing, and interfacing Python with other languages
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Distributed computing principles, parallelisation of code, MapReduce
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Machine learning algorithms in Python and R
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How git (and version control systems in general) actually work
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Building and accessing data structures; data warehouse concepts
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How to use d3.js for data visualisation
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Common programming algorithms e.g. sort algorithms
…amongst other things too. I’m on the lookout for projects that will incorporate multiples of these at once, and I already have some candidates. However, it’s probably a little ambitious to expect to tackle all of these during the time I have here, so I’m fully expecting this list to evolve and change as I go along.
Right now I’m feeling nervous, excited, disorientated and jetlagged.