This morning, as part of the Recurse Center’s welcome talks, Mary Rose Cook gave some advice on how to spend twelve weeks of unstrucutred time. You can see similar advice in the Recurse Center manual’s advice section, where they are divided up by level of experience: relatively new to programming; already have good grasp of one language; and really experienced.

There is one item that appears on all three lists: ‘avoid distractions’.

Aside from a delightful pairing experience1 with Ann, my only technical work today was on the one thing I had decided not to work on at the Recurse Center.2 While today was the first day, and it started later and ended earlier than most days will, I’ll still need to keep a close watch.


  1. I learned some Ruby syntax and we refactored a guess-the-number-from-0-to-99 game. The absolute best part was where we wanted to test something about the iteration, but won with 50 on the first try. The program very accurately told us that we were ‘the best at this!’

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  2. On the bright side, I finally got my 3-node etcd cluster running etcd2, which was blocking further progress on that project. ↩