Mary Rose Cook

After three joyous years, I’ve left the Recurse Center. I’ve moved to London to be closer to my family.

RC is like a writer’s retreat for programmers. Recursers come for three months to get significantly better at programming. The environment is mostly unstructured: there are no classes, curricula, grades or teachers. Instead, Recursers get better at programming by working on projects they choose.

My job had two parts.

First, I helped Recursers get better at programming. I helped them figure out what stuff they wanted to learn and helped them figure out what projects to work on to learn that stuff. I worked with Recursers on their projects: I gave code review, pair programmed, helped out in mammoth debugging sessions, helped plan program architectures. And I gave seminars on subjects that interested me.

Second, I worked on my own projects.

I made Code Lauren, a game programming environment for beginners. The user writes code for their game in a custom, easy-to-learn language. Their code runs on a virtual machine that lets them pause, step and rewind their program. This helps them understand control flow and debug their program. At BrooklynJS, I demoed Code Lauren and explained how it works.

I wrote Gitlet, an implementation of Git in one thousand lines of heavily-annotated JavaScript. From what I learned, I wrote a six-thousand-word deep dive into the innards of Git. I redesigned that material as a talk that I gave at Codecademy and !!Con.

I wrote Isla, an online programming environment for young children. The initial version was in Clojure and I later ported it to JavaScript. I talked about how it works at JSConf EU.

I livecoded Space Invaders in front of three-hundred people at Front-Trends. I turned the talk into a workshop that I gave at Strange Loop: How to build your first game in JavaScript.

I wrote A Practical Introduction to Functional Programming. I turned the essay into a workshop that I gave at RC.

I programmed a JavaScript game engine, Coquette, and used it to write three game prototypes: Racecar, Isla and Mary and Left Right Space.

I programmed a Lisp interpreter. I wrote an essay about how it works. I walked through the code in a talk at BrooklynJS.

I also wrote a bare-bones implementation of D3, an essay about testing, implementations of Asteroids, Lunar Lander and Snake, and a synth for the iPad in ClojureScript.

I did the best work of my life at RC. And I had the best time of my life at RC. I’m sad not to be able to program every day with Recursers. I’m sad not to be able to work on making RC the best place in the world to learn to program. And I’m sad to be parting from some dear friends.

I’ve learnt most of what I know about programming from Recursers. They helped me get better at code review, get better at explaining things and get better at pairing. They taught me both how and why to dive deep and how and why to be rigorous. They helped me try things that seemed too hard and helped me discover that they were hard but doable.

I’m currently thinking about what to work on next. My immediate plans are to go on a belated honeymoon with my wife, Lauren, to Paris, Florence and Berlin. I’m excited!