Mary Rose Cook

Hi. I’m Mary. I’m a facilitator at the Recurse Center.

First, I’m going to talk about what facilitators do. Second, I’m going to give you advice about making the most of your time at the Recurse Center.

What do facilitators do?

We’re here to help you help yourselves learn. We can do that in a number of ways.

We can review your code. That is: we can look at your code and talk about ways it might be improved. If you want code review, it’s best if you come prepared. Identify areas of your code that you’re worried about. Or pick a part of your program and a goal, like making the code faster, more idiomatic, shorter, easier to read, more functional or more object-oriented.

We can pair program with you. That is: we can collaborate with you on your code. When you pair with someone, try and be your most conscientious programmer self. Practice higher level programming skills like diving deep and debugging systematically.

We can help you choose a project that fits your learning goals for the Recurse Center. This might mean pointing you for inspiration to the well-thumbed list of Fun and Educational Recurse Center Projects. This might mean talking through what your learning goals actually are.

We run workshops on subjects that interest us. Recently, I’ve run workshops on getting started with functional programming, writing a game and exploring prototypal inheritance in JavaScript.

We can give you advice on how to get started with a new project or technology. That might mean talking about a reasonable architecture for your project. Or it might mean talking through the basics of a technology.

We can recommend other Recursers, facilitators or alumni who share your interests and who you might enjoy working with.

We can help you get unstuck when you’ve been struggling with a problem. Some of us use a guideline about when to ask for help. If you’re stuck, you must struggle for fifteen minutes. If you’ve struggled for fifteen minutes, you must ask for help. One useful way to spend that fifteen minutes is to rubber duck your problem. That is, explain your problem out loud or in your head to a literal or notional yellow rubber duck. Sometimes, this yields the answer. Sometimes, it identifies a promising avenue of investigation. And it always clarifies your understanding of the problem.

Finally, we can talk to you if you’re having problems in your personal life. Your time at the Recurse Center can be hard. It’s a new environment that is isolated from family and old friends. We can talk with you about problems you’re having.

All the things facilitators do for you can be done by you for each other: code review, pairing, running workshops, giving counsel and so on. There’s only one difference between facilitators and Recursers. Your priority is your learning. But we’re paid to be here, so our priority is your learning, too.

Advice for getting the most out of your time at the Recurse Center

You’ve probably made big sacrifices to come here. Maybe you’ve saved up all your money for months or years. Maybe you’ve quit your job. Maybe you’ve moved to a new city. Maybe you’ve decided to neglect your hobbies, or your friends, or your children.

If you make your time at the Recurse Center the most productive three months of your life, that’s fine. That’s pretty OK. But, given the sacrifices you’ve made, it would be even better to use your time here to learn skills that will compound your improvement as a programmer forever. The Recurse Center is a great place to put into muscle memory these higher level skills that get neglected under pressure from grades or bosses or worrying about what the internet will think.

There are four skills that have paid great dividends for me.

Dive deep. You’re using a framework, library or language and you realise you don’t understand something about it. Take the time to understand by reading the source, playing around in a REPL or reading the documentation. This will cement your mental model and help make you a sure-footed programmer.

Debug systematically. When you’re stuck on a bug, don’t just type in things you think might fix the problem. Form a hypothesis about what the problem is, then run experiments. If the results support the hypothesis, the problem is now clear and that is most of the battle. Otherwise, use the observations from your experiments to form a new hypothesis.

Learn your tools. Fix those nagging problems in your config. Learn more keyboard shortcuts. Automate processes you do regularly. Don’t lose days on this. Fix one thing, then get back to work.

Learn one programming language really well. This takes months or years. But it has two big advantages. First, you now have a language you can think in. You can express an algorithm or a thought fluently without looking up syntax or APIs. Second, you will learn about the deep ideas in programming. You could learn these deep ideas by learning new languages. Programming in Erlang teaches you about concurrency. Programming in C teaches you about memory management. But sticking with one language keeps you in familiar surroundings. This lets you appreciate the subtleties of these fundamental ideas. You, know: space, time, shit like that.