About Now

Recurse Center Day 1: init

This is a draft post that I have prematurely published. Currently, I am attending RC and I want to write as much as possible, log my daily learnings and activities. But, I also don't want to spend time on grammar and prose, so I am publishing all the posts which usually I'd have kept in my draft folder.

My RC first day was filled with welcome events and fun activities. It was nice to meet all the lovely people.

Welcome

The day had four welcome calls. In the first call, one of the facilitators talked about RC, the basics from the manual. Then few of us were put into a zoom call to chat and get familiar with each other. A previous batch recurser also was in the call, answering any questions we had.

The next call had RC founders and facilitators. One of the founders explained to us the social rules and their importance. Interestingly, as an activity, he broke those social rules and asked us to correct them politely. I loved this part!

The Social Rules are simple. They expect people to break them and you just tell them politely when they do, apologise, and move on.

Next, we spent some time in the break out rooms. I liked this concept. The way this works is,

  1. We are all in the “main” room
  2. Randomly two people are picked from the main room and put in another room
  3. We both have five mins to introduce, talk and learn about each other
  4. Once five mins are up, we are back to the main room
  5. Then we matched again, but this time the number of people in the breakout is increased: three, four and six etc.

Note to remote companies: do this as part of onboarding! It doesn’t take much time, but it introduces the new person to everyone, in a fun way.

The last call was about using how to use Zulip and RC Together. I had gotten access to these a week ago and I had been already familiar.

First Day

The first day of RC is very important. In case you cannot attend these calls, then you’d have to join a new batch. I think this is due to training on social rules and RC takes them very seriously.

RC is a judgement-free, safe space. Anyone can ask about anything and they won’t be made fun of. These social rules are crucial to set such an environment.

Plans

I spent some time thinking about my B Tree project. For now, I have decided to implement an in-memory B Tree first, then think about the disk-based solution. I find B Tree insertion, splitting, and balancing complicated, so I want to tackle them first.