Heads-up! I am part of the experiment called Recurse Center (RC, aka old Hacker School) in New York - a three month retreat for programmers who want to improve their skills and take a break from the grind of working for companies.

This is just my first week and it is being quite intense. Talking with my fellows we described the RC experience as a kind of ‘Big Brother’ for developers. The school has no teachers, everyone is a specialist in some field and at the same time novice in others. The most interesting thing is that all the participants have in common one characteristic: we want to learn how to program better and expand our knowledge and we want to achieve it by learning from others.

The philosophy of RC is that people learn best when they’re free to explore their passions and interests. I completely agree with this point of view, especially as I self-taught different languages during the past few years. Many schools and teachers nowadays implement methods based on self-regulated learning.

As an example, on my batch (a group of people who all start at the same time every six weeks) you can find participants that want to learn how to build a web application, but their background is in data analytics; web developers that are interested in developing machine learning systems; there is a back-end system administrator who wants to create a mutation test library in Clojure; and even a PhD in religion studies who wants to develop a music notation system in C++.

So far I can define RC as my most interesting educational experience I have ever participated. Pupils are open-minded, curious and passionate about their work.

The school is open 24 hours 7 days a week and from the first day they provide you with a key to access anytime in the space located in lower Manhattan. RC is gender balanced and even offer grants for living expenses for traditionally underrepresented groups of people in programming. On my batch they accepted people from around the world like India, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, Singapore, Russia or Sweeden.

In my first week at RC I already…

• Fixed a bug on a transpiler from Python bytecode to Java, with the support of @eliasdorneles.
• Read about functional programming paradigm and Haskell.
• Go back to basics, implemented and analyzed two sorting algorithms - bubble sort and radix sort.
• Started a GraphQL server in NodeJS.
• Play Catan.

It is quite exciting.

A hippie community for programmers?

Not really. The school is self-directed and free for everyone. We are free to work or study in any project we are interested. On the other hand, from the day one RC gives a set of must-follow rules and activities for all the participants - weekly study groups and presentations, mock job interviews or pair-programming encouragement. In addition, every month some resident (a smart engineer with significant expertise and who made a positive impact in the industry) visits the school for one or two weeks to help and guide us. For instance, Peter Norveig or Stefan Karpinski already visited RC as a resident.

If you are interested in applying and want to know more, there is tons of blog posts online about RC-ers sharing their experiences. Also, I would recommend to read their manual which explains clearly the philosophy of the school and the way it works.

The selection process is fast. The first step requires you to fill a form application with some questions and a simple code test. If you get selected, you will still go through two online interviews - an aptitude and a programming one.