Week 1

In this post…

• Pre-batch anxieties, concerns
• Concrete batch goals and non-goals
• Brain dump of project ideas
• Post-batch goals/plans
• Accountability mechanisms

Pre-batch

I’m coming off of ~five weeks walking the Camino de Santiago¹. Before that, I worked as a technical writer for two years, a baker for one year, a full-stack—React, Python/Django mostly—developer for six years, and I studied CS and writing in college. I felt an itch to get back to programming during my last tech writing job and while I wrote some code there to build the static site, I’ve spent the last couple months rarely thinking about computers and generally feel out of practice with more involved projects.

I’d also like to find a SWE job after RC, so I’m a bit concerned about how much time it’ll take me to find a job toward the end of my batch, both because of this career pivot/break and because I’m also rusty on programming interviews.

Goals

My goals generally fall into three categories.

1. Relearn frameworks I’ve used before, but only really understood as-needed for work

React/Typescript fall into this category, and I guess Python/Django, though I feel a bit more hand-wavy in the former. I’d like to refresh my frontend skills, learn what’s new, and understand more deeply (I’d also like to articulate this better) how React works “under the hood.” I have some vague idea of a Camino² route generator as a starter project. Something I’ve also been thinking about, which might be quicker to implement, is a browser text editor inspired by John McPhee’s index cards. Typescript type challenges also fall into this category—I used flow in my previous job, but never felt super comfortable with it.

In college I did enjoy discrete math and computational theory quite a bit. I don’t know if yet if this is something I definitely want to explore at RC, and “discrete math” is kind of a huge category, but it’s also in the back of my mind.

2. Learn something totally new to me

I’m interested in creative coding, p5.js, graphics, and shaders, but I know nothing about them. The Book of Shaders was mentioned in Graphics Chat as a great starting resource, so I’d like to spend time to work through that, and attend the creative coding group. This bucket might also include something with CSS grid, or databases, use NYC Open Data or images from NYC archives, or something else I don’t know?

3. Build something strange??

At work and in life I do concern myself with being useful, and I value building socially constructive software, but I want to lighten up a bit and build fun things at RC, where growth seems more important than pure utility. I also have a sort of mental block here that I’d like to push past to generate and execute on more weird ideas. I switched to technical writing partly out of burnout during the pandemic, and I think RC could be a good avenue for me to take programming a little less seriously.

I don’t know if any of these are particularly relevant to the “build strange things” goal, but outside of tech I like to read, cook, bake, walk/run/bike, beach, watch Martin Scorsese movies³, etc…so potential fodder for projects?

Etc.

I’d like to pair program often—I think I could use the exercise of articulating my thoughts out loud and I’d love to learn what everyone else is up to. I’m also generally interested in code reviews and learning how other people approach them.

Accountability

TODO

Success

TODO