RC Day 0: Welcome, Meeting, Panels, and Presentations

Aug 14 2017

First day of RC highlights included:

• Whirlwind meet-and-greet, where the most common question was “so what are you working on?” for current folks and “what do you want to work on” for new folks
• A discussion of “what are you excited about” and “what are you nervous about”:

• Panels about self-direction, choosing and scoping projects, and common struggles and how to cope with them. Oneof the stand-out aspects of RC is the strong focus on well-being, empathy, and kindness in addition to the programming/technical stuff. Definitely something that’s missing in a lot of other technical spaces.

• A skit about the RC social rules – much better than that sounds:

• Presentations! I gave a presentation based on my So You Want To Secure Something Akamai blog post. In retrospect, it was too much content to fit into five minutes, especially without slides. Hopefully I succeeded in conveying my key message: security doesn’t have to be scary, it is something every Recurser can learn, and learning doesn’t have to be a painful process.

I spent the break time researching a better way to pair people up for the meet-and-greet, in the process learning about the assignment problem and the stable roommate problem – a variant of the stable marriage problem I learned about in discrete math.

Tomorrow is the first “real day” of RC. I think I’m going to push myself to pair with folks – possibly putting up a sign saying what I’d like help with. There are a lot of folks here experienced in frontend dev/data presentation as well as folks who’ve been learning Rust, two areas I could definitely start out in.

Overall I’m super happy and excited for what the next twelve weeks will bring. Onward!