Now

I started working as a part-time moderator at the Recurse Center at the end of March. Fast forward 5 months, and it's been going well! Aside from the usual moderating of messages and answering questions, I've gotten to help out the faculty with some RC-wide improvements too, particularly around making the chat experience less overwhelming. As someone who's primary form of interaction at RC has been via chat, I'm glad I'm able to help.

In May, I attended my first Never Graduate Week - RC's yearly alumni reunion! Met some new folks, connected with folks whom I'd interacted with only via text, and caught up with some fellow batchmates. Tried writing some code but that didn't work out, and my favorite moment - me hosting Presentations last-minute with the help of some folks at the hub and the faculty! I attended entirely online, so the FOMO was strong this week.

I mentioned wanting to blog more regularly in my last update, and that happened! In June, I saw a fellow Recurser posting weeknotes on their site, and that inspired me to start writing my own! I had the habit of posting checkins within the RC community, so the weeknotes were a public version of those checkins.

I managed to post them for about 3 months - sometimes weekly, sometimes bi-weekly - and stopped them recently to focus on more technical posts. I did like the conversational tone of the weeknotes, so I hope to carry that forward in future posts.

Part of this change has been due to me trying a more directed approach to learning. Since August, I've been trying to identify gaps in my knowledge and fill those gaps either through reading material or working on a tiny project or both. I started reading Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective and I'm liking it so far! I also installed Linux on a spare MacBook, which I'll be using to try out some fun Linux experiments.

All of this has resulted in a lot of ideas, and I'm very excited to try them out and blog about them here!