posts

Jul 29, 2022

Last 6 weeks in the Recurse Center

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes (2100 words)

I first wrote about my first 6 weeks in the Recurse Center (RC) around 2 months ago. In a blink of an eye, I have “never graduated” from my RC batch.

I closed up my previous post with the things I wanted to achieve on my last 6 weeks in RC. In this post, I will first talk about my review of my last 6 week in RC, starting with a reflection and then review the goals I set out previously. Then, I’ll share about what I like about RC.

This post is structured as follows:

Reflection

Out of the last 6 weeks of RC, I’m away for RC for a week to travel and deal with some chores. During that time, I participated some events, wrote some checkin, but less time is spent on writing code. Despite the reduced time commitments and work done during that week, I have learnt a lot more that I expected.

I had this realization after I participated a talk about consensus protocol in distributed database system by TigerBeetle engineer. In an hour plus of the talk and Q&A, I had learnt a lot of things that would take more time for me to discover otherwise. This one event made me my week in RC worthwhile despite having less focus time than usual.

Being in RC also broaden my horizons way more than I expected. Every week, I’ll never know what new territory I would discover, or what cool and creative stuff that is possible through programming. I have learnt that programming isn’t just purely about solving technical problems, it can also be used to generate arts and do a lot of different creative stuff.

Another thing that I realized during my time in RC is that pairing is great. Having a project that I can pair with people get the best out of my time in RC. I have learnt so much from pairing with the others.

In retrospect, I also think that having a plan on what I want to do in RC is great as long as it is loosely held. If I stick to my plan I wrote 12 weeks ago, I might not enjoy my time here as much. Have a plan, but change things around when you came across other things you want to do.

Overall, the last 6 weeks was great even there were some hiccups (due to some personal issues).

Review

Before I review the goals I had, let’s have a quick recap on my goals for the last 6 weeks in RC:

Out of the 6 items, I think I accomplished 3 of them 🎉

Accomplishments

Let’s first talk about each of the accomplishments I had in detail. You can also skip to below expectations if you’re interested in things that didn’t go quite well.

One of the proudest outcome I have during my last 6 weeks in RC is:

A minimal ngrok like reverse proxy: rok.

rok is implemented in Rust and Tokio. The goal of this project is to learn network programming and async Rust. It’s one of the proudest project because:

This project will not be what it is if I have not paired with the others. Pairing on a project is a great experience for me.

Throughout my time in RC, pairing is definitely the activities with the highest ROI. You get to social, have fun and also learn a ton from each other!

I’m glad that I decided to allocate some time to work on other stuff other than database system. This has not been possible otherwise!

Implement Raft Consensus protocol in Rust

While I didn’t end up implementing Raft consensus protocol in Rust, I started implementing Viewstamped Replication (VSR) protocol in Elixir. This is because, VSR has been frequently discussed topic during my batch in RC and has been implemented partially by one of the batch mate.

Not to mentioned, the VSR paper is also easy to read and understand. The VSR implementation can be categorised into 4 parts:

At the time of writing, I have completed up to normal operations and going to implement the view changes protocol next.

Involve more socially

On the social side of things, I think I’m doing slightly better than my first 6 weeks.

Thanks to the onboarding buddy practice of RC. I get to have a couple of coffee chat with with my onboarding buddies. Having those conversations were fun and I always learn something from those conversations.

If you’re someone like me who takes time to warm up to social, I would definitely recommend choosing 12 weeks batch. This allow you to be the onboarding buddy of the next batch. A little push and responsibilities like this makes me be more proactive in socializing with people. Normally, RC will arrange people with similar interests to be your onboarding buddy.

I also participated in a couple of events. One of the most memorable one is the talk about distributed database design by TigerBeetle engineer. It explain Viewstamped Replication well and it’s part of the reason why I chose to implement VSR instead of Raft. The talk is available on Youtube here.

Sometimes, I do also jump into Coaches (basically zoom link where people just hangout) and Coffee Consumption Group (an event for early birds and EU timezone) to just listen in and social a bit.

Below expectations

Things don’t always go well as we planned, so next, let’s talk about things that don’t progress as I expected.

Regarding my work on database system, it doesn’t progress as much as I hope for. During the last 6 weeks, I’m implementing the lock manager to allow concurrency control. And I stopped writing the book for a while, as I realized that the abstraction of my current implementation might not be a good one, and I’m afraid of misguiding people. Hence, I decided to put it off for a while and come back once I have a better understanding of database system implementation.

Job searching has been on and off for me as well. Applied to a couple of companies and didn’t get past the resume stage. Given that experience, I’m struggling on what I should go for next. Ideally, I want to pivot my career into system programming, but it’s been quite tough to get an interview given my background and location.

Considering that my time in RC is limited, I decided to postpone it after the end of my RC batch.

It’s not that bad in retrospect as I did make some progress in both areas.

What I like about RC

Participating RC for a 12 weeks batch is one of the most memorable and beneficial experience I had in 2022. I have learnt and experienced a lot and would recommend to anyone who want to become a better programmer or find joy in computing again. Let’s talk about things I really like about RC.

Disclaimer: These are all based on my personal opinion and experience I had when doing RC remotely. It might be different from the others experience.

Serendipity

Every day in RC is full of serendipity. As mentioned a few time above, I always came across something unexpected whenever I participated in any social events in RC. I have learnt so much of unknown unknowns throughout my time here.

Sometime, it feels kind of magical after an event or conversation. It’s hard to explain in words, but let me try my best to describe it: It’s a feeling with a mixture of joy, fulfillment and inspirations you got after each interaction you have.

Never Graduate

Do you know that you can still participate in RC events after your batch ended? If you didn’t, now you know. You never graduate in RC, you become the alumni.

While not every alumnus is active in RC, there are still an outstanding amount of participations of alumni in day to day RC activities.

I think this is part of what make RC a great place. As a participant, you get to learn and navigate this new unknown territory with the help of the alumni (as well as your batch mate and facilitators). For example, I have an alumnus from Malaysia reached out for a coffee chat and share some useful advices to me.

As an alumnus, your participation is optional. Sometime, people from a couple of batches ago still participate in events. Even for now, I still checkin weekly to share about my work and learn about what the others have been up to as well. It’s a really great community to be in even as alumni.

Career Service

RC has a great career service! In general, RC career service:

offers personalized career services to help you find a new job, based on your experience and what you’re looking for next in your career.

Apart from helping you find a new job, they organize events to help people in their career as well. You could also reach out to them to have a chat about your career.

The career facilitators have been really helpful and professional. It’s also kind of reaffirming to have people who have expertise in this area and know the market to talk about our career.

Furthermore, you get to do mock interviews with the alumni. Some of the alumni will volunteer their time to conduct mock interviews to help folks to practice job interviewing. I got a lot of constructive feedbacks and felt more confident after two of the mock interviews I had. Definitely recommend it to anyone who’s looking for jobs.

Niceties

Another thing I like a lot is about the niceties practice in RC. By the end of a batch, you are prompt to write some niceties to people who are in batch together with you, especially for those where their batch is ending.

One of the reason I like this is because, it guides me to reflect and be proactive to write nice things about people. We often take things for granted and are not good at expressing our thanks to the people who have helped us along the way. Niceties help us with that.

Receiving niceties from people is also great. It kind of make you feel appreciated and more confidence about yourself. Personally, I felt really heartwarming and confidence about myself after reading the niceties.

How RC operates

The other plus points of RC are how they operate. There are a couple of things I like about how RC operates. The onboarding, the first week, the ongoing improvements the facilitators trying to make, is beyond my expectations. While there is more I could write about how RC operates well from my perspective, I guess it’s better for me to summarize my thoughts more concisely.

From what I have experienced and observed, RC nails it on managing expectations and having a good feedback mechanism in place and taking actions to ensure that the participants get the most out of RC.

The fact that they pivot to having virtual RC and continuously improving the experience just prove it all. Along my time here in RC, I have seen a few initiatives started by the facilitators, to help with the challenges people are facing in RC.

Personally, I think that a company can learn a lot from how RC operates and some practices it has.

Closing

To conclude, participating in RC not only makes me a better programmer and reignite my passion about computing, it also opens up a portal for me to connect with liked minded people and explore the unknown unknowns about everything.

When I first applied of RC, I thought that I wouldn’t get in. When I get accepted, I thought that I would have a hard time due to the 12 hours timezone difference. Turn out that I was wrong. Having the timezone difference kind of help me to balance my time between events and focus work.

If you’re interested to join, please don’t hesitate to apply!