Recursing

For the past few weeks, I've been on a leave of absence from work. There are a variety of reasons for this, and I may well write more about that in the future, but the short version is pretty simple, and as you might suspect: I was starting to feel burnt out.

In 2017, I quickly changed jobs, moved countries, and had my first child within the span of 2 months, and ever since then there has been very little breathing space in my personal life. When viewed in that context, it's really not a surprise that I was feeling this way. I decided I needed a reset, and since my employer offers unpaid leaves of absence, I was able to arrange one for 3 months, and so far it's been amazing. I've practiced a lot of music, played some video games, started going to the gym more regularly, etc, etc... just generally trying to orient myself towards a good and sustainable headspace. For the first time in a long time, I have time.

I've decided to use some of that time to reconnect with what I love about programming, and to that end I reapplied to do 6 week (half) batch at the Recurse Center. It starts today, this afternoon, and I'll be participating fully remotely from Copenhagen, from here:

In winter 2014 when I did a 3 month span at what was then Hacker School, I was extremely new to programming... it was a life changing experience and led me to where I am today in ways both figurative and literal. I expect this to be quite a different experience than my first batch. For one, I have a lot more to give back. It's also fully remote, and the bulk of participants will be operating on New York time. This will present some challenges, but by all accounts RC has done an exceptional job navigating the pandemic imposed remoteness, and for my part like many others I've spent a lot of time already effectively working fully remotely in my day to day, so I'm not so worried.

I'll be blogging about it; I've got some projects in mind. I'll be blogging about a lot of things. I'm saying it out loud right now. I've already got a lot in the pipes.

Watch this space.