#91

Day 6 (RC Day 0)

Recurse Center Day 0. Summary: Whoa. So many people.

I spent today for the first time realizing I'm in a similar time zone as my friends again, which is super weird, and then also getting this constant stream of meeting new faces. I had conversations today with people named Cory, Rob, Steve, Jesse, Alex, Emma and Nick. Chatted over beers with Jenna, Gonçalo and Agustín. Plus brief hand shakings and introductions with a bunch of other people.

After a fun introduction to RC (with lots of advice and introductions and whatnots), I sat down and read timbray's Google + 1yr post. All of this makes sense, although at only one week outside of the machine, I don't know how I feel yet.

Jesse pointed me at Joshua Davis. His personal site has all of this cool stuff, including his work with Diplo and his work with Phantomgram.

I watched two talks by him, one for Toyota and one from W3Conf.

I reread through Mike Bostock's Visualizing Algorithms post. This post reminded me how much I had to learn.

Things I had forgotten / didn’t know:

  • JS Bitwise OPs - I didn’t know what <<= did.
  • Spanning Tree and Minimum Spanning Tree - It’s been so long since I last thought about this stuff. The wikipedia pages aren’t very good, I’ll need to go dig out a better source for graph stuff and reread it.

Stuff to read next:

Code to read through:

Other random stuff to look into:

The day ended with a talk by @neha. She talked about the high level types of problems existing in database systems, focusing on how CAP, ACID and other uses of the word consistency work. I have experienced a lot of this during my time at Google, but her talk made me realize I really didn't understand a lot of the fundamental problems that were being dealt with and the decisions that were being made. I hope I can sit down and talk to her more, she seems super interesting.

A great day! Here's to many more.

#hackerschool (I guess I should go through and change all these tags... or maybe write an ability to alias tags...)