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First day at the Recurse Center

Meeting everyone

Introductions via Zoom and Zulip have been overwhelming but I really enjoyed learning about what everyone's working on, and the vibes have been 100% positive.

I was pleasantly surprised that a number of people seemed excited about the idea of a social synth app, which feels really nice! (I will be reaching out to all of you for collaboration and testing purposes; consider this your conscription 😂)

The rest is still unwritten

Today I attended the first half of Creative Coding (run by Jen, thanks Jen!). In the spirit of the new year, today's prompt was "the rest is still unwritten." Jen, Dan, and I had a brainstorming session to design a rest tracker terminal app as a complement (antidote?) to productivity trackers. Dan and I had to hop out for one of our core introductory meetings, so it was up to Jen to build the thing, which turned out very cool and which you can find here.

Things I learned about in the process:

Feeling slow 🐢

I'm feeling sort of self-conscious about how long it takes me to build things. I think the main culprits are 1. self-doubt/perfectionism and 2. being easily distracted. (Zulip! Blogs! Other people's projects! Should I use a library for this? Oh I gotta install this dependency first. Should I scrap everything and start over? etc.)

Fortunately, the collective momentum of pair programming—though somewhat intimidating—is really good for enforcing focus and removing time for self-doubt. Which gives me hope!

Here are some things I'm going to do to keep my momentum going:

Otherwise, I'm just trying to remind myself that speed isn't everything.