5 years!
Five years of the Recurse Center, an educational retreat for programmers
2011
marked the official start of RC.
july
The first batch of RC starts in a small room at NYU. Six folks attend and program together for five weeks.
july
We implement the first of our social rules: no well-actuallys.
august
A Recurser from our first batch coins our motto, “Never Graduate.”
september
We add no feigning surprise and no back-seat driving to our social rules.
2012
was full of firsts for our community.january
Our public website launches.
february
The first woman and the first people from outside the U.S. attend a batch of RC.
may
With support from Etsy, we launch our grants program to provide needs-based living expense grants to women.
may
We hire our first facilitators.
june
We introduce our fourth social rule, no subtle -isms.
june
The Summer 2012 batch is over 40% women.
august
Two more alumni return to RC to work as facilitators.
september
We welcome our first residents: Peter Seibel, Stefan Karpinski, Alex Payne, Jessica McKellar, and David Nolen.
2013
saw us all grown up and renting our own space in SoHo.
february
We rent a temporary space on Varick St.
march
We successfully sponsor a visa for Mary, our fifth facilitator.
may
We publish our User's Manual.
june
Alumni start helping us review applications to RC.
july
Peter Norvig is a resident at RC.
september
We move to our first permanent space at Broadway and Grand St.
2014
proved what we often say about RC: it is an experiment.may
We host our first Never Graduate Week, and invite all alumni back to relive their RC glory days.
may
We switch to overlapping batches. The new schedule allows Recursers' improvements to RC to persist across batches.
may
Members of the RC community plan and host the first !!Con, a programming conference.
june
We hire our first operations person, who quickly starts a cats stream on Zulip.
september
We expand our grants program to include people who identify as black, Latinx, Native American and/or Pacific Islander.
october
We host AlterConf at RC.
december
We start training RC alumni to interview applicants.
2015
was pretty quiet, unless you count changing our name or starting a research lab.march
We change our name from Hacker School to the Recurse Center. Options we decided not to go with include Ceper and the Foo Center.
june
We open the RC space to visitors for the first time for an open house.
july
We start inviting folks to write nice parting words for the exiting batches, and give everyone an envelope of these on their last day at RC.
august
We hire our first jobs counselor, and our first flex facilitators.
october
Facilitator Allie introduces crit as a way for folks to become better programmers through group feedback.
december
The total amount of grant funding we’ve given to Recursers from traditionally underrepresented groups surpasses $1,000,000.
2016
is a little more than halfway over, but it’s already been a big year.january
We launch RC Start, a program that matches new programmers with mentors from the RC Community.
february
We add the option to attend RC for either six or 12 weeks.
march
We hire three more flex facilitators, and Ginger, our first canine facilitator.
may
We finally add a public hire page.
july
We celebrate our 5th year in operation!
We've had linear growth, but a constant good time
We now have over 800 people in our community
...who have traveled to RC from over 47 countries
...have accomplished a lot of amazing things
1.09M
total Zulip messages sent by humans
50K
Zulip messages sent by bots
447K
public GitHub pushes from Recursers
12+
books by members of the RC community
6500K+
blog posts written by Recursers
25
Code Words articles written by Recursers
18+
programming languages contributed to
4
programming conferences organized
100+
conference talks given by Recursers
$1.2M
of diversity grants disbursed
$0
tuition charged
0%
graduation rate
...and have helped make RC the
best programming community in the world.
earlier today I didn't know much about websockets but then i spent 2 hours at @recursecenter and magically learned a lot about internals
It's a small gift in comparison to what RC has done for me!
It's my first day @recursecenter and I've already cried twice I am so excited to join this weird cult
Aint no party like a @recursecenter party, 'cause a recurse center party don't stop until everyone understands stateless programming and git
my talks get better from osmosis of ideas from the bright and thoughtful people I'm surrounded by, largely because I went to @recursecenter
My favorite bit about talking at @recursecenter is that when you say "ask questions", they do. Good ones, too.
- Only at the Recurse Center have I seen people genuinely giddy... at the prospect of trying out some new language or technology.
- I don't remember anyone ever being told that they couldn't do something because they didn't know enough.
- There is one constraint: work at the edge of your programming capabilities. Which is to say: work on something that makes you a better programmer.
- The result I can only describe as magic.