Recurse Center
The Recurse Center (formerly known as Hacker School; also called RC) is an independent educational institution, combining a retreat for computer programmers with a recruiting agency. The retreat is an intentional community, a self-directed academic environment for programmers of all levels to improve their skills in, without charge. There is no curriculum and no particular programming languages or paradigms are institutionally favored; instead, participants work on open-source projects of their own choice, alone or collaboratively, as they see best. The Center has been an active advocate for women in programming.
Type of site | Intentional community |
---|---|
Headquarters | New York, New York |
Owner | 5blades, Inc. |
Founder(s) | David Albert, Nick Bergson-Shilcock, Sonali Sridhar |
URL | recurse.com |
Commercial | yes |
Registration | No charge, competitive admission |
Launched | July 18, 2011 |
History
The Center was initially founded in the Summer of 2010 as Hackruiter, an engineering recruiting company, using seed money from Y Combinator. The idea quickly arose of trying to transform recruiting for start-ups by running a retreat as part of the process, with the goal of helping clients become better programmers.[1]
It officially opened its doors as “Hacker School” in New York in July, 2011, obliquely anticipating the coding bootcamp movement that arose in the mid-2010s. Hacker School came to wide public attention in mid-2012, when it partnered with the e-commerce company Etsy to offer “Hacker Grants” in support of female developers.[2][3][4] A number of companies soon joined Etsy in funding these grants, and in 2014 the grant program expanded to offer support to other groups not well represented in American technology industries.[5]
In 2015 Hacker School was renamed the Recurse Center.
Business model
The programming retreat is free of charge for admitted applicants to attend. The organization itself is for-profit and supports itself through recruitment, by placing some participants in programming jobs.[6] In 2014 the retreat reached the "tipping point" of self-sufficiency purely from recruiting income.[7]
Internal costs to the company have been reported at "nearly $12,000" for each participant.[6]
The Center does not publish statistics on its admission rate, although there is no published rule against reapplication.
Educational philosophy and name
There is no curriculum; each participant imposes their own structure for self-directed learning on their stay at the Recurse Center, with guidance as requested. Despite its original name ”Hacker School“, the Recurse Center is not a school — its model of self-directed learning was inspired by the Unschooling philosophy of John Holt (1923–1985).[8] Nor does it have any connection to the popular notion of a hacker as someone who breaks into computer systems — rather, “hacker” here was intended to suggest a programmer who is technically resourceful but also supportive of other programmers.[9]
In 2015 the organization changed its name to the Recurse Center to avoid confusion over these matters.[10]
Since its founding, the faculty have experimented continually with day-to-day experience in the retreat. Experiments have included:
- “facilitators” for day-to-day shepherding of participants and improvement of the organization itself,[11][12][13][14]
- Code Words, a journal about programming,[17][18]
- a “maintainers” program to promote contribution to open-source software projects[19]
- half-length batches,[22] and
- a mentoring program for new coders.[23]
Social environment and influence
The Center did not initially publish a code of conduct, but eventually formalized its expectations of participant behavior in June 2017.[24]
Instead, to promote a study environment in which people feel comfortable asking each other for guidance and criticism, the Center has long used a set of “lightweight social rules” to guide interactions between participants. In contrast to traditional “codes of conduct”, many of which have a legalistic tone, the social rules are intended to shepherd community behavior unobtrusively, “to remove as many distractions as possible so everyone can focus on programming.”[25]
These social rules are one of the retreat's most influential features and have been adopted by a number of other programming communities.[26][27][28][29][30][31]
There is a large community of alumni that have remained active past the end of their ”batch“, interacting with each other and with new participants in person or via virtual tools.[32]
Specializations of participants
The level of participants' skill and experience is diverse, in common with retreats in other creative fields and unlike many engineering organizations. Participants range from long-experienced software developers on sabbatical, to people who have been coding for only a few months, to retirees, to college students on vacation.[33] Some participants hold doctoral degrees; others have left school before completing secondary or even primary education. Many participants are engineers, but others have strong non-engineering backgrounds, in the Humanities, journalism, pure mathematics, the performing arts, among many others.
References
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (January 6, 2012). "The Path to Hacker School". Blog. Retrieved November 26, 2016.
- Daniel Nye Griffiths (April 6, 2012). "Etsy To Fund "Hacker School" Grants For Women". Tech. Forbes. Retrieved June 16, 2012.
- Rebecca J. Rosen (February 7, 2013). "Etsy CTO: Prioritizing Diversity in Our Hiring Fielded Better Women … and Men". Technology. The Atlantic. Retrieved May 1, 2013.
- Leslie Bradshaw (March 4, 2013). "Martha Kelly Girdler on How to Cultivate More Female Engineers and on Being Part of Etsy's 500% Success Story". Leadership. Forbes. Retrieved May 1, 2013.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (September 25, 2014). "Building a better and more diverse community". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 1, 2014.
- "Jobs, recruiting, and how we make money". Manual. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 26, 2016.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (May 11, 2015). "Michael Nielsen joins the Recurse Center to help build a research lab". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 26, 2016.
- Madeline McSherry (March 29, 2013). "Why Everyone Should Learn to Code: An Event Recap". Future Tense. Slate. Retrieved May 1, 2013.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (December 17, 2012). "What we mean when we say 'hacker'". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved May 1, 2013.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (March 25, 2015). "Hacker School is now the Recurse Center". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 26, 2016.
- "Facilitators". Manual. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (May 4, 2012). "Welcome Tom and Alan!". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Dave Albert (December 5, 2013). "Treating people like adults". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (April 13, 2017). "Join RC and help build a better place to learn". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved April 21, 2017.
- "Residents". Manual. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- "Residents". Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Rachel Vincent (December 5, 2014). "Introducing Code Words". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 28, 2016.
- "Code Words". Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Dave Albert (August 21, 2013). "Announcing the Hacker School Maintainers Program". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Dave Albert (October 23, 2016). "Why research". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Dave Albert (August 23, 2016). "Pausing RC Research". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (February 25, 2016). "You can now attend RC Retreat for six weeks". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (January 20, 2016). "RC Start: Free one-on-one mentorship for new programmers". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- "Code of Conduct". Recurse Center. June 9, 2017. Retrieved June 9, 2017.
- "Social rules". Manual. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 25, 2016.
- "Good Conduct". Haskell Now. Retrieved November 25, 2016.
- "Social Rules". The Hacktory. Retrieved November 25, 2016.
- "Code of Conduct". Unhackathon. Retrieved November 25, 2016.
- "Code of Conduct". !!con. Retrieved November 25, 2016.
- "Code of Conduct". Hack && Tell. Retrieved November 25, 2016.
- "Scala Code of Conduct". Scala Lang. Retrieved December 11, 2016.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (September 25, 2015). "Zulip: Supporting OSS at the Recurse Center". Blog. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
- Nick Bergson-Shilcock (July 30, 2015). "Three reasons to apply (and three reasons not to)". Blog. Recurse Center. Retrieved November 27, 2016.