This is the first time in 2020 where I felt like time has escaped me.
Recurse center reflection
Twelve weeks ago, I started the Fall 1 batch at the recurse center. I didn't know what to expect other than that I will have a structure around this free time I didn't expect to have. In the first few days, I thought I was going to be primarily working on my priority executor project, writing a Linux kernel module, and possibly diving deeper into lower level development. Even though I would've been perfectly happy doing all of this, I didn't spend any of my time doing any of this. These past twelve weeks have been full of functional programming (Haskell) and compilers (LLVM). A full list of my accomplishments/things I worked on are below:
- Completed CIS 194
- Finished part of fp-course
- Read chapters 1-8 of Engineering a compiler
- Read through Stephen Diehl's tutorial on writing a compiler in Haskell & began to fix up some modules
- Learned more about LLVM & currently in the process of submitting a bug fix to the upstream
- Wrote a SQL parser with a recurse friend (Taro) for a toy database project
- Wrote an implementation of a hashmap in C
- Created a proof of concept for my priority executor project
- Wrote a barebones backtesting infrastructure in Haskell
I couldn't imagine thinking that I would accomplish all of this when I first began, but I am so happy with the outcome of this. I really felt like I found a passion of mine that I've been looking for, and I can't wait to see where this brings me. Even though this is the end of my batch at recurse, I now know what it means to never graduate!
A special thanks to all of the faculty at recurse and all of my FP & compiler friends that I met along the way during recurse!
What is next?
Well, I am super grateful and fortunate to have had a job lined up before joining recurse so I could primarily focus on learning during my time there. I am joining Wayfair as a software engineer on November 9th. I'll be doing a wide range of full-stack engineering in my role. I am super excited about what this experience will be like.
Until next time,
~ Dan