It’s about time for me to introduce the main project that I’ve been working on at the Recurse Center. This is a pipeline for collecting annotated text data for AI training and benchmarking. I’m working on this because it’s a fairly complex real-world process, it involves an area of my expertise (language data), and I’ll get to learn hands-on about orchestrators and other data engineering tools.

I’ve been doing the Build Your Own Shell challenge on Codecrafters to get more proficient in Rust.

I can’t believe I’m already at the halfway point of the six-week batch I committed to.

Yesterday I settled on the project I’m going to focus on for the rest of this batch. I will build a tool that solves issues that commonly occur when handling annotated data for AI/ML use cases. I’m excited that I’ve decided to work on this. The project feels practical and right. I don’t know if anyone will ever use the tool I develop, but I will have the satisfaction of solving a problem for past me, and it should be a good way to get familiar with a lot of different data-related technologies quickly.

Last Friday I chatted with Michael, who was kind enough to tell me all about his experience in data engineering. He practically provided me with a custom curriculum for this area.

Today I paired with Farid and Marc on rock-paper-scissors in Rust, which was extremely fun and satisfying! I should mention this is the first Rust code I’ve written from scratch.

Ballet sequence generator

Remote RC was somewhat better today, though I also forgot that I had a dentist appointment.

Okay, so I missed blogging Day Five. Suffice it to say that I thoroughly took advantage of my last day socializing in the physical Hub.

I felt guilty for spending almost no time at the computer today before realizing that it was my second-to-last day at the Hub and that socializing was probably the right thing to do.

Today I was visited by the strange sensation that I had a boss looking over my shoulder, judging how I spent my time. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m the boss now, and that the goal isn’t to maximize output/second.

Today was my first day at the physical Hub! It’s heartening to be in a physical environment that is the accumulated result of such creativity, and in a social environment fine-tuned to remove obstacles to learning. It’s clear that a lot of care has gone into this.

For the next six weeks I am attending the Recurse Center, a self-directed programming retreat. I’m spending the first week on-site in Brooklyn, and will return home to Seattle and attend the rest of the batch remotely.