Updated: 2024-02-26 Mon 10:47

RC: Week 3

This is now a remote RC for me

I moved to NY just a couple of months before RC started. In order to get settled I need to fix my J2 visa as my partner has a J1 visa already. To do this I had to return to Sweden (where I am currently in the area of Malmo and Lund where some of my siblings live). While it's been great seeing family it has been harder to stay focused on the RC batch mostly due to having to find a new routine being fully remote.

Some of the things I think is different

  1. It's much harder to meet new people since you actively have to reach out or use the RC virtual space rather than randomly meeting people in the kitchen of the hub.
  2. With people around I can use their energy to energize myself, and I didn't realize how much this was a thing until I went to Sweden.
  3. Generally, contacting people to pair programme and other activities just have a bit higher friction which tires me out more.
  4. I'm on vampire-time where I stay up until 05:00 and get up around 12:00.

Next week I will see if I can come up with ways to mitigate these points.

Sharing and pairing

Previously I've often coded in isolation, and one thing I want to get out of RC is the social aspect of coding and learning together with others.

Presentations

I don't think I'm a very good presenter, but I think I could be. One of the aims that I have with RC is to overcome my (not super big) anxiety of speaking and giving talks and presentations. My goal for the rest of the batch is to give a presentation at least once a week. This weeks presentation was a small intro to how meditation is often categorized in a Buddhist setting, I use reveal.js which outputs to html so I will try to put the slides I generate throughout RC on this webpage somehow!

Pairing

I've paired with several people at this point and I really enjoy it. It's a bit of a double edged sword as it can really drain you since your pairing partner usually keeps you focused on the task and subjectively it feels like you engage your system 2 more than your mindless system 1. I think that on the whole this reduces the work needed in the end and also add a nice social aspect to coding!

Impossible day

This week we did the so called "impossible day" where we set our goal on doing something impossible, that is, outside of what we expected to be able to do. I've slowly getting to grip with web-development, and wanted to make a side-project to my generative ML project where I want to generate novel images of the RC hub in the form of an online portal where people could upload images of the hub which I store in a database. Just days before we had gotten $100 credits at render.com which I wanted to use to improve my understanding on how to actually build a functioning web-app and deploy it and make it available using a Recurse sub-domain. Here is the resulting website!

With some help from some good web-dev people through pair programming I actually managed to get something together and deploy it successfully (although extremely bare-bones and barely working). All in all, I managed to

  • Learn how to use the flask framework.
  • Set up a postgresql server to store the images through render.com and integrate it into the code.
  • Accept user input using some input HTML tags.
  • Set up a Recurse sub-domain to point to the deployed render server.

This was a great experience and I am thankful to those that helped me out!