Recurse Day 1

I started Recurse Center today.

Some things:

1. I felt very emotional and happy during intros. Alicia said: “We want all of you to be here.” There is so much power in explicit, active, affirmations of acceptance.

2. I am excited allow myself to be a nerd. I’ve spent the past 20 years of my life trying to temper my pure interest and mental facility — with pursuits that (in theory) lend me more social cache or are deemed worthier than pure interest. I wonder how much of this tempered/scrambled self I can unravel in the next 12 weeks.

3. Chun Li showed me the SICP exercises he was working on in Racket. I think the syntax and simplicity of this language is beautiful. Chun Li was really nice while he was explaining how Racket works.

4. George and I worked on his JavaSript drawing accuracy tool.

   • I learned how to evaluate JavaScript in a browser (embedding a link to the remote file in a script tag)

   • I learned about some JavaScript control functions (javascript also has lambdas like ruby!)

   • I learned the phrase “No Premature Optimization”

   • I learned about the JavaScript ImageData object (this is a way to read all of the pixels of a canvas element)

   • I felt happy about what I was able to contribute to George’s project — primarily a general way to evaluate the accuracy of a drawing relative to a pre-existing image using ImageData

5. I can now call Sublime Text from the command line

6. I decided (temporarily) to focus on JavaScript during this batch (I feel good about this)

7. I started a CodeWars Kata in JavaScript and I’m excited to continue working on it tomorrow