Invest six or 12 weeks programming at the edge of your abilities alongside motivated peers. Do a programming retreat in NYC, hybrid, or remotely.
I was accepted into Recurse Center earlier this year and started my batch this past week, on May 19th, 2025.
While I'm currently attending remotely from Seattle, I'm putting plans in motion to make it out to NYC, to spend as much of my 12-week batch as I can at the hub in Brooklyn.
What I'm Doing At Recurse
After working on Canvas Lord and WriteGames.com on-and-off for the past 4 years, I'm ready to put my head down and get them published!
WriteGames.com is an upcoming educational game development website that uses Canvas Lord to power its interactive tutorials. Many of its individual components are built, but they need to be stitched together and made more robust.
Beyond that, I'd like to learn how to maintain open-source projects, get comfortable contributing to other open-source projects, and remember what it was like being a fresh to game development. There's so much knowledge I take for granted, and being able to see things through the lens of folks figuring it all out is an opportunity I can't let pass by.
And, of course, I'll be doing a lot of pair programming! There's a few projects others have going on that I'm looking forward to contributing to.
What I Did This Week
I wish I had taken better notes! So much happened this week.
There were interest groups for game development, TypeScript, and language/linguistics that I attended. Beyond that, I ended up meeting a handful of my batchmates, chatting about every topic under the sun: indie games, languages, Lego, food, math, CSS, graphics programming, game development, puzzles... the list could go for quite some time.
One of my batchmates, Cyrene, was working on a watercolor shader for their site. We worked on it during the pairing workshop, and almost got it working! It was my first time playing around with Three.js, which I was shocked to understand after having studied shaders last year. Just a couple years ago, it would have all been gibberish to me.
Wednesday's creative coding workshop had me teamed up with Raunak. Together, we extended a pong project of his using C & Raylib, adding "fake springs" to collide with. Raunak's codebase is super clean, and Raylib seems pretty straight-forward. I might give it a go again at some point.
On Thursday, I decided to sign up for presentations. One of the hard parts of being remote is having everyone at the hub remember you're there, so I figured it'd be good to make myself as visible as possible.
I gave a 5-minute presentation titled "Making Games with the DOM". During the talk, I briefly touched on the history of interactive experiences in web browsers, and how you don't have to use any technologies beyond HTML, JS, and CSS to make games - not even the canvas! I showed off Yksi, Regretris (by WITS), and RADICAL SCRABBLE, all of which use this DOM-based strategy.
This Week's Daily Sketches
One of the things I want to get out of Recurse is to work my educational muscles. I've done tutoring and led programming classes in the past, and want to combine coding & education. WriteGames.com.
I've also been posting vertical versions of each sketch to YouTube and Instagram each day. Follow me to watch my progress as I make more complicated animations.
Here's the first five sketches!
More Posts, Maybe?
We'll see how good I am with posting these - I waited until pretty late on Sunday to get this out. There are writing groups at Recurse, so ideally I'll be able to leverage those to help me stay accountable.
