About RC

What we do

The Recurse Center is the retreat where curious programmers recharge and grow. It's an opportunity to dedicate your time to programming in a focused, supportive, and energizing environment. It's a chance to build and learn new things, to meet and work with kindred spirits, and to accelerate or change the trajectory of your career and life.

The retreat is free and self-directed; it's for you if you're ready to work at the edge of your abilities, develop your volitional muscles, and learn generously.

Most importantly, it's for you if you want to program. It's for you if you want to program useful, silly, hard, surprising, or beautiful things.

We are based in New York City. You can do your retreat in person at our Hub, or online if you can't make it to New York. Many people move here for RC, and we encourage you to do so if possible, so you can experience the focus and serendipity that comes from working alongside your batchmates in person.

You attend RC as part of a group of people, called a batch. Batches start every six weeks, and you can attend RC for either 6 or 12 weeks.

RC is for people of all ages and nearly all experience levels. While you need to know how to program to attend, we’ve had Recursers attend with as little as six months of programming experience. There is no upper bound for experience; some past participants have had many decades of professional programming experience.

Our goal is for RC to be an environment where you can push yourself and do great work. RC is self-directed and built to give you as much control over your education as possible, so you can do more than you think is possible. We don’t have teachers or a curriculum, and there’s very little required structure beyond making a full-time commitment during your retreat and participating during our core hours. While here, you’ll pick the projects you work on, the people you work with, and you’ll create or opt into the structure you need to do your best work.

The most important thing you’ll do at RC is push yourself as a programmer. You will pick projects at the edge of your understanding, and work on them either alone or with others. You will reflect on your goals and progress, go down rabbit holes, and learn things that you did not expect to learn. You will also struggle, get distracted, lose your way, and sometimes wonder if you’re making any progress at all. Doing good work is not easy. Our goal is to create an environment that supports you in staying engaged when the going gets hard.

To help you have a transformative experience, we have three self-directives. The self-directives are tools for learning and working independently.

To help create a productive environment, we have four lightweight social rules. The social rules name and identify behaviors that make for a worse learning environment and act as a release valve so that frustrations don't build up over time.

Being in an environment as self-directed as RC can be a challenge, but your fellow Recursers are here to help. The RC community is full of smart, friendly people who can talk through your goals with you, help you pick projects and structure your time, answer your questions, give you code review, and support you emotionally. Recursers all have different backgrounds and experience levels, but everyone at RC is here to become better programmers and to help each other in doing so.

All the software you’ll write at RC will be free and open source. A large part of the educational value of RC comes from your interactions with your batchmates and alums, and writing code that can be read, used, and improved by others in the community is an important part of that.