Recurse Center

🌷Spring applications are OPEN! This is your sign: come write code with us in Brooklyn! Join a playful, kind, and curious community, rediscover your love of programming, and learn more deeply than ever before. Learn more and see if it's right for you via the links below. We'd love to hear from you. What: Spend six or twelve weeks learning and programming with a kind and curious community in Brooklyn. Career services are here if you want, or not if you're not. When: Applications are open for our Spring 2 batch from March 30- June 26.

@_fcjr For those who can't make it, a recording of the talk will be made available on our YouTube channel: @RecurseCenter" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@RecurseCenter

@_fcjr Localhost is a series of technical talks in NYC given by members of the RC community. RC is the retreat where curious programmers recharge and grow. 🌱 Dedicate your time to programming in a alongside other kind and curious peers. Learn more: recurse.com

Join us on March 18 for Localhost! The RCade is a custom arcade cabinet built during the Fall 2, 2025 batch at the Recurse Center. It has a real CRT, a custom graphics card, spinner controllers, and a deploy pipeline where anyone can ship a game just by pushing to GitHub. It now has over 44 games. Frank Chiarulli (@_fcjr), Rose Hall, Stephen Downward, and Greg Sadetsky (@technology_greg) will present how they built it; reviving the hardware and building the deployment system, designing a custom display adapter from scratch, and building a game engine and plugin sandbox.

Do staff engineers make $130k or $6M a year? The answer is both. There’s 10x, maybe even 50x, more variance in the job market than most people realize. If you’re a job seeker, you usually only have one real data point: your own experience. Anything wildly different from that can feel hard to believe. But when you work with hundreds of job seekers (we helped 350+ last year at the @recursecenter), you see just how extreme the spread really is. In 2025, we saw: - candidates negotiate their offers up by $700k+ - companies refuse to budge even $5k - senior engineers struggle to get offers - college dropouts get multiple offers - ICs making $1M, $2M, even $6M+ a year in liquid comp - staff engineers making $90k/year - remote jobs with 4-day workweeks - in-person jobs with 7-day workweeks - job searches that took three days - job searches that took over a year - a candidate who got an offer after a single phone call - a candidate who got rejected after 17 (!!) rounds As with everything, context matters. The candidates getting eye-popping numbers have deep, specialized ML experience (and some haven’t had a night off in months). The staff engineers making 1/10th as much are choosing mission, flexibility, and work-life balance (or they’re in Europe). Many of the folks struggling to get offers are playing on extra-hard mode: they’re great engineers, but life and family constraints narrow their search. The programming job market isn't monolithic; it’s fragmented. And advice that’s true in one slice of it can be completely wrong in another.

This computer is the reason you can't download all software for free. The Franklin Computer Corp was a computer manufacturer founded in the early 1980s. Their flagship product was a clone of the Apple II, one of the most popular personal computers of the day. But Franklin didn't just make a machine similar to Apple's: they openly and directly copied the Apple II's ROM, which meant it ran all the same software perfectly. They could do this because it wasn't yet clear if you could copyright compiled binaries. After all, a binary is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, basically math, and you can't copyright math! (Source code was already established as being copyrightable.) Unsurprisingly, Apple sued, and the Third Circuit ruled in their favor. This case (Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp) is still the foundation of US copyright for compiled software. Without it, you could legally download binaries of any software or email them to your friends (and the entire industry would likely look very different). That's why the Franklin has more than earned its place in our vintage computing lab at the @recursecenter.

Feeling ready to apply? Check out the application: recurse.com/apply

Read more about the retreat and our philosophy: recurse.com/about

🌷Spring applications are OPEN! This is your sign: come write code with us in Brooklyn! Join a playful, kind, and curious community, rediscover your love of programming, and learn more deeply than ever before. Learn more and see if it's right for you via the links below. We'd love to hear from you. What: Spend six or twelve weeks learning and programming with a kind and curious community in Brooklyn. Career services are here if you want, or not if you're not. When: Applications are open for our Spring 2 batch from March 30- June 26.

From an article my mom wrote almost 30 years ago about what my parents did to support my interest in computers and programming:

i love building software

.@_fcjr built an arcade cabinet that has a real CRT running at 320x240, a custom graphics card, custom input controllers with spinners, and a deployment system where any Recurser can ship a game to it just by pushing to GitHub. There’s also a web player and local simulator so remote Recursers can play and build for it from anywhere. There are now 44+ games on it. This is the story of how it came together:

my friends at @recursecenter made a website for a zojirushi water boiler, perfectly christened as spenser i love it so much spenser.recurse.com

.@spillybones gave a talk at @recursecenter on Tomo, a programming language he's been building. Highlights: built-in CLI arg parsing, integer overflow safety, no separate build system (the compiler handles dependencies), and C interop. He demoed a 150-line Snake game built in one evening: youtube.com/watch?v=-vGE0I…

Questions? Send us a DM or email at admissions@recurse.com.

Apply: recurse.com/apply

⌛️There's still time to apply to the Spring 1 batch that begins on February 16th! Join us for six or twelve weeks on a self-directed programming retreat: work at the edge of your abilities and become a dramatically better programmer alongside other kind and curious peers. Come and build what truly excites you -- not just what you "should" be building. Curious? Visit our site and reach out: 👉

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