A few great things Recursers did in 2017

In 2017 the RC community grew to include more than 1,100 programmers from all over the world.

We asked our community to share things they were proud of having done last year, and received an impressive range of responses. Recursers launched companies, wrote books, gave talks, organized communities and conferences, published research papers, created tools that bettered people’s lives, wrote build tools and microkernels, made games, did some top-notch trolling, and were on the cover of The New York Times.

There were too many accomplishments for us to list in a reasonably-sized blog post, so here’s a selection:

Research

Timnit Gebru, Summer ‘12 — published a research paper about using machine learning to estimate demographic makeup and shifts in the United States. Her work was covered in The Economist and the New York Times.

More research by Recursers:

• George King, Summer ‘13 — released a prototype and research paper for Muck, a build system for data projects.
• Katherine Ye, Summer ‘13 — had her paper on verifying pseudo-random number generators accepted to ACM CCS ‘17.
• Martin Kleppmann, 2015 resident — co-authored “Verifying Strong Eventual Consistency in Distributed Systems,” a paper on using theorem-proving software to formally verify that the algorithms behind Automerge work correctly.

Art & hardware

Katherine Ye, Summer ‘13 — released Hyperbible, a project for National Novel Generation Month that randomly generates new translations of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

More art and hardware by Recursers:

• Twelve Recursers worked on generative art projects for two weeks in Berlin at our first Pop-up.
• Alex Berke, Spring 1, ‘17 — published a group theory coloring book.
• Lea Albaugh, Fall ‘13 — generated and quilted a waveform for the new baby of two former RC residents.
• Samantha Goldstein, Summer 1, ‘15 — made laser cut Yubikey earrings.

Tools

Saul Pwanson, Spring 2, ‘17 — released Visidata, an open source multitool for data exploration and manipulation.

More tools by Recursers:

• JB Rubinovitz, Fall 2, ‘17 — worked on Bail Bloc, a program that redirects users’ spare processing power towards mining Monero, which is then donated to the Bronx Freedom Fund.
• Keiran King, Fall 1, ‘17 — released Phil, a crossword puzzle generator.
• Nick Sweeting, Summer 1, ‘14 — released Bookmark Archiver, a self-hosted way-back machine similar to the Internet Archive that turns bookmarks or browsing history into an offline, browsable HTML archive.
• Nicole Orchard, Spring 2, ‘17 — created a site listing all the public works of art in New York City.
• Parker Higgins, Summer 2, ‘17 — released gotham-grabber, a set of scripts that allows journalists to create PDF backups of their articles.
• Stuart Sandine, Winter 1, ‘14 — shipped Pointed, a client-side developer tool for spinning up mock servers to build, test, and debug against.

Product

Omar Rizwan, Winter ‘13 — released Screenotate, a screenshot-taking tool for macOS and Windows that does automatic OCR to make screenshots searchable.

More product and project releases from Recursers:

• Diego Berrocal, Fall 2, ‘15 — released the Marko Language Server, a Language Server Protocol (LSP) implementation for the Marko UI templating language.
• Dustin Getz, Summer ‘12 — released Hyperfiddle, a visual programming tool.
• Marijn Haverbeke, 2015 resident — released ProseMirror 1.0, a document schema agnostic WYSIWYG-editor library.
• Mindy Preston, Winter ‘14 — was the release manager for MirageOS 3.0, which incorporated a new hypervisor backend and was a net loss in lines of source code.
• Peter Lyons, Winter 1, ‘17 — released Hexagonal Lambda, an example serverless application for AWS Lambda and API Gateway including 100% code coverage unit tests, system tests, automated build tooling, deployment tooling and documentation.
• Tara Vancil, Fall 2, ‘16 — built Beaker Browser, an experimental peer-to-peer web browser.

Talks

Aditya Mukerjee, Spring 1, ‘15 — spoke at conferences in four different cities about making programming more accessible to people who don’t speak English by translating programming languages themselves to other (human) languages.

More talks from Recursers:

• April Neal, Spring 1, ‘15 — on fostering technical growth at PyTexas.
• Lauren Long, Fall 2, ‘15 — on machine learning and serverless programming at Google I/O.
• Michael Arntzenius, Spring 1, ‘14 — on Datafun at StrangeLoop.
• Pam Selle, Spring 1, ‘15 — on serverless computing at OSCON.
• Sumana Harihareswara, Fall ‘13 — spoke to a joint committee of the New York State Assembly about the importance of open source in government forensic science, and gave the closing keynote address at LibrePlanet.
• Zach Smith, Winter ‘14 — on the Nim programming language at PyGotham.

Writing

Dan Luu, Winter ‘13 — measured latency across 40 years of computers.

More writing from Recursers:

• Jonathan New, Winter 1, ‘16 — wrote about Unicode quirks in JavaScript.
• Kate Murphy, Fall ‘13 — wrote about exploding git repositories.
• Michael Malis, Spring 1, ‘15 — wrote about how performance analysis at Heap saved them millions.
• Nicole Leffel, Winter 1, ‘17 — wrote about writing scripts to analyze data from a 1967 survey of Catholic nuns.

We can’t wait to see what Recursers do in 2018!

Becoming a Recurser means joining a community of people dedicated to learning and becoming better programmers, which can be a major accelerator of growth and productivity during a retreat and beyond. If you’d like to attend a retreat and join the RC community, you should apply to an upcoming batch!