Suvash Thapaliya

Recalling my time at Recurse Center

Before I forget

Exactly 6 months has passed since I posted the following for my final check-in as a RC participant (Summer1 2023).

**Wk. 12 - Day 5 | 4th August ‘23**

- Last day of the batch, more like checkout, not doing any “work”, going out after posting this
- Re-read ‘A forty-year career’ slowly today, something I want to think more about
  - [https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/](https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/)
- Went back through my very first checkins to see how aligned I’ve been to myself
  - some hits, some misses, some surprises 😅
- Rest of the month is pretty much time off
  - while travelling, will be pondering on what I’d like to work on next

I’d also like to take the space of these two lines to thank everybody in my batch as well as everybody else that I’ve interacted with either through Zulip or perhaps online.
Even if I’ve been sorta background tired for most of my batch, this has been an incredibly joyful experience, the energy in the end-of-the-week presentations are the best.

Looking forward to check in after my vacations again. Thank you everybody ! 🤗

And for these past 6 months, I've thorougly enjoyed my sabbatical. Far removed from my programming/tinkering space, I mostly spent time with family, friends & slow traveling. During this period, I hadn't really prioritized my time to reflect on my RC experience. Now that I'm back, and ready to move on to the next thing, thought I'd write a quick short note, before it all becomes a blur.

What kept me busy

Lucky for me, I have all my daily checkins well organized to help me recollect what I'd been working on during my RC batch. While I did attend a lot of meetings & some book clubs as well, here are some of the main things that I accomplished during my cohort.

In retrospect

For a variety of reasons, I ended up starting RC pretty much the next day after I had wrapped up at my previous workplace. If I were to do RC again, I would absolutely want to avoid this. The first fews weeks felt rather exhausting and could have been much easier on my brain, had I taken a short break beforehand.

But, apart from that I have zero complains. I've had the most fun tinkering around with goofy projects while chatting with people way smarter than me. 6 months later, I can see clearly that it has rekindled my joy in programming. I can definitely see myself taking more RC 'breaks' in the future.

Before I go

One final output from the artifact created during my RC batch. Here's a 'daily check-in note' generated by the same language model that I trained on my daily check-in notes. Unfortunately, it was too little data & the model had to be severly overfitted to generate anything meaningful.

THIS FILE CONTAINS GPT GENERATED TEXT.
NONE OF THE CONTENTS BELOW IS A VALID CHECK-IN.
---

Rough plans for tomorrow

- Probably just focus one
    - Maybe attend the continue afternoon
- attending realised that I’m pretty tired, time to slow though
- Lots of things that further difficult
- Read up more on embeddings and Databricks LLM things


**Wk. 2 - Day 5 | 26th May ‘23**

- Coffee chechats with summarize-2ated)
- Didn’t end up some conversations
- Take plenty of time off - no point piling up things back on and some facetime calls
- woke up in time, very slow and lazy breakfast,
- spent the morning cleaning up the N2T Hack assembler
- Coffee chats and maybe a sunny weekend
- I’ll let RC plans to be on the backburner for this weekend


**Wk. 3 - Intentions**

- Finish Karpathy’s NN course 🤞🏽
    - This is the main priority, everything else can more for RC things and very
- Slow on the day, so I tried had opt to date and say on
    - plan the next ratter today (25th May)
- complexity no much to chunch of the things in the temptation feel which on I missued readings
    - Did poorly at this LLM(Grountner in the future, esp. in the context of GPU Compute.