Today was the first day of my new Recurse Center batch! I have two goals: write every day, and record a new song every day (livecode). Here’s what happened today 🙂
The day began with the “intro stuff.” The welcome to Recurse Center, the skit teaching people about the social rules … things are different from when I came in 2015 in many ways! One of which is the daily check-in groups (mentioned in my prior RC posts) are no more.
This batchset (the mini, and Winter 2 that started today as well) has a goodly number of alumni, so someone is starting a daily check-ins squad, but I generally think it’s interesting (and dare I say awesome?) that one of the few bits of RC “structure” is not here anymore. I like that, although I do wonder how the folks doing the first go-round feel about it.
After the more presentationy bits, there was a sort of “speed” meet & greet, where I talked to a few people for a few minutes. Then there were lunch groups; I didn’t love any of the options (or most were full) so I invented a new one with my new friend Aaron, and known friend Austin and new pal Pat also joined for checking out Next Level burger, a vegan joint inside Whole Foods.
Once back, I was feeling up to work on things after so much socialization, and so I retreated to the 5th floor (the quiet floor!! very into the new RC layout) and started a song. I feel into talking to people on the internet though (and a somewhat unpleasant interaction having to tell a friend I’m prioritizing my time at RC while in town, and I didn’t do that in the best way). So when Max pinged me back about people futzing with web audio, I joined the crew, and we mob programmed a bit. I:
- Got to play with Glitch really for the first time! (much lauded, much seen, never played with it!) Clicking through to the console of Glitch is very interesting (find it, and run git log 🙂 )
- Hooked up web audio API (used an oscillator!)
- Took a break with the group to do some push-ups/squats/planks
- Combined forces with the pals working on web MIDI and we used the MIDI controller with web audio! So cool!
- Some nice long chats reviewing on how some parts of synthesizers work, and found out about this tool which was helpful in discussing how attack/decay/sustain/release work (click “envelope”)
- Long chats about possible cool music projects, and various inspirations, such as this machine learning+piano project. Or suggesting that we watch the Magic School Bus episode on sound (I think it’s this one, apparently on Vimeo?) or that cool documentary about synthesizers. Other long chat topics wandered to decentralization, serverless, Rust vs Golang … and other things probably
After such an awesome set of socializing and making cool computer stuff (weee!) I went upstairs to make the song, which I snagged a recording of. I’d just started to try and futz with Google Cloud Storage (I want to attempt to use AWS less, and diversify my cloud literacy) when it was a good time to get food.
After foodventures (Trader Joe’s), I came back and set up a proper AWS account (thing I needed to do really), because the chat on the walk to food led me to conclude that doing the thing I know, to get this stuff published, was better than pursuing a rabbit hole involving me being mad that the Google Cloud Console wouldn’t work in Firefox.
There were a few hiccups (how do I convert aiff to mp3 again? how do I make a public S3 bucket again? those options look different than last time. links here for future me) the song is now online! Tomorrow I could do some pretty URL stuff for that. And then I wrote this blog post! Until tomorrow…