Today finds me returning to the Recurse Center (RC for short) for 6 weeks. I decided I should ressurect my old tech blog posts as I plan to attempt fairly frequent posts inspired by Julia Evans 2020 RC batch among others.

I first went to RC back in 2016 after leaving Google. Since then I’ve spent some time back in school first completing my BA in Anthropology at Wellesley College, and then starting a PhD in 2020 which I left December 2022 - academic job market in the humanities and the even worse than tech work/life balance of that career path were factors in that. The last few years has also left me deeply missing community and RC has a fantastic community and returning will allow me to explore new connections, and rekindle old ones.

I hope to come back to RC to help me figure out what’s next. I think I want to shift my career path away from support/SRE/DevOps roles back to primarily develop open source infrastructure projects. Trying to build on projects I was most happy and productive working in at least for a time - system package management (RPM, yum), distro building (anaconda, Fedora), configuration management (puppet), Python package management/developer tooling (pip, virtualenv), and containers (Docker).

Initial Batch Plans subject to change!

• Open source work - probably CNCF related - have made start with minikube
• Experimentation and play - observability and debugging spaces (eBPF), rust, maybe some digital art/performance stuff
• Pair & share knowledge - resurrect my blog, post regularly, pairing, workshops