Recurse Center
@recurse
The retreat where curious programmers recharge and grow. 🌱 Work at the edge of your abilities, develop your volitional muscles, and learn generously. 📝 Applications are now open! 📍NYC
15 years + 3,000 alums later, what started as a 6-person experiment is now a community of curious, kind programmers: engineers, artists, scientists, hobbyists, all united by a love of programming. If 6 or 12 weeks to focus on what truly interests you sounds appealing, apply! www.recurse.com/apply
It's Friday! What better way to start your weekend than applying to RC? The application takes about an hour, but the community will stay with you for so much longer. The Summer 2 batch starts June 29th, and the window's closing soon. Apply below:
Our website automatically updates as more people come to do a batch at the Recurse Center. Today, we finally hit 3,000 people! Thank you to everyone in our growing community! RC couldn't exist without you all. 👫👩🏽🤝👩🏼👬
Live from the RC hub: Lincoln S.P. Clarete with Parser Generator Report: 2018-2026
We’ve kicked off our annual alum reunion, Never Graduate Week 2026! Hundreds of RC alums gather at our Brooklyn hub to give talks, run jams, collaborate on projects, and so much more. Welcome everyone and thank you for coming! Stay tuned for more across the week.
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.
From a salvaged retro arcade cabinet with a CRT monitor to a custom community game platform, @frankchiarulli.com and many other Recursers came together to make something that we couldn't have imagined alone:
"I purposefully did not prioritize being useful. Useful and fun I think might be antonyms." Ryan Goldstein on building Felt:
🕹️A mysterious joystick has appeared… the tree is, in fact, getting new features
We featured Ryan Goldstein’s Felt, Bruce Hill’s Tomo, and Frederic Kettelhoit’s Kombucha. Thank you to everyone who came to our December Localhost. We’ll see you next year! 📸 Photos by @robbielyman.com
This week, three people shared their handmade programming languages. We learned not only about their features and syntax but the philosophies, joys, and challenges around building them. Could you build your own language? Should you? We dare say… yes!
At the Recurse Center, we encourage people to share their work at all stages of doneness. Introducing: the Holiday Shrub 🎄
Possibly the best thing about being at the Recurse Center is watching this sort of beautiful, wild, communal, thingamajig pop up in the hub every day:
Today at 6:30pm, join us for a series of lightning talks on three bespoke programming languages: Felt, Tomo, and Kombucha! Why make your own programming language? What unique goals, design decisions and sensibilities come into play? RSVP below ⬇️ We have a few tickets left!
Why make your own programming language? What possibilities unfold in making one? How do you even start? Programming languages are unique design works, each with their own goals and sensibilities. On 12/2, join us on a tour of three bespoke programming languages: Felt, Tomo, and Kombucha! RSVP ⬇️
The Recurse Center is a self-directed retreat for programmers, coming to make for the joy of making, collaborate with kind peers, and of course— become a dramatically better programmer. We don’t charge tuition, since we’re fully funded by our integrated recruiting team. Applications are now open!
When you @frankchiarulli.com have successfully nerd-sniped the entire floor into clustering around your project, crawling out from behind their laptops and study groups…
Frank: What do you think about making a cabinet using a CRT monitor? Me: I don’t know anyone who uses CRTs, but I couldn’t tell you why. Why:
Join us in our quest to make an open, hackable, alt-control, modular, multiplayer arcade cabinet! The future home of many a Recurser’s game:
RC alum Daniel Temkin will be reading from his new book, Forty-Four Esolangs! The book challenges conventional definitions of language, code, and computer, showing the potential of esolangs—or esoteric programming languages—as pure idea art. Details/tickets: ⬇️
MAKING ROBOTS IS GOOD (& good for you) Michael Suguitan came to RC and presented on a series of robots, from a cat-detector, to a self-strumming guitar, to a robot used in research and schools around the world. He goes not just into the how, but the why behind making. ⬇️
New Yorkers hate dogs 🚫🐕 (we have the data) It's pairing jam day at RC and Chris, Brittney, Wilson, and Tajairi made a 311 noise complaint heat map of NYC.
My favorite hobby? Just watching everyone swarm the pair programming signup sheet.