I've wanted to attend the Recurse Center (formerly known as Hacker School) or a while, and have finally found the time to do so. It's very consistent with the free education path (it's free!), and so far has been a great source of exposure to new topics and ideas, as well as of inspiration to work on different classes of problems. They've put a lot of effort into fostering a healthy, supportive community, and the nature of the program is such that self-motivated, inquisitive learners more or less self-select themeselves into attendance. Some topics I was exposed to or participated in so far -- audio programming, gaming, lower-level / systems programming languages (eg Zig), functional programming (eg Haskell, Elm), procedural generetion, Web Assembly compilation... There are folks of all walks of life, skills, and interests in the community, making it something that I expect will continue to yield rich experiences for the remainder of the three-month batch.
