Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock

Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock is the co-founder and CEO of the Recurse Center (originally Hacker School), a free, self-directed educational retreat in New York City where programmers spend up to three months getting dramatically better at their craft. A lifelong unschooler who taught himself to code on an Apple IIe, he built RC with no teachers, no curriculum, no grades, and no certificates, funding it through an optional recruiting service rather than tuition. Since 2011, thousands of programmers from teenagers to sixty-year-olds have passed through its doors, guided by ideas like 'building your volitional muscles' and a handful of deceptively simple social rules.