recurse-center
(3)
Recurse Center
The Recurse Center is a self-directed, free educational retreat in New York for programmers who want to get better at their craft. There is no curriculum, no teachers, and no grades - people spend six or twelve weeks working on whatever they find most interesting, alone or in pairs, guided by a few light social rules. Founded in 2011 as Hacker School and renamed the Recurse Center in 2015, it is free for participants and funds itself by running a recruiting agency that connects its community with hiring companies.
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.
Dilawar Mahmood
Dilawar Mahmood is a machine learning engineer at ZeroEntropy (YC W25) in San Francisco, best known for four years at Apple where he optimized on-device models for Siri and Spotlight - work he once presented directly to Tim Cook at the Steve Jobs Theater. A Norwegian-educated engineer who left a comfortable career track to attend the Recurse Center and rediscover what programming actually feels like, he builds distributed ML frameworks in his spare time and is on record hating vibe coding.