Recurse Center’s Post

Filippo Valsorda maintains the standard cryptographic library for Go, has been the lead for Google's Go Security team, worked on the Cryptography team at Cloudflare, and authored widely used encryption tools, including the one most of the world used to detect the Heartbleed vulnerability. When I met him in 2013, Filippo had just just arrived in New York for his three months at the Recurse Center. He told me he wanted to be a professional cryptographer. I thought he was delusional: He was fresh out of high school with no professional experience, degree, or formal CS education. He'd taught himself to program, alone, in far-off Tortona, Italy. I was wrong, and gravely underestimated him. In his three months at RC, I saw how hard Filippo pushed himself and watched his growth explode. He went on to do exactly what he said he was going to, and so much more (and folks, let me tell you it's hard to get a visa in the US when you don't have a degree)! Filippo is living proof of how much you can achieve when you decide to do something hard, and then don't give up.

A great example of how much you can accomplish with curiosity, hard work, and persistence. Way back in 2017, Nora Sandler started a blog at the Recurse Center. One of her first posts was about writing a C compiler. That one post turned into a series of 10 in-depth posts on the topic. Later, Nora signed a book deal with No Starch Press, and over the past few years, she's worked tirelessly to expand those posts into a 700+ page book. Today, a little less than seven years after Nora wrote that first post at RC, I have the final product in hand, and I'm thrilled to add it to our library. It's a book for curious programmers who want a deep, practical guide to building a compiler. It covers everything from the basics up to optimization techniques and register allocation. Congrats, Nora! And thanks for the lovely shoutout in the acknowledgements.

We're hiring! If you know anyone who'd be great as an Office & Operations Assistant, please send them my way 😀 This is a full-time, onsite role with delightful colleagues, positive impact on the world, and good benefits. Full details in the job post (link in comments).

A small glimmer of hope for the tech hiring market: October was the first month in 20+ months where the number of comments in the Hacker News "Who's hiring?" thread *increased* year over year. Every month in 2022 was down y/y compared to 2021, and every month this year has also been down y/y, except for October. 🤞