This is gonna be a “first day at RC” post. See more views on this here, here or here. I’ll assume you actually clicked the links or know RC, so I’m gonna jump directly to some personal impressions of and thoughts on my first day at RC which was yesterday.

Upfront I was very scared of the first day. Meeting a large group of people can be very stressful. I fear that I have nothing interesting to say or that I will be sitting aside and only listenning while others were talking. To anticipate the outcome: This was definitely not the case! At the end of the day I was so happy about all the different people and ideas coming together here.

One of my favourite things was the “meet and greet” which was some speedy way to get to know each other: The “meet and greet algorithm” tells you which person you are supposed to meet at which place and then you have three minutes to get to know each other. I was so excited about this that I smiled the whole time and it happened that I accidentally interrupted the person I was paired up with because I could relate to so many things that we talked about.

Another cool thing was the coding dojo, where you solve a programming problem in pairs (again! yay). I paired with Louise and we tried to not give them five with some C++ code. It’s been a long time that I have seen C++, so it was very helpful that my coding partner had an environment already set up. Otherwise I might’ve spent the 25 minutes setting up an environment. We had some misunderstandings on the way, which I think is normal when you’re not experienced in pair programming, but I personally was happy with the result. I would like to learn about coding pair programming practices though. How do you talk about different expectations and how do you decide for an approach?

During the day there were two situations where I was told “you seem to know more than me about X” and I felt bad about it. On both occasions it was some details about RC stuff (for example the chat system Zulip). I know this might be a stupid thing to feel bad about, but I didn’t know what to say. It was not a big deal, but I’m mentioning it here because others might have had the same situation. At the welcome procedure we were told on several occasions that it is okay to not know something. Everyone is an expert on some field. But when you find out, how do you deal with it? Am I allowed to take the teacher role here on the fields that I know? Does the other person then not feel bad about not knowing? This is some kind of vicious cycle in my head.

I don’t think I am really breaking the social rules, but is there more rules that I don’t see?

An insight to this question came to me in one conversation towards the end. I was feeling I was talking a lot about my experience of learning computer science, so I told the other person to stop me if I was talking too much. The answer was something like “I won’t stop you there, because you are giving me something”. Then I was happy I could do that and it seems I picked up something in all those years of studying computer science.