Hey all, it’s my birthday, and I thought I would write up a post about what’s going on in my life right now, and my current trajectory. Right now, I’m preparing to go to Hacker School, an amazing program where you create things with cool people for three months, and then they help you find a job afterwards. Sort of like a personal accelerator. The program is free, but living in New York City is not – I’m building my money reserves up for the program. I found a place to live for only ~$700 a month, which is amazing. An unlimited metro card is ~$100 a month, and if I’m being frugal, it should be possible to live on ~$200/month of food, which puts my total monthly expense at $1k! That’s a nice, round number. I’m busy selling all of my things via ebay and craigslist. I know I should get a job, but the thought is honestly kind of scary (I am easily scared, like a cat), and I’m not sure how many places are okay with on boarding an employee for a total of one month’s work.

I’m incredibly excited for the program to start! I check my email feverishly for updates. I met Allison Kaptur at PyCon, who is already like the coolest person I know. Hacker Schoolers have built some pretty amazing things, the most impressive of which is probably Julia Evan’s operating system in Rust! Hacker School seems like the environment I was looking for at my previous University, full of hard working and creative people, and I am SO FREAKING EXCITED!

I’m planning on learning as much about compilers & compiler theory as I can during my time there. I’m working through Stanford’s online compilers course right now as preparation. The next post will be a checklist of all the things I need to get done before Hacker School starts.