The Recurse Center (formerly known as Hacker School; also called RC) is an independent educational institution, that combines a retreat for computer programmers with a recruiting agency.

The idea quickly arose of trying to transform recruiting for start-ups by running a retreat as part of the process, with the goal of helping clients become better programmers.

[3] It officially opened its doors as “Hacker School” in New York in July, 2011, obliquely anticipating the coding bootcamp movement that arose in the mid-2010s.

Experiments have included: The Center did not initially publish a code of conduct, but eventually formalized its expectations of participant behavior in June 2017.

[28][29][30][31][32][33] There is a large community of alumni that have remained active past the end of their ”batch“, interacting with each other and with new participants in person or via virtual tools.