I attended a decade ago and it was great, lots of people working and exploring a lot of cool stuff! I think what I would quibble with is that yes it is “random” what people work on, but there’s certainly themes and some people have pretty clear directions about what they are up to and want to learn. If you want to focus on That One Open Source Project for a couple months, that’s cool and encouraged.

Which part of it doesn't click? Attending the Recurse center means you commit to spending a few weeks on spare time programming projects and you get to work on these projects around other people who do the same.

Do the concepts of meetups or hackathons make sense for you? Take that concept and stretch it out to a few weeks.