Hey, I'm the one that posted this story and I am headed to RC next month :-) So excited! What did you work on/study?
I spent a lot of time learning new languages and filling in my missing computer-science education. You can do a lot in 3 months if you have no distractions! I was probably there 60 - 70 hours a week and have never managed to hit such a sweet spot of motivation, inspiration and productivity before or since. My PhD was a colossal waste of time in comparison. Actually it made me totally re-evaluate my ideas about education in general.
A random selection from memory:
* Emulator and debugger for a particular embedded hardware (MSP430)
* Website that scraped Rosetta Code and displayed it in a less-annoying form
* Genetic algorithm for graph problems
* Nand2Tetris course
* Two weeks trying and mostly failing to learn Haskell (took me another year to really 'get' it)
* All sorts of other fun/dumb stuff. Boggle solver! Endless project Euler problems! Super Meat Boy!
I was a miserable PhD student, playing around with poor-quality datasets, battling office politics and learning a bit of Python on the side. Saw Recurse Center as an opportunity to see if I might fit in with a techy crowd and perhaps provide some new inspiration.
Went, loved every minute, met wonderful people, learned loads, had a blast. Got home, quit my PhD, quickly landed a developer job and haven't looked back since. My only regret is not doing so sooner.
My story is not unusual. Apply to Recurse Center!