snapshot of https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git @ 48c69911c7dd4e03b20552eb3bd77ad8151c1357 (2026-09-15)

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+[The Recurse Center](https://www.recurse.com/about) (RC for short) offers
+educational retreats for anyone who wants to get dramatically better at
+programming.  Since its founding in 2011, [over 2000
+participants](https://www.recurse.com/10-years) have attended the program,
+either in person in New York City or (since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic)
+remotely from anywhere in the world. Participants range from experienced
+professional programmers to new programmers transitioning into the industry. The
+retreats are free for everyone, and RC is funded entirely through its
+[integrated recruiting agency](https://www.recurse.com/hire).
+
+[A major highlight](https://www.recurse.com/why) of RC’s program is its active
+online community of current participants and alumni. “The core of the Recurse
+Center is the community, and the core of our online community is Zulip,”
+[writes](https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip) Recurse Center
+[co-founder and CEO](https://www.recurse.com/team) Nick Bergson-Shilcock.
+“Switching to Zulip has turned out to be one of the best decisions we’ve made,
+and it’s impossible to imagine RC today without it.”
+
+
+> The core of the Recurse Center is the community, and the core of our online
+> community is Zulip… Switching to Zulip has turned out to be one of the best
+> decisions we’ve made, and it’s impossible to imagine RC today without it.
+>
+> — [Nick Bergson-Shilcock](https://github.com/nicholasbs), Recurse Center
+> [co-founder and CEO](https://www.recurse.com/team)
+
+
+## Choosing Zulip in 2013: “One of the best decisions we’ve made”
+
+The Recurse Center was an early adopter of Zulip. They began to use the product
+in January 2013, when it was still in private beta. Even then, Zulip’s
+thoughtful design made it stand out. “We wanted a private chat system that was
+persistent, easily searchable, and which supported syntax highlighting for code
+snippets,“ says Recurse Center co-founder and CEO Nick Bergson-Shilcock. “Zulip
+gave us all the benefits above, along with a slew of others we hadn’t expected.”
+
+When the startup building Zulip was [acquired by Dropbox in early
+2014](https://zulip.com/history/), Zulip product development was put on hold for
+a year and a half. Because of Zulip’s advantages over the alternatives, Recurse
+Center continued using Zulip all through that time: “We strongly prefer Zulip to
+other options for several reasons – its message threading being a key one,”
+[wrote](https://www.recurse.com/blog/90-zulip-supporting-oss-at-the-recurse-center)
+RC CEO Nick Bergson-Shilcock in 2015.
+
+From the early days, the RC community has been passionate about Zulip. When
+Dropbox generously decided to [release Zulip as open source
+software](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-dropbox-hack-week-project/)
+in 2015, Recurse Center alumni [flew out to San
+Francisco](https://www.recurse.com/blog/90-zulip-supporting-oss-at-the-recurse-center)
+for a week to help make it happen. Since then, Zulip has built the most active
+open-source development community of any team chat software, with [75
+people](https://zulip.com/team/) who’ve contributed 100+ commits.
+
+> It’s not an exaggeration to say Zulip has made RC a stronger community.
+>
+> — [Nick Bergson-Shilcock](https://github.com/nicholasbs), Recurse Center
+> [co-founder and CEO](https://www.recurse.com/team)
+
+
+## Zulip becomes the backbone of a worldwide community
+
+For years, the Zulip chat been the backbone of the Recurse Center community.
+“Zulip is an integral part of the Recurse Center experience,” says Rachel
+Petacat, [Head of Retreat](https://www.recurse.com/team) at Recurse Center, and
+RC’s Director of Operations from 2014 to 2021.
+
+Zulip serves as a collaboration hub for the current participants and alumni.
+“Participants use Zulip to ask and answer questions, get code review, and
+coordinate pairing sessions, reading groups, informal seminars, and countless
+other forms of collaboration. Zulip is even more essential for our alumni, who
+are in over 100 cities around the world but remain heavily involved thanks to
+Zulip,” [writes](https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip) RC CEO Nick
+Bergson-Shilcock.
+
+> [In the first ten years](https://www.recurse.com/10-years) since the Recurse
+> Center was founded, the community sent **2.52 million** Zulip messages.
+
+[Zulip’s threading model](https://zulip.com/why-zulip/) makes it easy to have
+focused technical discussions. It also perfectly accommodates participants at
+different levels of engagement. Current RC members can immerse themselves in the
+ongoing discussions, occasionally muting topics they don’t want to follow. RC
+leaders monitor the community asynchronously, reviewing the ongoing
+conversations a few times a day and jumping in as needed. Finally, alumni can
+drop by on occasion to skim [recent conversations](/help/recent-conversations),
+catch up on their friends’ update threads, or search the discussion history for
+a topic of interest.
+
+“Our community is 10 years old and spans continents,” RC’s Head of Retreat
+Rachel Petacat says. “Zulip provides the continuity that lets us maintain our
+culture over time.”
+
+
+## A welcoming environment for all community members
+
+When new participants join the Recurse Center, Zulip becomes their port of entry
+into the community. “With Zulip’s threading, new folks can get the full context
+for a conversation, which makes the community feel welcoming,” Head of Retreat
+Rachel Petacat says.
+
+
+> Zulip is more friendly to new users than Discord or Slack.
+>
+> — Rachel Petacat, Recurse Center [Head of Retreat](https://www.recurse.com/team)
+
+Threading also gives each conversation its own space, which means that community
+members never have to feel like they are interrupting when they speak up.
+“Threading makes it easy for anyone to jump in,” Rachel explains. ”Folks don’t
+feel like they’re stepping onto someone’s conversation.”
+
+Over the years, the Recurse Center has used Zulip’s customization features and
+powerful, well-documented APIs to set up a space that really feels like a home
+for the community. “We use so many custom emoji,” says Rachel Petacat.
+
+A whole crew of bots is on hand to help out, from Chatbot for quick chat intros,
+to [RSVPBot](https://github.com/wtfcarlos/RSVPBot#readme) for creating and
+managing calendar events, to
+[Blaggeregator](https://github.com/recursecenter/blaggregator#readme), which
+aggregates blog posts for the RC community.
+
+
+## “I can’t imagine being able to operate Recurse Center without Zulip”
+
+Rachel Petacat is a long-time member of RC’s leadership team. Her job requires
+keeping up with the ~45 members in the current batch, making sure they have what
+they need to get the most out of their RC experience.
+
+To juggle everything she needs to get done, Rachel takes full advantage of the
+flexibility between synchronous and asynchronous discussions that Zulip offers.
+Realtime chat on Zulip is perfect for coordinating with other members of the
+leadership team. “Zulip is one of the first tabs I open at the start of the work
+day,” Rachel says. “I can check what’s happening, and plan my day. Other
+organizers and I tag each other on Zulip if we need any help.”
+
+Rachel uses Zulip to follow the ongoing conversations, and help out as needed.
+Zulip’s threading model makes it easy to review discussion threads every few
+hours, and respond in context. “I read the discussions on Zulip once in the
+morning and again in the afternoon, chiming in where I need to,” says Rachel.
+With Zulip, Rachel is able to manage the community without her focus being
+interrupted by the need to jump in before the moment has passed. “I can’t
+imagine being able to operate the Recurse Center without Zulip,” Rachel says.
+
+
+## An alum experience: Staying connected since 2015
+
+One of the benefits of participating in RC is the opportunity to stay connected
+with the community. “You'll be able to participate in the RC community online
+forever,” the RC website [explains](https://www.recurse.com/why). “Almost 30% of
+the RC community is regularly active [on
+Zulip](https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip),” an incredible
+statistic for a 6-12 week program with many alumni who attended years ago. Many
+alums drop in on Zulip to chat, pair-program, and host events.
+
+John Hergenroeder first attended RC back in 2015. In the Recurse Center, John (a
+software engineer by profession) found the inclusive and welcoming programming
+community he was looking for.
+
+Even with everyone sitting in the same room, Zulip served as a social hub for
+John’s RC cohort. “People had different schedules, so we used Zulip to leave
+questions, work artifacts, demos — anything you thought was interesting,” John
+says. This let participants engage with the content asynchronously, and created
+a lasting record for the community. “We even used a Zulip topic to coordinate
+for lunch, to let people have their uninterrupted focus time,” John says.
+
+Since 2015, John has stayed connected with the RC alumni community on Zulip. “We
+have a channel for alumni check-ins, where each alum uses a dedicated topic to
+post updates,” John explains. Some alums drop by weekly, while others might come
+around once a year.  “You can leave a note, and it’s OK if your friend reads it
+a few months later,” John says. “Compare that with Slack, where if someone
+doesn’t see a message in some channel on that day, they’ll *never* see it.”
+
+Without dedicating a lot of time, John is able to stay involved in the community
+on Zulip, and share his expertise where relevant. “I scan [recent
+topics](/help/recent-conversations) for places where I could help, and rely on
+email notifications for private messages,” John explains. The experience of
+keeping up on Zulip is in sharp contrast with Slack, which John uses at work:
+“It’s so hard to keep up with the Slack firehose.”
+
+> Zulip allows people who are engaging with the community at different paces to connect.
+>
+> — John Hergenroeder, Recurse Center alum
+
+
+## Zulip’s open-source ethos
+
+Zulip is developed as open-source software, with an active and growing
+community; over 1100 people have contributed code to the project. As a long-time
+Zulip user, John Hergenroeder appreciates the many thoughtfully designed
+[features](https://zulip.com/features/) unique to Zulip.
+“[Choosing](https://zulip.com/help/mention-a-user-or-group#silently-mention-a-user)
+whether or not a mention notifies people is really handy,” John says. “[Global
+times](https://zulip.com/help/format-your-message-using-markdown#global-times)
+are great for organizing events, and
+[spoilers](https://zulip.com/help/format-your-message-using-markdown#spoilers)
+were perfect for chatting about the Advent of Code puzzles.”
+
+And if Zulip is missing some feature? “We can file an issue, or even go and make
+it happen,” says John. Over the years, John has filed [11
+issues](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aissue+author%3Ajdherg+is%3Aclosed)
+in the Zulip issue tracker that have been resolved, and dozens of Recursers have
+contributed code to Zulip. It’s a radically different experience from trying to
+give feedback to a corporation building a closed-source product. When he
+encounters issues with Slack, John has his strategy: “When I come across a Slack
+bug, I try to find someone I know who works there, because I have no idea if
+anyone will pay attention if I go through support.”
+
+
+## Going virtual: “For a while, Zulip *was* RC”
+
+Prior to 2020, the Recurse Center offered an immersive in-person retreat
+experience in the heart of New York City. This paradigm was shattered when the
+Covid-19 pandemic hit New York in March 2020, and the Recurse Center made the
+difficult decision to [move all operations
+online](https://www.recurse.com/blog/152-RC-is-online-only-until-at-least-May).
+
+Over time, the Recurse Center built out a custom virtual world (integrated with
+Zulip) for online participants.  But in the early days of the pandemic, it was
+Zulip that replaced the physical space where RC participants had spent time
+together and helped each other out. “At the time, all we had was Zulip, email,
+our website, Zoom, and a rarely used forum,” recalls RC’s Head of Retreat Rachel
+Petacat.  “For a while, Zulip *was* RC.”
+
+
+## An invaluable knowledge base
+
+Edith, who works as a technical writer, participated in virtual RC in 2020. Two
+years later, she still uses Zulip every day to stay connected.
+
+Zulip’s combination of powerful search and topic-based threading makes prior
+discussions both findable and useful.  “It’s easier to build context with Zulip
+than any other tool,” Edith says. “With other messaging services, information
+tends to get lost. In Zulip, I often look something up from a while ago —
+anything from discussion of niche programming topics, to whether anyone has
+commented on a book I’m thinking about reading.”
+
+“You really feel that you’re joining a group of 2000 people who’ve been doing
+this for 10 years,” says Rachel Petacat. “You can find someone who trod the same
+path 6 years ago!”
+
+---
+
+Check out our guides on using Zulip for [education](/for/education/) and
+[events](/for/events/), and learn how Zulip [helps communities
+grow](/for/communities/)!