42 Day 7

Edit: This is part of a series that culminated here, Next post. Previous post.

Edit2: I consolidated all the posts of the piscine daily posts here

Edit3: You can read up about what it’s like as a cadet at 42 here

I did not finish the sastantua project, I barely started it all, but I also barely understood how to do it, we had to print to screen a pyramid that would adjust what was already printed to center based on what was later printed. Then have a door that based on the size displays differently and is also centered.

Group project turned out better than I thought, my partner is from an island outside of Madagascar, cool guy, really smart. He helped me understand a lot of things that had been bothering me that I didn’t understand yet, one of which (the thing I really wanted to know, how to use a variable as an array size) is apparently really bad practice, and after I asked about it in slack they gave an announcement about how you shouldn’t do that (oops).

But now it’s day05, I’m glad I put in the time to understand arrays as now we are doing a ton of string manipulation. I’m going to try to actually get all of today’s work done, missing an assignment because I didn’t prioritize my time right was about the worst feeling in the world.

There is also a meeting today at 9:42, we are all unsure as to what it will be about, my guess is that we will be reminded of rules that people have been breaking.

Our numbers are fewer still than they were before, every day when I get here in the morning there are less and less. I still think we are close to 90 but I would have to count. Right now at 8am Monday there are about 14, a third of which are still here from the night before. Two days ago at this time there was 40 to put it in perspective. Either people are getting more used to the schedule and actually sleeping now or more have left.

I did sign up for another piscine starting October 20th, that way I can still keep my word to my old job a little bit (though only being back for one month wouldn’t be great for them, It may not be enough to justify it really). But the plan is still to get accepted the first time. I used a different email to sign up again, and it gave me a different login which is a shame since I like my login. Between paying for car insurance and rent I almost wonder if it’s worth it going back, or if I should just have my brother sell the car and call it good. It would be a shame not to go back as there was a girl I would have liked to see, but she was terrible at texting me back anyway, so she probably doesn’t actually care much. All I stand to lose is a loss of integrity, and I wonder if perhaps I promised something I shouldn’t have. Still integrity is important to me, so I’ll do it even if it’s expensive, but for future lessons I should probably be slower to promise things like coming back when it wasn’t something I really wanted to do.

I’m not sure if my roommates know about the meeting, I’ve been trying to run into them for days to let them know I’m going to try to move out (as I don’t want to be a dick who just leaves) but they go to bed at like 3 am, are rarely in the lab (at lest not when I am) and sleep until after noon. I don’t think they’ve managed to set up slack either, so if I were a betting man I’d wager they won’t show. I wonder what the consequences of missing a mandatory meeting are?

We are one week done out of four, no small feat. In a way I’m sort of proud of the people who stuck through it, just the feeling of constant failure is hard to push past, to be able to put aside your ego enough to get through it is itself impressive.

Oh I did try to nail down the selection process further and as it turns out nobody really knows anything, everything about the process is rumor. We know that certain things help, things like higher points, better collaboration, helping others, putting in the time, but on the whole nobody really knows, many of the people who have gotten in barely know or at least the feeling is that they still don’t. But all who have come before have stories of people who got low scores and still got in and people with nearly perfect scores who did not. So I guess cross your fingers for me since I’m not really sure what the most important thing to focus on would be, the short answer is that I don’t know how to game the system, and I would guess that’s exactly why it’s designed as it is.

I don’t actually have access to day05 files for another half an hour, so I will update that tomorrow.