42 Piscine Day 05 — (Exam00)(04)
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
Not a lot of time today (as it’s the next morning now). I’ve got a large project, a group project and all of yesterday still due tonight. I took too much time preparing for the test, which was great as I passed (got a 55/100, more than 25 is passing) but then someone told me that the exams excepting the final aren’t really weighted more than assignments, that it’s just about getting as many points as possible. I’m not sure what is true or isn’t about the process but I need to buckle down a little more.
More than half of the class didn’t pass the exam, and from what I understand percentage wise this was a higher pass rate than normal, as we are expected to improve over time more than to already be masters coming in. A few people got 100% on the exam as well, but I think these ones came from a programming background already.
For the group project one of our teammates has already stopped showing up a couple of days ago, I’m not sure if this will affect our grade. I may have to talk to someone. The project itself is to automate grid creation in the terminal window, not unlike creating sudoku boards.
The personal project is called Sastantua (after the pyramid in Hitchhiker’s Guide) where we are visualizing different sizes from different distances. Also it’s a higher level of a project than all the others being a lvl 2 assignment, everything else has been 0 or 1. This means it will be put under heavier scrutiny and is worth more points, in gaming terms think of it like a rarespawn or a boss fight I suppose.
I see less people everyday, though I think most are sticking through it. We’ve been placed on four different teams, the wufpack, snek, galacticats, and honeybadger. In each groups we have a leaderboard for points and a bit of competition has started to develop between them, but the top 7 seem to be somewhat consistent for each team, I’m solidly between 11 and 18 on my team.
My partner who is still here for the group project is one who is top ranked for his team, when I talked to him about the project he had already finished and asked me to work on it a bunch to figure it out and then we would compare notes later, which sounded fair to me, so that is what I will be doing first, even though the project is worth the least amount of points of all of them as it’s level 0 and with us missing a member of our team will be extra costly to be corrected, so it’s a higher cost with a smaller reward, if a project would be given the chopping block to skip this one would maybe be it.
I’m getting the swing of things now, but still feel perpetually behind and always catching up, I think it’s designed that way. I may ask to switch rooms after all as I’m really not sleeping well.
Making some friends too so that’s cool.
Other things of note, as pisciners we are not allowed free reign of the place, certain zones are off limits, we were given a talking to today because some took some food set out for a hackathon (ie not us). I’m spending more on vending machine snacks than I thought I would. Finding time for laundry is hard, but it seems Saturday and Sunday are the best days for this as they are less demanding (sort of). Some people have been bad at checking the slack channel, but it’s been really important to check it once in a while(we’ve gotten resources like a google calendar that notifies when you should sign up for things). I still don’t have a clear path as to how to pass this thing other than to keep trying, to help people and to rack up as many points as possible, which is about as much as I knew on the first day. Someone showed me a tool on github called towel that can auto check our work, but I think it’s a touch outdated, so even if it’s helpful it should not be treated as gospel.
assignments for today were such
- iterative factorial (iterative functions)
- recursive factorial (recursive function)
- function that returns the value of a power applied to a number
- recursive function that returns the value of a power applied to a number
- fibonacci sequence
- function that returns the square root of a number
- find if the number is a prime number
- return the prime number greater or equal to the number given as argument
- function that returns the number of possibilities to place either queens on a chessboard without them being able to reach each other
- same as 9 but recursive?
