42 Piscine Day 16 — (11)

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

As much as I’ve struggled to focus before today was worse. I was missing family, friends, former romantic partners. If it was a thing that could be missed I felt it today.

So I got to the lab at 8 am, studied a bit, watched some video’s to understand the concepts for today, and then spent at least 3 hours bouncing between trying to study, checking reddit, looking at imgur, checking email, looking up people from the piscine (one went to Harvard for economics, fascinating). It was not a productive day. After lunch I tried to double down and watch videos to further understand the topic of the day (link lists) but my mind was wandering. Finally after dinner I realized this was due to a lack of sleep, I took a nap and suddenly I could focus again. Don’t forget to sleep enough everyone, you will focus better.

There was a time when all the computers on the network crapped out for a bit, and some of my assignments were abandoned when they couldn’t have been, which was odd, things were fixed and taken care of, so no worries at the end of the day.

I’ve worked out my flight back, my work schedule on return and a place to stay once back in Austin. So we are all good on those fronts. Less things to worry about.

Today on our slack channel 42’s official twitter retweeted a guy who wrote an article about his piscine experience after the fact, it was short, entirely positive in tone and on the whole accurate. He posted pictures and screenshots, perhaps I should implement some of those as well. It’s a struggle to write everyday as it is, the postmortem after the fact will be of higher quality for sure. Some of the other pisciners are reading my blog and having a laugh at our shared pain (love you guys). It made me realize that my tone has slanted negative some.

In truth I understand more about programming than I ever have in my life, and I’ve been trying to learn this stuff for more than ten years, unsuccessfully I might add. This after only two weeks, these have probably been the best spent two weeks of my last decade. So I don’t want you to think that my despair and frustration of the moment are signs of regret, I’d have quit already if that were the case. No I’m just trying to accurately convey the emotion of the moment, and the feeling of today was homesick and distracted.

When I see code now I can read and understand it, it’s amazing, it feels like a superpower. I wish this program had existed when I was younger, I don’t think these guys coming here out of high school realize how fortunate they are to have this sort of opportunity. I hope they don’t squander it.

Day 11 assignments are entirely about link lists, understand that and you will do well, if you want specifics I’ve saved all the pdf’s of the assignments, message me and I’ll get that to you.

That’s it for today, I’m going try to actually get to bed at a decent time tonight.