42 Piscine Day 18 — (13)
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 may actually be dumb after all. I thought I was smart, hard working, dedicated. Friends of mine usually use the words “witty”, “sharp”, “creative”, “brilliant”. Maybe I was just a big fish in a small pond. None of these words feel true at the moment.
Yesterday I went on a bit of a rant in the blog about people discounting how hard it’s been for me and others of us without a stronger background in coding. I regret that rant, it was unprofessional and came from a place without forethought. So I dug a little deeper to see how I may have been mistaken.
I reviewed all of the assignments we’ve been doing. I had in my mind told myself that I didn’t start struggling until after the first week, this wasn’t actually true, I’ve been struggling with concepts since day 4, and I struggled with format and how to turn things in since day 1. The whole thing has been a struggle. I have learned more than I thought I could, and am arguably not just smarter because of it, but a better person too. No regrets, but I am humbled and aware of the fact that perhaps I held myself higher than I should have. IQ tests be damned, I’m not actually as smart as they or I thought.
I also have regrets about how I portrayed the last group project. Our group did fail to communicate, but this was also my failure as I was also one who communicated poorly. To not own up to my own role in this would be a disservice to everyone and also to myself. Most of what happened was outside of my control, but I could have communicated better, this is an area I don’t completely suck at and I should have performed better.
One of the people in my piscine made a video of his last piscine that fairly well captures the feelings of it, you can find the video here. I should add, that his first piscine he hadn’t done any programming before and this piscine he has consistently been one of the most brilliant people that I could bring questions to, it’s cool to think about his growth like that. I’m sure that I am in many ways discounting my own growth, the test tomorrow will tell.
Speaking of, that’s what almost all of us are doing right now, studying for the test, or procrastinating studying for the test. My writing this article is my at least somewhat justified form of procrastination. My intent with the blogging was to give people a glimpse of the experience as I found it really hard to find much info about how the piscine was or worked(at least in english), or how to get ready for it ahead of time, or even if you could get ready for it ahead of time. If I get in perhaps they would let me take a shot at helping to boost the marketing and recruiting, I mean I’d love to give it a go, that’s a big “if” right now though. I just hope it’s helpful for someone. A lot of the other Pisciners have come up to me telling me that my blogging about how hard it is gave them a laugh because “that’s exactly how we felt”. So at least that. I am proud of myself for keeping up the day to day of it, and for putting in the hours to learn here, I’m averaging over 14 hours a day, mostly just sleeping, eating and coding. So I’m proud of the effort spent as well. My brain isn’t adjusting as quickly as I’d like, and procrastination and poor time management struggles aside I’ve done as much as I could have done, I pushed limits, I achieved more than I thought I could, all of these are things to be proud of, not ashamed.
Even if failing but done with right action it was still the right action. Or as my own little life motto has started to be the last couple of years; fail better, fail faster, fail forward.
I’ve questioned if there was wisdom in listing what the assignments were as I've been doing, but I think I’ve been vague enough about them that if someone took the time to actually figure out this stuff ahead of time, then they are the most deserving of getting into the program that there ever was. Seriously, to figure things out from my vagueness, I would only applaud. That said if anyone from 42 reads these and wishes edits just let me know. I wrote these in the spirit of helpfulness not malice.
Day 13 assignments are as follows, this is the last days of assignments, only large projects and tests remain.
- tree create node
- tree apply prefex
- tree apply infix (honestly I don’t understand what these are asking for)
- tree apply suffix
- tree insert data
- tree search item
- tree level count
- tree apply by level
- insert data to the tree
- remove data from the tree
