42 Piscine Day 26 — (Final Exam)

Edit: This is the end of a series that culminated here, 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

The piscine is over and my only regret is that I could have focused more the last few days. I didn’t do well on the final and so my expectations of acceptance aren’t super high. One of the prefects was like “don’t count it out yet” and I might have brushed it off, sorry. Stranger things have happened and were it to happen I would take it as such a vote of confidence I would move mountains to live up to it. We will find out in a couple of weeks.

More likely I will try again in October, build upon what I’ve learned so far and come back more prepared and ready to continue the path toward mastery. It’s not enough just to get in, this is about learning a craft, of understanding and the joy of finding out “oh so that’s how that works”. I can safely say now that figuring out how to make code work is a joy now when it started as something that felt overwhelming.

I found myself figuring things out and learning things even during the final, there were moments of frustration, triumph, curiosity and joy.

Right now our BBQ is in full swing, I excused myself to write this and to get a jump on laundry before my flight in the morning. Food was great, company better, I really will miss some of these guys. This place felt like home, if you can get through the initial frustration I would recommend it to anybody who wants to learn the deeper aspects of code, in all a fantastic experience and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Since the piscine is over we no longer have lab access, and my laptop is broken so this was written on my phone, I apologize if anything is misspelled or out of place.

I’ll do the recap/postmortem in a couple of days once I’m back in Austin.

Until next time.