42 Piscine Day 3 — (02)

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

Mostly blogging right now as my brain was fried and I needed a break. I’ve been averaging around 13 hour days the first two days, today will probably be longer, but I also feel like today was the least productive workload wise but most productive actual usefulness wise.

We finally started programming instead of terminal commands. Though I feel I really did learn a lot from those, I’m eager to leave it behind and just look things up as needed. Hopefully that’s a healthy attitude, because spending months on just doing terminal things sounds terrible to me.

Today we started grading each other’s projects. It’s set up such that we have a certain amount of grading points that we spend to get someone else to grade our work for us, we earn them when we do the grading. There is essentially only a finite amount of points in circulation, when people quit they take their points with them, and shortages apparently can and do happen. It helps to be generous and willing to grade more than just being graded, I feel that was the intent of the system.

I did ok when graded, but then I had to also factor that the computer graded me as well. This was for day 1 (00). The first two assignments out of 6 were done wrong, but I aced the other four. ironically if you fail the easier/earlier assignments then the rest aren’t counted, so I got my grade for the day was a solid zero. This was a blow to the ego, especially since it was something like changing the date/time to match the screenshot was the detail I got wrong. I figured timestamp changing couldn’t possibly be part of what they were asking as it wasn’t specified in words. I was wrong, and now I’m paranoid about being tricked or complacent again, which maybe was a more important lesson? I don’t know.

Later on though several people asked me for help and I think I was actually helpful for them in how I explained some of the basics of programming, that made me feel a little bit better about my first day failing.

I’m finding out that the assignments today actually have a lot of little tricks to get caught up on, I hope I catch them all, I’ll spend several hours tomorrow cleaning them up before final submission. I did manage to get a couple more of yesterdays work done today, but I’m not spending much time on polishing them tonight, I’d rather work on the actual programming.

The test study guides show that it’s primarily programming things, so I would rather get a better grasp on that to be ready for that.

assignments today were as follows

1. a print alphabet function using only a special function ft_putchar (note all assignments today, the only function allowed is ft_putchar)
2. print reverse alphabet
3. print digits on a single line in ascending order
4. a function that determines if a number is negative or positive
5. populate and remove duplicates of a number sort (3 digit numbers, 012, 789, no two numbers the same, no reverse duplicates) -this is how far I got today
6. display all two digit combination of numbers of between 00 and 99
7. display the numbers entered as a parameter, display all possible values within an int type variable (I’m a bit lost here)
8. number sort, print combine (honestly I don’t understand it yet)

that’s it for now.