42 Piscine Day 4 — (03)

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’m writing this at 2:30 am. I’m awake because my roommates smoke so much that my sinuses won’t let me sleep. I was going to write this in the morning, but since I can’t sleep now works just fine too.

A few things I forgot to say before. The food here is actually pretty good, it ends up being about $5 a day for lunch and $6 a day for dinner, no breakfast though. The campus is actually a former Devry campus, but it’s nice, there are some things that still seem to be under construction (like where the information monitors used to be) but on the whole it’s nice, dorms are too but the beds remind me a lot of the beds we used at scout camp, basically a cot, but decent enough. Computer lab is huge and pretty cool looking, it does get a little hot though, they recommended bringing a fan, I would second it. it’s hard to find time to do laundry and other chores. Those who commute from home commuting to and from seems to be an extra struggle, I read somewhere else that “if you don’t get into the dorms don’t bother”, I feel this was a little strong but also I do see the commuters struggling more than those who just walk next door.

Busy day, I spent most of it working on day02 exercise 4, a program that made three digit numbers without repeating numbers or reverse similar numbers while not being allowed to use most functions or create new ones either, basically the write function and while loops were all there was. I felt a bit overwhelmed, had to take a nap, call my mom and make some tea today to calm some feelings of anxiety about it. The nap helped and after I got back to work, finished exercise 04 of day 02, polished up my code before submission (mostly using a command called norminette, to see if our code fits the styling standards of the school called the norm) and submitted. Then I got back to work on day 03 determined to get at least examples 00 through 03 done tonight and finished at about 11:30.

Sidenote; I failed day 01 as well as day 00. Not all of my assignments failed but my first ones did, for stupid mistakes that could have been easily avoided. This has shaken my confidence some and has made me paranoid looking for tricks and things that were implied but not more outrightly spoken. It seems many of the “word problems” for lack of a better word are tricky or designed to trick you. The real success here is not just in ability to code but in ability to look for directions and follow them even when not boldly stated (like reading the directions at the beginning of a document and remembering them as you go through the document or equally important paying attention to the screenshot examples).

The people here are really cool, it’s nice to at least be in some good company, it’s also humbling/refreshing to be around so many smart people, and people, many of whom are way smarter than I am, which I don’t run into a lot. A few groups have started forming mostly around language lines, those who speak French hang out with each other, those who speak German and Russian likewise. There are not many who speak Spanish, but a good diversity of nearly everywhere else is represented, there's a good showing of women as well, which is cool to see (I would say about a 2 to 1.5 ratio of men to women, not perfect but better than expected for a code environment).

Apparently this particular piscine is small, I’m not entirely sure how that affects our chances of getting in, but I guess sometimes if there are too many there is a grade cutoff as there are limited spots, which for us should be at least one less problem to worry about. I worry that some of this info may just be hearsay, if I end up being wrong about it I’m sorry, once I finish the piscine I’ll try to go back and edit out any inaccuracies I’ve posted. The lack of clarity of process seems to be a feature and not a bug though, those who ask questions and get to know people find out more, those who search it out find it, those who don’t try don’t know. At least it seems that way to me. To be honest I’ve barely talked to the prefects (the ones who are running the piscine) I’m not sure if they would answer more questions if I asked them or not, they seem to give off the vibe that they aren’t here to teach but just to facilitate, and have often joked about not actually helping, but perhaps that was a trick as well.

Some people have already quit, though not as many as expected based on what I read ahead of time. Time will tell, I think the first test will really determine a lot of who stays or goes.

assignments today were as follows

1. function that does a pointer to an int showing a certain number
2. chain of nine pointers
3. swap the values
4. dividing with remainders while using pointers (hint use mod)(this is how far I got today)
5. similar to above but more complex
6. display a string of characters using pointers and arrays
7. count and return number of characters in a string
8. reverse the order of a characters in a string
9. reproduce the behavior of atoi (what?)
10. sort an array by ascending order

That’s it for today.