42 Piscine Day 8 — (05)

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 made a mistake, wasted most of today and only just realized the mistake as I was heading to bed.

I let my ego get in the way of progress. I see everyone else figuring things out and I wanted to be one to come to conclusions on my own as well, I wanted to feel smart, to have discovered or learned on my own, then later to help others understand. Ultimately this was stupid as I had the resource that other people not being used. Not using the resources at hand is dumb.

So this is how today went. I would spend 20 minutes working on code, filling in as much as I knew and understood, then I would get stuck stare at the screen for ten minutes, half heartedly ask my neighbor if they solved it yet (usually a no, not yet) then stare at it again until the frustration morphed into procrastination. Then I would daydream about some game I’d love to make, YouTube music would be listened to, memes looked at, email checked and articles read. Then stare at code in frustration again, watch a video about what I think I’m stuck on and still feel stuck afterward. Rinse and repeat and that was most of today.

I did go to town for groceries and a haircut also the servers were down (meaning the lab was down) for a couple of hours before noon so I took the time to do laundry but otherwise my day was frustration and procrastination and what’s worse is I realized what I could have done to fix it as I was heading out. I was trying to solo what aught to have been collaborative. By not seeking out help from others (which I’ve been good about until now) I handicapped my learning for the day. Because I was proud and wanted to feel smart rather than actually learn. This was maybe one of the dumbest things I could have done.

Also there was a meeting this morning about 1. How getting a high score on assignments but not tests shows either a lack of understanding or cheating so it’s not the way. 2. We need to understand pointers, arrays and recursion. 3. Keep going some people don’t have it click until days before the end.

Other hints given at the meeting: look up c array syntax sugar, look up file descriptors for the write function, pointers are values also.

I for one was grateful for the slight clarity of process, encouragement and direction. Lots of others interpreted differently. Some saw it as a warning to pay more attention, others still thought it was a waste of time. Another theory was that the group was too small so they need to increase the pass rate while not lowering quality (I find that doubtful). I really think it was just to help.

Some of the guys who are a bit better at coding started working on a script to calculate how many of us haven’t quit yet, I bounced some ideas with them for possible solutions but I don’t have time to help more than that. It’s cool to see a small personal project emerge though.

I’m writing this on my phone so I don’t have access to the assignment list but I will say the first 3 are the hard assignments from previous days, they don’t count for points but have to be correct to get any points on the other assignments. There were a lot of other assignments as well. I’ll do details tomorrow.

Edit: as promised here are the assignments for day05

1. (not for points but needed to continue) put string function
2. (not for points but needed to continue) put number function
3. (not for points but needed to continue) atoi clone
4. strcpy clone
5. strncpy clone
6. strstr clone
7. strcmp clone
8. strncmp clone
9. function to transform every letter of every word to uppercase
10. function to transform every letter of every word to lowercase
11. function to capitalize the first letter of ever word and lowercase the rest
12. return a 1 if a string is only alphabetical characters, a 0 if there are others
13. return a 1 if a string is only numbers, 0 if there are others
14. return a 1 if the string is only lowercase characters, 0 if otherwise
15. return a 1 if the string is only uppercase characters, 0 if otherwise
16. return a 1 if string contains only printable characters, 0 if otherwise
17. strcat clone
18. strncat clone
19. strlcat clone
20. strlcpy clone
21. putnbr_base — displays number in a base system onscreen, shape of int and in radix of shape of a string(what?), contains only useable symbols, must handle negative numbers, if invalid display nothing
22. atoi base (I don’t understand what it’s asking for at all)
23. if non printable character display as hexadecimal
24. function to display memory area onscreen

hope this helps someone in the future.