42 Piscine Day 9 — (06)

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

Today was better than yesterday, I at least learned more, but I did not finish assignments that were worth points, only the preliminary ones that were not. Because they weren’t worth points I didn’t turn them in, this was probably a mistake as it would have left a bit of a record of progress.

I feel like I’m always behind, I was talking to another student about it this morning and she responded “we have to measure ourselves against ourselves not each other” wise words I’ll have to make an effort to remember them.

It really feels like the piscine, or even this whole school is less about coding and more about being the kind of person who could be great at coding. Like what I’m told was an old zen proverb “drawing a perfect circle is easy, first be perfect, then merely draw a circle”. This piscine seems to be designed such as to be a foundational philosophy for a life filled with code, rather than just learning to code. We are learning seemingly contradictory things that when you take a step back really aren’t. We are learning to be humble, and to earn what we get. Seeing our weaknesses for what they are (hence always feeling frustrated) and also that we are more capable than we thought. That we must be willing to ask for help but ultimately owning our own success or failures. To think for ourselves, to seek out answers on our own and yet part of that is knowing that other people are resources to learn from.

I mean the school is set up to teach us to be great at programming, but I hope they don’t mind me taking some life philosophy away from it as well. Damn I really want to be here on a more than probational status, I want to be the kind of person this would help me to be. I mean I’m already on the path and I was before I came, but to have a place surrounded by these sorts of smart people, in an environment where finding your own answers and working together is encouraged, sounds to me almost beautiful, lacking a better word.

My not getting things turned in isn’t the way though, even my roommates who have seemed like they have been sort of slacking managed to get in up to assignment 8, and I only got up to 2, because I didn’t want to move on without understanding, which maybe was a mistake. I need to ask for help sooner, even though yesterday was better, I still hesitated. I need it to be every half an hour after stuck instead of every few hours after stuck.

Also yesterday I didn’t sit next to my friends, not what I wanted to do but I did see an increase in work done, I may just have to check in with them and go to lunch with them and try not to sit too close in order to get things done.

Yesterday my base count of students at around 8 pm was 120 give or take ten. I don’t think there are more than 130 total students anymore, I could be wrong but I think that’s about what it is now. The guys making a script to calculate ran into problems and will have to build a web-scraper and a program to compare results, I’m not sure they are that dedicated to it yet so we may not know until we finish, we may not know even then.

I’m in the lab early because I woke up early, there are about 8 of us here at 7am, half of which are here from the night before, I found two people asleep at desks or laying on multiple chairs.

Later today we are being graded on our group project, our group grade is based on the weakest link of the group, which since there is only two of us, and my partner did a piscine once before and is brilliant, well the weakest link would be me. I’ve been studying and feel that I understand, I had to hand compute my way through the program to fully grasp it but I think I’ve got it now, I hope it goes well. I feel for some of the other groups, most of my friends have been the ones pulling their group, and their teammates don’t understand and seemingly haven’t tried very hard to. It’s hard to say if this is a failing of the stronger teammates or not, one can only push so hard, and often this is usually part of a language barrier(much like real life I suppose), we will have to see how it goes.

day06 assignments were as follows

1. create a library (using previously made functions)
2. create a program that displays it’s own name
3. create a program that displays it’s given arguments
4. create a program that displays it’s given arguments in reverse order
5. create a program that displays it’s given arguments sorted by ascii order