On 7 April 2025, my attendance to 42 the computer science school's 26-day bootcamp named Piscine has finally begun. I have been looking forward to this day for nearly three months, after visiting my local campus of the school on its open day in January, applying to join the Piscine that was originally scheduled on February 24 but was later replaced by a 5-day bite-sized version of the bootcamp called Discovery Piscine, and applying to join the full Piscine that was scheduled for April 7.
+Despite having attended the Discovery Piscine to get a taste of what the Piscine would be like, the full Piscine is still quite a different experience, because not only the full Piscine is longer, but also its curriculum was different: Discovery Piscine focused on Python, but the Piscine focuses on C the programming language, with the first two projects being about shell commands. In addition, during Discovery Piscine, we did not use Git for storing our projects, but in the Piscine, the school's intranet creates Git repositories for all our projects, so we would submit our projects by pushing them to their own Git repositories, and during peer evaluations, evaluators would clone the Git repositories into their own computer to review their peer's work. Furthermore, Discovery Piscine did not have automatic evaluations, but in the Piscine, after getting through peer evaluations, our projects need to pass the automatic evaluation to succeed.
+A key to succeed the projects is to pay close attention to the details of the project exercise requirements and examples. A good thing is, one of the ways 42 is not a traditional school is that we can retry projects even if we failed. During my first try of the Piscine's very first project, which was about shell commands, I failed due to not paying enough attention to the details of the exercise requirements, but after learning my mistakes and retrying the project, I succeeded by passing both peer and automatic evaluations.
+I had learned C when I took CS50's Introduction to Computer Science course, but it has been a while since I wrote C, so the Piscine served as a good opportunity to refresh my C skills and knowledge. I started the Piscine's first C project on April 10, and despite already having some background in C, I still got to learn some things about C that I was not aware of before, such as the write()
function. That said, my background with C and programming in general certainly helped me to pass the Piscine's first exam on April 11.
After the weekly exam happened on Fridays, we got assigned weekly group projects to do during the weekends, with our team members being generated randomly. The first group project was easy enough for my team to complete it on Saturday, including alternate versions of the project as an opportunity to earn bonus points. Therefore, I got to take one day break on Sunday, but I still need to prepare for the possibility of needing to visit the campus for group projects in Sundays in the next few weeks.
+Attending the Piscine made me even happier with my decision to learn to use Vim to get prepared for the Piscine, because not only the campus computers have Vim installed, but also 42 has its own Vim plugin to add its custom header, which is a requirement for doing its coding projects like C. The plugin is available for Visual Studio Code as well, but the video resource for the first C project showcases C code with Vim. The staff of my local 42 campus also mentioned having Vim installed in the campus computers when they briefed us on the first day of the Piscine. In conclusion, my hunch that 42 encourages students to use Vim was right.
+On average, I stayed in the campus around 8 hours per day. I had prepared for April being a busy month for me because of the Piscine, so I am doing my best in the Piscine projects, and I hope I can pass the Piscine and enter 42's core curriculum. I chose to attend 42 because computer science and programming are such vast fields that there is always something to learn, and I am a firm believer that learning is a lifelong process and journey.
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