42's first step: surviving the piscine

To be accepted at 42, one of the best IT schools in France, you have to pass through their rigorous selection process. It is called Piscine and consists of an entire month of coding non-stop, all day, sometimes even all night because the school is open 24/7, and coding in C, a language that I've never had contact with.

What can I say about this experience? It surely was extra hard for me. Here's why:
✅ My First international trip
✅ Entirely new culture and environment
✅ I Don't speak the language quite well
✅ Low-level programming language
But I had to succeed no matter what. I was spending all my life's savings on this trip.

And so it began, I was shocked by the number of people, there were almost 500 people on the first day. They separated us into two teams. Two coalitions. Heap and Stack. I was part of the heap, or la heap, and for the next days the staff would do several challenges and events where you could gain points for your coalition. The coalition with more points receives extra XP when submitting projects.

Here's when my coalition got together for a group picture:

The first two projects were about shell and bash scripting, so we could get used to shell commands. Then, we moved to C.

Evaluation system

The peer-to-peer system of 42 works extremely well. People really help each other on the projects. And when a project is finished you have set it as finished and schedule your evaluation. That's a crucial moment to defend your project and your decisions while making it. Each project has to be evaluated twice, and you use your evaluation points to schedule the evaluations. You gain evaluation points evaluating people.

It's extremely interesting to see the several different ways someone can develop the same project.

The evaluation is a moment where you not only share your coding expertise, giving tips on how people can improve their programs, but also learn while correcting their code, and it's extremely interesting to see the several different ways someone can develop the same project, so you can compare the way you did with the way they did.

The exams

Each Friday we have an exam. It's a time to prove your coding skills, on computers with no internet, only you and your text editor, there's not even auto-complete 💀. You receive a .txt with an assignment, you have to code it and submit it for an automatic correction. If you succeed, you gain points and move on to the next assignment, if not, you have to do the same assignment again.

I finished the Piscine at level 9. I submitted 2 Shell projects, 9 C projects and 1 group project. You can check all these projects on this git repository:

GitHub - marcioflaviob/piscine42: The exercises from the piscine at Ecole 42 / Paris.

The exercises from the piscine at Ecole 42 / Paris. - marcioflaviob/piscine42

GitHubmarcioflaviob

After the Piscine I went on a quick Eurotrip, and I was in Camden Town, in London, when I got the email telling me I was selected to join 42. 🥳

Then I knew I had to go back to Brazil to apply for a student visa as soon as possible.