Ok, so from August until the start of September I was in 42 Silicon Valley, doing the piscine. A month of A LOT of C coding, usually around 13 hours daily for me personally.
It was a very interesting experience, and I was waaaay more social than I would have anticipated. I have a bunch o peeves that remained around the way some things work there, as well as some details around the way the experience is engineered…​ One of the things I was somewhat vocal about was the motto "born to code" which is used by people to justify why minorities in tech are minorities, they were just not "born to do it" and while I get that was not what they meant at all…​ It still made VERY wary of how many microaggressions I’d have to deal with. Since they have updated the website and the twitter handle and I think the phrase is gone, yay!

Another thing that had me on my toes was the non-existent code of conduct, which sounded really bad. I know a lot of people that refuse to talk or attend conferences that don’t have them properly set up. Why would I go to a place for a whole month that doesn’t worry about that?
I think 42 is walking in a good direction overall. A code of conduct was made and it’s one of the mandatory projects for the students (which is ok, I guess), but I would much rather it was available on the website because that’s where people are more invested in learning about the school (in contrast to the first day of piscine when you also get a huge list of exercises to do, and will probably not read the code of conduct/harassment policy pdf).

That said, the actual program has some interesting premises, it goes in a completely different direction than boot camps for instance. The month in the piscine is mostly spent programming functions in C that already exist, so you actually know how to build basically everything you work with (except for malloc, free, write and sizeof, which is fairly reasonable since the program gets to them eventually). The opposition with boot camps lies in not wanting you to join the workforce as soon as possible, it’s building knowledge from the ground up from an actual low-level language like C, which is pretty interesting if you have the time to spare.

It’s also a peer-learning institution and because of that, a lot of the learning experience is what you make of it, but with the pace of the piscine, for instance, I just wasn’t able to get theoretically in-depth as I’d have liked around pointers and such. That might be the kind of thing that you may miss if you come from an Academic background or even un-school background. After the piscine, the course is a lot more self-paced from what I heard, so that may not be that big of a problem, but I still found it to be annoying while I was there.

Passing the piscine doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the grades you get during it. But there are grades and the grading system is boolean and VERY FRUSTRATING (probably on purpose), especially when the schedule is that tight and most people are to some degree of sleep deprived. I got zeroes for forgetting to print a new line in huge programs or for forgetting to check if my program matched the linter (ohhh, the linter…​ ) and I felt awful, it’s the kind of thing that can eat away at your personal confidence (again, especially if you are somewhat sleep deprived). My guess is that the program WANTS people to "fail" to normalize "failure" and to force people to be more throughout and also to weed out people that can’t deal with the idea of "failing" because that’s hardly a good mindset to have as a learner. But it still felt disproportionally punitive at times :<

All in all, I got in. But have decided not to attend, at least not for now, my mind might change on that one. But I don’t live all too well with not working and attending 42 would mean not working for a while and also moving with spouse and all to do some not working in Paris or the Silicon Valley, both places that are way more expensive than where I live right now, on my spouse’s account :/ to have an educational experience that I’m not sure I WANT to live.

So after I left 42 I remained around the bay area, SF/Oakland for around a month with my spouse until StrangeLoop came by. It was under a months time, so partner got to work on site, we got to eat a bunch of nice things and visit some cool places. So, my partner works at NoRedInk which is basically the home company of the Elm language. Since I was around I decided to try and do Elm-bridge even though I don’t feel that much joy will come from me trying to work with front-end. The amount of pain that writing the view files brought me might have confirmed that hypothesis all too well, lol. That said, it’s a very nicely made curriculum and I would definitely recommend it to beginners that want to dive into how elm works or to anyone that gets joy from building things and watching them work!

So, right now I’m studying Data Science at DataQuestand I will say that pandas are awesome O-O, in an almost scary way. I almost fear the amount of power I could get after mastering a set of tools like that. I just came out of a C learning experience, I already thought that Python lists were a very cool and complex data structure and then, BOOM, DataFrames!!! Ok, I think this is more than long enough, just going to register a couple of to-dos and wrap this up :D.

Oh, before that! I did a productivity journal, just listing things that I want to accomplish/accomplished everyday and it is the NICEST thing if you tend to feel a bit useless or have trouble with how you feel about your productivity. It’s great having a bunch of lines proving to you that you, in fact, did something with your time.