Codam Coding College — Piscine Day 1
The first day of the Piscine was a headache. Literally. I got a headache and had to go home around 5:30 p.m. Other people apparently stayed until 8 p.m. or later.
I got to the school around 8:30 a.m. At about 8:45, they started letting people enter the building and showing them their seats. This took forever because only 2 were allowed in at a time and were being asked multiple questions about Corona and their personal info. I had to get my picture taken for my keycard because I wasn’t able to come to the onboarding day 2 weeks earlier.
They took me to my seat in the “cluster” (a room with all of the computers) on the ground floor. There’s also a cluster upstairs. They have computers with a green sign on them. This means they have been sanitized and can be used. When you leave for the day, you’re supposed to flip the card over to red so the cleaning staff knows to sanitize them. When we’re at our spot working by ourselves, we’re allowed to have our masks off. Only every 4th computer is being used to keep distance between people. The 3 in between are covered with some plastic so we’re not allowed to use them.
Right after I sat down at my spot, I got antsy waiting for the presentation video to start on the computer, so I got up and went to the area with the coffee machine and tea. I was happy to find out that the school offers free and unlimited coffee and tea AND fruit! I made a cappuccino and then started talking to some girls that were standing there as well. There was a group of 4 of us, and we talked for a while. Then we were ushered back into the room for the presentation.
The presentation took between 2 and 2.5 hours. The director stressed that the Piscine is not a race nor is it a competition and to not compare your progress to anyone else’s. There are people here who have years of experience and some with no experience whatsoever. Then there are those in between. I have some experience with R and Python from my master’s, but we’re working with C during the Piscine. We also found out that if you break certain rules, you can end up with “community service”, which means you have to come to Codam and help out for 2 hours. We were told that there was 1 community service handed out in the Piscine before ours (so last month in June).
After the presentation, some people got right to it and started working on the Shell00 exercises. I took a lunch break because I was starving. I talked with some people at the lunch tables and then went back to start watching the YouTube videos on Shell. I watched for about 5 hours, but then I got a massive headache and decided to call it a day and go home. Going home so early made me feel like I was going to be super behind everyone else the next day and left me questioning whether Codam was really for me. Only time will tell.
