Codam Coding College — Piscine Day 4
Holy moly. Talk about a jam-packed day.
I accidentally put too many ¨availability¨ slots in the system for evaluating other Pisciners, and FOUR people ended up signing up with me to get their Shell00 exercises evaluated. Plus I got evaluated twice myself for Shell00. In total, my day was filled with SIX evaluations. The evaluations take quite some time, too. The slot is for 15 minutes, but it ends up being more like 30 minutes sometimes. I didn´t have enough time to finish the videos on C and just decided to start on the C00 exercises since it was already 6:30 p.m. and there were STILL 4 more videos to watch.
I ended up failing Shell00. I did exercises 00 to 07, and I failed at 05 because I stored my output of the code in the text file instead of the actual code itself *facepalm*. I needed a 50% to pass, and I got a 40%. If I would have gotten 05 correct, I would have passed with 50%. The way the grading system works is: as soon as one of the exercises is incorrect, the rest of the exercises are marked incorrect even if they´re technically correct. That´s because the exercises are laid out from easy to difficult, so if you fail the easy ones, they don´t care if you get the harder ones right. Since I failed 05, my 06 and 07 were also marked as incorrect even though my 07 was actually right.
You also get an immediate fail if you end up pushing extra files into the git repository than is requested by the assignment or if you´re missing any files. For example, if you have to zip files and you end up pushing both the zipped file and the individual file, you automatically fail. One guy thought he pushed all his exercises, but exercise 03 was missing, so I had to mark the rest wrong. He was pretty angry about it. He didn´t even let me look at the rest of his exercises to give him feedback or anything. He was just like ¨finish the evaluation and get it over with¨. I thought that was a pretty negative attitude to have about the whole thing. I mean, if you fail your evaluations, you have to re-submit the assignments and go for another round of evaluations. Each assignment cell needs to be evaluated by 2 people, which costs you 2 evaluation points. You start off the Piscine with 5 points. Each time you sign up to be evaluated, you lose a point, and each time you sign up to evaluate someone else, you earn a point. So…I get why he was frustrated. He basically lost out on 2 points and was going to lose out on another 2 since he had to re-submit and go for 2 more evaluations. At the same time, the more times you get evaluated, the more you learn since your evaluator is randomly chosen by the system. It´s just another opportunity to meet and talk with other people. And like Codam says: it´s not a race!
Anyway, after the evaluations, I managed to make it through the first C exercise with a little help from a guy 2 rows behind me. The task was to write a function that displays a character passed as a parameter. With the first exercise of each new ¨cell¨ (read day 1), I´m always confused and wondering what the heck they are actually asking. Then after some googling, it clicks and I can move on. I also figured out how to compile my code with gcc, so that was cool. It finally feels good to know what it means when people tell you that ¨C is a compiled language¨. When I used Python, that was all done behind the scenes.
To sum it up, long and tiring day. I´ve been arriving at 9:00 a.m. every day and leaving at 8:00 p.m. Never thought I would be dedicating 11 hours of my day for days on end to just coding, but it´s worth it!
