2024-09-25

Finishing the common core of 42

So the day finally came and I finished Transcendence the last project of the 42 Common Core. The day started with a lot of stress still because the day before the evaluation we still had to fix some problems and bugs but we managed to figure it all out. The evaluations went really well and then our joy got cut short when the Intra net went down. Our final evaluation was still not in and then we just needed to wait till it was back on. I can tell you waiting for it to come back on felt like ages while it really just took about an hour. The last evaluation went through and we passed. Time to party! Also for the 19 Campus in Antwerp it was a special moment because we were the first people to finish the Common Core there. It was a really nice moment and I am really happy that I could be a part of it. I learned a lot in the past year and I am really happy that I made the decision to go to 19. I met a lot of nice people and got to know a lot of new things. I hope that the future will be as bright as the past year and I hope that I can keep learning new things and just keep on growing. In the next section I will talk a bit about the things I learned and the things I want to learn in the future.

So what did I learn in the past year? First of all I learned a lot about programming in C. The first couple of months all the projects required us to write C. A lot of people will tell you C is outdated or not up to standard anymore but I have to disagree. While not being on par with some other options like C++ or Rust it is still a really nice language. It is really good at teaching you the basics of programming. Some of my favorite projects in C were FdF and Minishell. FdF because I really like working with 3d graphics while I didn't like MLX the graphic library we needed to use it was still a blast. Minishell I really liked because it is something to be proud of when it is done. It is a really big project and I already made a blog post about it. It is definetly worth checking out my git repo about it. After Minishell I learned some more fundamentals like multi threading but then the real deal began. I started to learn C++. While this was just the 98 version OOP was a really nice addition to have. The IRC project we had to do with C++ also was a lot of fun. My team was amazing to work with and I even worked with one of them togheter on the final project Transcendence. Transcendence is a project where you need to make a web app to play pong on. The game is not too difficult but you also needed to create stuff like a full authentication system and a database for storing users friends and game history. The project was in Django for the backend and Html, Css and JS in the frontend. The backend we used was sqlite. This project was also a lot of fun but I didn't really like the technologies we needed to use. I would love to use a frontend framework like svelte or react on this too but this was not allowed. Still we passed it and I am really happy wit the results of all the projects.

I also want to thank all the people that make Campus 19 possible. It really changed me as a person and learned me a lot. I also want to thank my fellow students for the amazing campus environment and the fun times we had. I will certainly still be around in the campus while doing some of the specialisations and I hope to see you guys there. I hope you guys enjoyed reading this blog post and I will see you guys in the next one!