On 6 October 2025, I returned to school by officially attending the core programme of my local campus of 42 the computer science school, after having passed the school's 26-day bootcamp named the Piscine in May.
On 16 October 2025, I completed Milestone 0, the very first milestone of the core programme, by completing and passing the first project in 42's core curriculum.
42's core programme has a pace system where when a student logs in to the intranet for the first time during the core programme, they will be prompted to answer how long do they plan to complete the core programme, and the intranet system will suggest the deadlines of each milestone based on the student's chosen pace. The intranet can adjust the suggested deadlines accordingly depending on how fast or slow the student completes a milestone.
I chose to set the goal of completing 42's core programme in one year. As a result, I was suggested to complete Milestone 0 on 17 October 2025. I ended up completing the milestone just one day before the suggested deadline.
The first project in 42's core curriculum involves creating your own static library for the C programming language that includes various functions that will be helpful in future projects in the curriculum. Many of these functions are rewriting ones from the standard C library, but some functions are new ones requiring students to write according to the project's requirements.
I had actually finished the Milestone 0 project for the first time on October 14, but failed after both my peers and the intranet's automatic evaluation discovered massive issues with my work. As a result, I had to wait for another day to retry the project.
Then came October 16, when I retried the project, I discussed with my peers and asked for their advice on how to solve the project. We both tested our project manually and used testers developed by other 42 students to ensure all the functions in our own C library works, and that our C library can be successfully compiled.
At last, after hours of discussion, booking each other's time slots for evaluations with peers, I succeeded in the very first project of 42's core programme, and by extension, Milestone 0, with the highest score, which means I passed the bonus part of the project as well!
What is even better than me succeeding the project with the highest score, is that my peer congratulating me for my success. This makes me appreciate 42's peer-to-peer learning model even more by encouraging students to help each other succeed in projects.
To celebrate me completing Milestone 0 of 42's core programme, I decided to have a long weekend, especially since the next Monday also happens to be a public holiday in Malaysia, namely Deepavali.