My experience with 42Wolfsburg during the remote Piscine — Day 00

4 min readFeb 4, 2021

Day 1…. No it’s Day 00

I know you have read some articles about the Piscine already but this Piscine is remote due to Covid. It’s some kind of special. We won’t be in Wolfsburg. I will sit 350km away.

The first day started pretty late as I like to get up early in the morning. We had to participate a zoom meeting at 9.42. A homage to the famous film (you already know which one). I was a bit nervous if my IT systems will work properly but everything went fine so far.

Max (the CEO of the school) and his team welcomed all of the candidates in a Zoom meeting. I don’t know exactly how much people we are but I think it is around 170.

from https://www.facebook.com/42wolfsburg

I am also on the picture above, can you find me ? (hint: 3rd row) :D

“Don’t panic”

We were given some instructions about the tools we use. I recommend getting familiar with Zoom and Discord. Basically there is a “getting started” guide on notion.so which you will granted access after the meeting. There is a different terminology compared to other on site Piscines

The base camp

Imagine this as a camp were we are all together no matter if you are Pisciner or staff. They tried to built such an atmosphere on Discord. You can hang out in rooms and chat/talk (like you would do at a campfire)

The tribes

This is your inner circle. You can pair with up to 6 people. Don’t worry, there are events where you can meet other campers.

The 42staff

Basically these are the staff members of 42 Wolfsburg which run the school

The WolfP.A.C.K

Cadets from other 42schools which can answer questions regarding the camp. They won’t help us solving coding task. PACK stands for Programming, Assisting, Connecting and Kindness. Wolf is related to the city Wolfsburg I guess

The campers

That’s us ;)

“Nothing is mandatory”

There are a lot of meetings during the week but you don’t have to participate at all. You decide what you wanna do. Discord has a built in bot where you can earn points by attending. I would highly recommend to participate as much meetings as possible. I always learned something new or met someone new. And an advice: Subscribe to meetings on the Intra as you will get 0 points when you don’t do. Also don’t subscribe when you don’t want to. Points are just for achievements (as far as I know). You can gather points by being online on Discord as well

In addition to Discord and Notion there is the mentioned Intra of 42. I had some trouble with my profile picture but staff fixed it. It’s important to ask and talk to others if you need help.

I randomly joined a tribe (13 as I like this number). Guys seems to be cool so far. We are 2 women and 4 men with an age range from 21 -31 (I’m the grandpa haha). Tried to talk to everyone.

The afternoon meeting was for tribe formation. You can meet other people there and talk to them. I think the staff were a bit surprised that everyone has joined a tribe randomly after lunch so I guess 80% were already full.

After the last meeting I joined a voice channel and tried to talk to others. It’s pretty hard to save other campers name as your name on discord consists of your Intra username (which is the first letter of your first name and up to 7 characters of the surname).

I found out so far that there are guys with no coding experience as well as intermediate experience. I would suggest myself being somewhere in between. I will try not to get crazy during the first week as there are some rumors about how to pass the Piscine. We won’t write any code during the first week.

I ended the day at 8 PM and talked to some friends and shared my experience.

You can find the next day here

If you want to find out how to prepare for the Piscine go here

Here is a chat with a non-coding guy about the Piscine