Mmm, High School - Pt. 2

Yep, that’s right, over a month in! But first, let me amend some things from the previous blog LOL.

Amendments

Cool, (Quite) Fun Biology

I changed my mind, my biology teacher is quite fun (or at the very least not boring at all). BUT DAMN, MY FIRST IMPRESSION WAS NOT GOOD AT ALL. He’s the only teacher who already told us bout his class rules and discussed the proper study material on the first day.

Cozy Chairs?!

Cushioned chairs are cool, but some of them have really bad cushions and end up being way more uncomfortable than normal wooden chairs. There are some of those in my homeroom and I always pray to not end up getting a bad one after group assignments 😭

Speaking of group assignments, there are TOO MANY. That’s the only thing I don’t like from the new curriculum 💀

Poster & Drawing

Oh boy, most of the posters I have to make don’t require custom drawn assets (or are annoying to draw manually) 😭—I’m more of a “draw-a-scene” artist. I’m cooked for the rest of the academic year. Hopefully I’ll find something cool and beneficial out of this, haha.

The Yearly Competition (dubbed “Excelsior”)

Okay, as I promised. The excerpt is not a clickbait! Basically:

Some Amendment

I wrote that it’s a “competition for younger students” in the previous blog—which is not completely wrong, but it’s also open for high schoolers.

The Lonely Candidate

Okay, the main thing. An Interview. Yeah. Remember when I said..

My school has a yearly competition for younger students, and we get to be part of the committee. I registered myself already, hopefully I’ll get accepted.

Yes, you have to pass an interview to be part of the committee, apparently.

The thing is that, I was the only person who were gonna get interviewed for the division I wanted that day. I was part of the second batch for the interview, so I guessed that that’s why I was well all alone. The division I wanted? IT, duh. I mean, what else am I good at. Design? I could try, but I bet that my art skill is pretty much the standard here.

Okay, but for real, that’s not why I wanted to join this whole “IT division”. In their vacancy flyer, they listed that you’d maintain the competition site and their server. I already went like, “Damn, we have a server? That thing has to be running Linux and that sounds dope asf”—that’s why I picked IT.

The interview day then came, I waited outside the room. 10-4, I still remember. Why the hell did I even wait, I was the only kid. Bruh. But anyways, I soon got called in by the senior (the coordinator of the division) and it was just like a normal student council interview. You got asked bout your past experiences, time management, blah blah blah. All the usual stuff.

Well, that is until..

“Tell me a bit about your tech skills. Go on, you can share your stories.”

Oh fuck no, how am I supposed to answer this? This is the worst.

But okay, I’ve been daily driving Linux since I was 11 (you’re looking for a sysadmin, right?), I have a Raspberry Pi server at my home. Started liking to code back in 2018/2019, I’ve been enjoying shell scripting since I started using Linux, I met one of my friends in 2023 and then I relearned a bunch of languages properly like Python, C, C++, JavaScript, what else, not sure. I’m a programming wreck. I don’t even remember if I mentioned Rust already (i wuvv Rust even though I don’t use it that often).

I gotta say, that was the absolute worst way of telling your programming/tech experience professionally. I went too damn casual and non-technical 😭 Don’t know what I’m good at or what I like to code—it’s anything I can think of. Oh boy, my nervous ass. The only thing that I’m good at explaining would be my visual art/CGI experiences¹. I’m so fearing my 2030 job interview 💀 (like frl)

Now I interview the interviewer. (?!)

Ehm, let’s just say that the other reason why I wanted to join this division was to find other people who share similar hobbies. I actually thought of talking to some other people who would’ve also been interviewed that day—but there’s none. 🤷

And so, I decided to interview the damn interviewer. Why not. Hmm, what should I ask? Oh, what about this. This will tell a lot about you. “So anyways, what’s your favorite programming language?” I swear if you answer Rust I’ll scream from the bottom of my lungs-

Rust

Whaat?! Okay that’s interesting. We (or I) then proceeded to scream in the interview room for the next few minutes, literally forgetting that we were not the only people in an interview. We then talked about some other things, including our GitHub accounts, typing (with keyboard) speed records, the fact that we’ve met somewhere in my middle school before, meh. Yeah. I don’t remember anything else. Oh wait, I do. They also use Neovim HAHAHHAAHHA.

DREAM CAME TRUE?!

And after a lil more talk, definitely a new friend! SHOUTOUTTTT TO THE LEGENDARY SBYTE

When’s that time when I first badly wished that I could have the chance to meet some programmer slash tech enthusiast in real life? Oh right, that was 3 years ago. Wow.. dream granted :O

Dominating The Division

AND YESSE, I GOT ACCEPTED! Literally already been told that the day before the official announcement. Or more like, I would’ve been accepted anyways thanks to the amount of candidates, maybe. Haha.

Wanna guess the amount of people on the team? 15? 10? no, it’s 4². Compare that to the other (main)³ divisions—they have like at least 10.

With only that many people, it’s really easy to pick up tasks. On the first week, I’ve already contributed to the codebase. Very proud of that LOL. I asked my 10th grade friends and some of them legit haven’t gotten any task yet.

PHP-

Oh yes, the event’s website is powered by PHP™. No CMS, just all raw PHP files. When I first heard that I literally tripped off. Me, maintaining PHP code? What kind of era am I in-

We have our own infrastructure for EVERYTHING. An admin panel? We have it. For storing the competition participants? We got our own MariaDB database. Sending mails to participants? Automated. And since I have to maintain all that (they’re mostly in PHP), I turned into a full stack web developer OVERNIGHT.

But after finding out that PHP has classes, basic type annotations, try-catch functionality, a not-too-confusing import syntax, easy superglobals to get various kinds of data, …, yeah, sure. PHP is actually kinda cool. The only uncool thing is that it’s still loosely typed. But eh, no wonder that it still powers the majority of the web.

We are actually planning to rewrite the site with a good modern framework, though.

Actually, now that I think about it, should we really do it? Wouldn’t it be fun if we pass this crazy spaghetti codebase to the next generations so they’re gonna have a bunch of things to do together, collaborate, and maybe learn new things like what I’m doing now?? Eeh nah let’s not-?

That’s it For Now.

I’ll be talking about the event, its site, and its infrastructure specifically in an upcoming blog, don’t take your eyes off of your RSS reader.

1. Writing this made me go through another identity crisis. I wanna be an artist for a living again.⁴ ↩

2. Officially; but we got some extra people chipping in for fun. ↩

3. Main divisions are the divisions that are involved in the whole event, not just some specific competition. ↩

4. I have decided that I want to have a programming/tech career in the future. ↩