The project that taught him to stop faking it

Tomislav came to 42 Wolfsburg from Zagreb in February 2022, early enough to count himself among the school's first students. He is open about why. He was going through a hard time, and the move was partly an escape and partly a search for something that mattered to him. He had not found it at home in Croatia, so he went looking in Germany.

Three years later he graduated. As he puts it, that speaks for itself: he found his answer.

the project that humbled him.

Ask him which project stuck and he picks webserv, the one where 42 students build their own HTTP server in C++. He calls it infamous. He built it with two close friends, and he does not dress up his part in it.

I'm not going to spare any words. I was useless.

The gap between what they knew and what he knew was so wide that at times he felt uncomfortable being on the team at all. What changed things was a heart-to-heart with one of the two, one to one, about what he was doing, what he was missing and the problems he kept running into.

He came out of that talk with a morale boost and something that lasted longer. He did not need to impress anyone, or pass his work off as the right way before he had found an answer that was actually true. "I don't need to fake it," he says. He calls it a monumental step in his personal growth, and he is still grateful to both friends for that project.

the word is responsibility.

The other big lesson had nothing to do with code. Before 42, Tomislav had worked with plenty of people but rarely with anyone from outside Europe. In Wolfsburg his peers came from other countries and other continents. He counts talking across those differences among the most useful things he learned there.

It did not always go smoothly. Some people took a different approach to what he said, and now and then someone took offence. Those moments taught him a routine. First, understand that you crossed a line. Then own the mistake, apologise and take responsibility, while still offering your own perspective. If there is one word for it, he says, maybe that would be responsibility.

fifteen people, one dorm kitchen.

The best story in the interview starts with a beer. Four 42 students shared a student dorm and, programmers being programmers, mostly kept to themselves. Then a Lithuanian and a Slovenian ran into each other in the kitchen. The Lithuanian took a beer out of the fridge, looked at the Slovenian and offered one word: "Beer?"

Tomislav heard the commotion and went to see whether his housemates were really talking to each other. He sat down, the Greek housemate joined them, and the four of them realised they were living with fun people. From then on they met every Sunday to cook and hang out.

The Sunday dinners kept growing. At one point fifteen people were packed into that very small kitchen, and nobody knew how to fit everyone in or cook enough for all of them. It was still, he says, amazing. Between the jokes and the cooking, it is where he understood what that kind of human contact meant to all of them.

They have since scattered across the planet. They still talk, still send each other memes, and are planning summer or winter trips to meet up again.

what 42 is, for him.

Tomislav is clear that he did not need 42 for the technical side. If he only wanted a coding skill, he says, he could take one of the many online courses and be done in a month or two, and that market is oversaturated anyway. What 42 gave him is the part a course cannot: working closely with people who are different from you, accepting the differences, and staying yourself while owning what you do.

None of it came easily. "Long answer, it wasn't pretty," he says. There were plenty of times he wanted to give up, told himself he was stupid and could not do it, and felt too embarrassed to ask anyone for help. He would not call his time at 42 difficult, but it had its pitfalls, some of them monumental. He learned to treat each one as a chance to take stock: this is where you are right now, so what is stopping you from taking the next step? Good friends got him through the worst of it, and he finished the core curriculum.

what comes next.

Working with people is also what he is most looking forward to in his career. His current role should put him in touch with people from well beyond Croatia, and with what he learned at 42, he thinks he would do a pretty good job of it. He has since gone back to Croatia, where a coffee with an old friend turned into a med-tech start-up building a reusable surgical drill.

Watch the full interview on the 42 Wolfsburg YouTube channel. Portrait by Dario Komar, a 42 Wolfsburg pisciner.