People ask why a coding school is named after a number. The honest answer is that a British comedy writer needed a punchline.
the joke.
In 1978 the BBC broadcast a radio comedy by Douglas Adams called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A year later it was a novel, and after that pretty much everything else. In the story, a race of very clever beings builds a supercomputer called Deep Thought and asks it for the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Deep Thought thinks about it for seven and a half million years. Then it says 42.
Nobody is pleased. The computer points out, quite reasonably, that the answer only looks useless because nobody ever worked out what the question was. So a bigger computer is built to find the question. That computer is the Earth, and it gets demolished to make room for a bypass shortly before it finishes.
what the number means.
Fans spent years hunting for the hidden meaning. In binary, 42 is 101010. In ASCII it's the asterisk, the wildcard that stands in for anything. Six times nine is 42 if you count in base 13. Adams had heard every theory, and in 1993 he settled it on a fan newsgroup: “It was a joke.” He wanted an ordinary, smallish number, looked out at his garden and picked one.
We're keeping the asterisk theory anyway.
why a school borrowed it.
When 42 opened in Paris in 2013, with no teachers, no lectures and no tuition fees, it took the number as its name. Part of that was a nod to the people most likely to get the reference. Part of it was a claim, that this could be one answer to how programming gets taught. The network now has campuses all over the world, and Wolfsburg has been one of them since 2021.
the part we take seriously.
The joke has a point, and the point is why the name still fits. An answer is no use without its question. Deep Thought had seven and a half million years and all the computing power anyone could want, and it still handed back a number nobody could use, because nobody had done the harder job of asking properly.
That is most of what happens here. Nobody at 42 Wolfsburg hands you the answer, because there is no teacher to hand it over. You get a project, a deadline and a room full of people who are exactly as stuck as you are. You learn to ask better questions of the problem, of the documentation and of the person at the next desk. The answer tends to turn up along the way, and it's rarely the interesting part.
It also means nobody delivers the meaning from above. If the answer to everything is an ordinary number picked on an ordinary afternoon, then what it stands for is up to whoever is using it. Life is a puzzle with no solutions printed in the back, and you get to write more of it than you'd think. Around here that has looked like a carpenter learning to code at nearly 50 and a late train that turned into a hackathon win.
so what's your question?
We don't know it, and at the start you probably don't either. The Piscine is four weeks of finding out. The Guide's most famous advice is printed on its cover and applies from day one: don't panic. Its second most famous advice is to always know where your towel is. Piscine is French for swimming pool, so that one holds up too.
42 Wolfsburg