I've also been through Epitech which is the school that greatly inspired 42 (same founders) and I would like to add some details on top of that.
Even if it's true that Epitech us mainly about coding, the program enforce a coding standard that is a huge part of the final grade of each coding project (small functions, 80 char per line of code...). Fom the second year, components decoupling and basic design patterns are part of the program.
Nevertheless, the school doesn't really make the most to teach basic good engineering practices or at least I don't remember (doc, tests, vendoring, observability...) and this is one of the main pain point.
They have the same rules at 42 to code, 80 columns, 25 lines for a function, ect...
Where Epitech is better is that from the middle of the third until the end of the beginning of the five year, you have to work on a end study project. You need to prepare everything before coding, database schema, how will you do your tests, ect..
Even tough I find Epitech better than 42 on this, Epitech is also lacking a lot of things. Some teachers to explain to you the best practices, code review, ect.. would be really nice.
I used Frontpage, and Frontpage Extensions on the server side. I used HoTMetaL, Dreamweaver, and a few other WYSIWYG editors too. They were good, but nothing quite beat Notepad (or BBEdit if you were on a Mac). I remember Adobe Pagemill was really handy for doing the same changes across hundreds of files too.
I used Frontpage for a good while (I made a nice chunk of change off of that app), but switched to Dreamweaver as I started doing more and more PHP.
But either way, I always loved those programs (and was really irritated by the elitists who said you couldn't make decent sites unless you used only notepad; those training wheels helped me become good at something that all of my "notepad-only" friends have all given up on).
But I agree, as fun as it was, I really have no desire to go back to that world.
MS Front page editor and Notepad were the only tools those days. But was really cool. I still remember my first website showing Dinosaurs family classification inspired by movie 'Jurassic Park'
As C language teacher assistants in Uni, we used LD_PRELOAD during project defences to replace the lib standard malloc by one of our own in order to be sure that students allocated & freed memory correclty. Never saw so much Segmentation faults in such a short time window.
If you can afford rebuilding from source, using AddressSanitizer (perhaps also UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer) should be better at uncovering memory safety bugs than any LD_PRELOAD trick.
I don't know where you live in the USA so I cannot really judge but I think you should also take in consideration the cost of life in USA and Canada. It's not only about how much you make but about how much you spend.
However, this does not adjust for free healthcare and education.
On the other hand, tech cost of living is skewed by SF and Vancouver.
SF is the #1 tech city in the US whereas Vancouver may be #2 in Canada, but the US is a larger country so SF may "dilute" more. Without stats, this is just guesswork.
I feel like if you are at the top of your game, and can make it at any of the major tech companies or can start your own startup without trouble at finding funding, the U.S. is way better. Most of my friends, including myself, earned 1.5-3x what we'd earn even in a major city as Toronto.
And if you happen to join a great tech company, chances are the health insurance you'll get is superior to the general public healthcare system in Canada.
California vs Montreal is cherry picking the data. You could easily say Chicago (cheap) vs Vancouver (not cheap).
The major economic tech centres in Canada are Toronto and less so, Vancouver. Montreal and Ottawa (because that's where Shopify is HQ'd) are the next biggest.
Toronto and Vancouver are hugely unaffordable when it comes to housing; Montreal and Ottawa are much more affordable.
On the flipside, Vancouver is apparently more expensive than anywhere in the US for housing and median salary is much lower than somewhere like New York City.
Montreal is a big city, so I concede you have a (partial?) point. I have heard horror stories about cost of living in Vancouver here on HN, as well as from people I met in real life.
Even if it's true that Epitech us mainly about coding, the program enforce a coding standard that is a huge part of the final grade of each coding project (small functions, 80 char per line of code...). Fom the second year, components decoupling and basic design patterns are part of the program.
Nevertheless, the school doesn't really make the most to teach basic good engineering practices or at least I don't remember (doc, tests, vendoring, observability...) and this is one of the main pain point.