Hi,
My question certainly stems from the imposter syndrome that I am living right now for no good reason, but when looking to resolve some issues for embedded C problems, I come across a lot of post from people that have a deep understanding of the language and how a mcu works at machine code level.
When I read these posts, I do understand what the author is saying, but it really makes me feel like I should know more about what’s happening under the hood.
So my question is this : how do you rate yourself in your most used language? Do you understand the subtilities and the nuance of your language?
I know this doesn’t necessarily makes me a bad firmware dev, but damn does it makes me feel like it when I read these posts.
I get that this is a subjective question without any good responses, but I’d be interested in hearing about different experiences in the hope of reducing my imposter syndrome.
Thanks
I have no fear of implementing anything I’m asked to in typescript go rust java c# f# or nix… They’re all the same tool just kinda different in some places.
I’ve learned a lot by breaking things. By making mistakes and watching other people make mistakes. I’ve writing some blog posts that make me look real smart.
But mostly just bang code together until it works. Run tests and perf stuff until it looks good. It’s time. I have the time to write it up. And check back on what was really happening.
But I still mostly learn by suffering.
But I still mostly learn by suffering.
That resonates so much. Almost every time someone is deeply impressed with something I know, it brings back a painful memory of how I learned it.
I really like brain twisters. It can get frustrating at times, but it’s the most fun out of the profession to me.
how do you rate yourself in your most used language?
I know things that no human should have to carry the knowledge of
Do you understand the subtilities and the nuance of your language?
My soul is scarred by the nuanced minutia of many an RFC.
in the hope of reducing my imposter syndrome.
There’s but two types in software - those who have lived to see too much…and those who haven’t…yet.
After almost 12~15 years of programming in C and C++, I would give myself a solid “still don’t know enough” out of 10.
After almost 12~15 years of programming in C and C++, I would give myself a solid “still don’t know enough” out of 10.
That resonates so thoroughly.
And while it can 100% also be the case in any tool or language, it’s somehow 300% true for C and C++.
Better than many, mediocre.
With my coworkers I’ve got a strange ability to pick up any language that tastes like c, and get stuff done. I’m sure I’ve confused our c# guys when I make a change to their code and ask for a code review, because I’ll chase down quality of life improvements for myself. (Generally, I will make the change and ask if I have any unintended side effects, because in an MCU, I know what all my side effects are, multi threaded application?, not at all)
Edit: coming from a firmware view, I’ve made enough mistakes to realize when order of operations will stab me, when a branch is bad because that pipeline hit will hurt, and I still get & vs && wrong more often than I would like to admit.
I just have to say “tastes like c” is a visceral way to say it. I approve.
I think I’ll never not make & &&, | || or = == operators mistakes. It’s so easy to go over it fast and not notice the mistakes.
I like developing MCU firmwares because there is limited amout of resources and you usually have direct control of what is running when.
I feel the better than many, but mediocre in my soul. I mean, I get paid to code, so I certainly have a good enough knowledge to do so. But I have the tendancy to undersell myself.
I’ve been writing code for 25+ years, and in tech for 27+.
I’m a novice at all languages still. Even though they tell me I’m a Principal Engineer.
There’s always some new technique or way to do what I want that’s better I’m learning every day. It never stops. The expectations for what I consider to be good code just continues to climb every day.
I try to tell this to all young guns getting in.
The amount of information due the dearth and depth of theory, practical, and abstraction I would need to where I’m comfortable enough to consider myself an expert would take a lifetime to learn.
Hence, it’s, “Stay in the dojo, padawan!”
8/10 Server-side JavaScript
7/10 Ampscript
3/10 SQL
There is something about SQL that I can’t get to click with me. I can run basic queries and aggregation, but I can never get nested queries to work right.
All of these also assume I have access to documentation. Without documentation, all of them are like a 2. 🤷
I have advice that you didn’t ask for at all!
SQL’s declarative ordering annoys me too. In most languages you order things based on when you want them to happen, SQL doesn’t work like that- you need to order query dyntax based on where that bit goes according to the rules of SQL. It’s meant to aid readability, some people like it a lot,but for me it’s just a bunch of extra rules to remember.
Anyway, for nested expressions, I think CTEs make stuff a lot easier, and SQL query optimisers mean you probably shouldn’t have to worry about performance.
I.e. instead of:
SELECT one.col_a, two.col_b FROM one LEFT JOIN (SELECT * FROM somewhere WHERE something) as two ON one.x = two.xyou can do this:
WITH two as ( SELECT * FROM somewhere WHERE something ) SELECT one.col_a, two.col_b FROM one LEFT JOIN two ON one.x = two.xEspecially when things are a little gnarly with lots of nested CTEs, this style makes stuff a tonne easier to reason with.
I’m 100% going to try this, but I have a feeling that it isn’t going to work in my application. Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses some pared-down old version of Transact-SQL and about half of the functions you’d expect to work just flat out don’t.
The joys of using a Salesforce product.
Oh boy, have fun! CTEs have pretty wide support, so you might be in luck (well at least in that respect, in all other cases you’re still using saleforce amd my commiserations are with you)
Salesforce just gives me the other kind of CTE.
I am very proficient in my primary language, C#.
Writing more context out feels like boasting, so I think I will skip that and go to a summation/conclusion directly.
Knowledge and expertise comes from more than the language. Which you hinted at. The language is only our interface. How is the language represented, how will it transform the code, how will it be run. There’s a lot of depth in there - much more than there is in the language itself.
I learned a lot, through my own studies and reading, studying, projects, and experience. I’m a strong systematic thinker. It all helps me in interpreting and thinking about wide- and depth- context and concerns. I also think my strengths come at the cost of other things, at least in my particular case.
You’re not alone. Most developers do not have the depth or wide knowledge. And most [consequently] struggle to or are oblivious to many concerns and opportunities, and to intuitively or quickly understand and follow such information.
Which does not necessarily mean they’re not productive or useful.
Through the different replies, I reflected on what I know and what I do for work and I feel like my skillset is more akin to a generalist/integrator, which is needed. But I also feel like everyone in my domain does that. Which might or might not be true.
I guess knowing our strengths and weaknesses is also a skill in itself and a little bit of self doubt here and there can help us grow and direct our knowledge in a certain direction.
Thanks for the insight.
I should know more about what’s happening under the hood.
You’ve just identified the most important skill of any software developer, IMO.
The three most valuable topics I learned in college were OS design basics, assembly language, and algorithms. They’re universal, and once you have a grasp on those, a lot off programming language specifics become fairly transparent.
An area where those don’t help are paradigm specifics: there’s theory behind functional programming and OO programming which, if you don’t understand, won’t impeded you from writing in that language, but will almost certainly result in really bad code. And, depending on your focus, it can be necessary to have domain knowledge: financial, networking, graphics.
But for what you’re taking about, those three topics cover most of what you need to intuit how languages do what they do - and, especially C, because it’s only slightly higher level than assembly.
Assembly informs CPU architecture and operations. If you understand that, you mostly understand how CPUs work, as much as you need to to be a programmer.
OS design informs how various hardware components interact, again, enough to understand what higher level languages are doing.
Algorithms… well, you can derive algorithms from assembly, but a lot of smart people have already done a ton of work in the field, and it’s silly to try to redo that work. And, units you’re very special, you probably won’t do as good a job as they’ve done.
Once you have those, all languages are just syntactic sugar. Sure, the JVM has peculiarities in how its garbage collection works; you tend to learn that sort of stuff from experience. But a hash table is a hash table in any language, and they all have to deal with the same fundamental issues of hash tables: hashing, conflict resolution, and space allocation. There are no short cuts.
Thanks for the input, it will make me think about how to approach how to get the skills I need.
I’d say I am decent with FreeRTOS which is pretty much just a scheduler with a few bells and whistles.
I haven’t used assembly in a long while, so I know where to look to understand all the instructions, but I can’t tell right off the bat what a chunk of assembly code does.
Algorithms, I am terrible at these because I rarely use them. I haven’t worked in a big enough project where an algorithm is needed. I tend to work in finite state machine which is close to algorithms, but it’s not quite it. And a big part of my job is interfacing peripheral chips for other to use.
Thanks for the input
You’re welcome!
I haven’t used assembly in a long while, so I know where to look to understand all the instructions, but I can’t tell right off the bat what a chunk of assembly code does.
Oh, me neither. And that’s not what I think is necessary; what’s important is that you can generally imagine the sorts of operations which are going on under the hood for any given line of code. That there’s no magic “generate a hash for a string” CPU operation, and that, ultimately, something is going to be iterating over a series of memory locations and performing several math operations on each to produce a numeric output. I think this awareness is enormously valuable in developers, and helps them think about the code they’re writing in a certain way, and usually in a way that improves their code.
Algorithms, I am terrible at these because I rarely use them.
You use them all the time! Anything longer than a single operation is an algorithm.
Nobody is going to ask you to write a search function; however, being aware of Big-O notation, and being able to reason about time and space complexity, is important. On the backbend, it’s critical. It’s important if you’re a front end developer - I blame the whole NodeJS library fiasco on not enough awareness of dependency complexity by a majority of JS developers.
I tend to work in finite state machine which is close to algorithms, but it’s not quite it.
I’d absolutely call FSM work “algorithms”, and it sounds as if the projects you’re working on is where these fundamentals are most important. Interfaces between hardware components? It’s the most fraught topic in CIS! So. Many. Pitfalls. Shit, you probably have to worry about clock speeds and communication sheer; there’s absolutely a huge corpus of material about algorithms for handling stuff you’re working with, like vector clocks. That’s a fabulous, interesting field. It’s also super tedious, and requires huge attention to detail which I lack, so in a way I envy you, but an also glad I’m not you.
What helped me a lot with pushing deeper down into the language innards is to have people to explain things to.
Last week, for example, one of our students asked what closures are.
Explaining that was no problem, I was also able to differentiate them from function pointers, but then she asked what in Rust the traits/interfacesFn,FnMutandFnOncedid (which are implemented by different closures).And yep, she struck right into a blank spot of my knowledge with that.
I have enough of an idea of them to just fill in something and let the compiler tell me off when I did it wrong.
Even when designing an API, I’ve worked out that you should start with anFnOnceand only progress toFnMut, thenFnand then a function pointer, as the compiler shouts at you (basically they’re more specific and more restrictive for what the implementer of the closure is allowed to do).But yeah, these rules of thumb just don’t suffice for an actual explanation.
I couldn’t tell you why these different traits are necessary or what the precise differences are.
So, we’ve been learning about them together and I have a much better understanding now.Even in terms of closures in general (independent of the language), where I thought I had a pretty good idea, I had the epiphany that closures have two ways of providing parameters, one for the implementer (captured out of the context) and one for the caller (parameter list).
Obviously, I was aware of that on some level, as I had been using it plenty times, but I never had as clear of an idea of it before.I work in a small start-up where I am the only one doing what I do, so my epiphanies come from the struggles I have.
Other people I work with often have a blank look in their eyes when I try to explain some issues or what the code does because they don’t have the skillset to comprehend what I am doing. So this isn’t a path for me (yet, hopefully we can grow enough where we need more people in my field).
But I appreciate your experience. I will certainly think about a way to play in the innards of my language so that I can understand it better.
The more I learn about my language the less I think it matters. Maybe in embedded C you can’t just leave everything to the compiler though.
It’s a strong typed language with a minimal set of guard rails, so there is certainly some considerations to take into account, but the compiler are pretty good and give more leeway to the dev.
novice still learning everyday
I got pretty good with BASIC back in 1983.
Nice!
I’m still struggling to get good at BASIC, myself.
BASIC was my first language, and I still don’t feel like I’ve mastered it, so I still study it on some weekends.
I take so many modern tools for granted, now. It makes my learning progress in BASIC feel slow.
But I’m getting better at it.
I would give myself a solid 4.2/5 on python.
- I have in deepth knowledge of more than a few popular libraries including flask, django, marshmallow, typer, sqlalchemy, pandas, numpy, and many more.
- I have authored a few libraries.
- I have been keeping up with PEPs, and sometimes offered my feedback.
- I have knowledge of the internals of development tooling, including mypy, pylint, black, and a pycharm plugin I have created.
I wouldn’t give myself a 5/5 since I would consider that an attainable level of expertise, with maybe a few expections around the globe. IMO the fun part of being really good at something is that you understand there still is to learn ❤️
Good enough to make my own things or mod things.
But not good enough to get a job as a programmer.
But not good enough to get a job as a programmer.
This is as weird of a time for getting hired as a programmer as we have ever had. Hang in there. Once we let AI deployment pipelines start causing production outages and shareholder bankruptcies, we will start falling over ourselves to hire human programmers again.
I mean that it’s quite a leap going from making, like, a text-based adventure in C++ or BASIC and changing/adding lines of code to someone else’s thing making mods to doing actual, professional level programming of systems I have never even fucked with for fun. Like, I can’t make the screen display an image. I don’t know how to do any sort of networking, at least from a programming standpoint (hardware and shit, no problem; I was CISCO and A+ certified at one point).
I guess if all they need me to do is make what is essentially a database or calculator, I could do that. 🤷🏻♂️
That’s the beauty of programming (and lots of skills, really) - once we master the basics, all we tend to notice is what we haven’t learned yet.
It’s hard on our confidence, but there’s also a perverse beauty to it.
It is a big leap, but it’s the kind of leap that gets easy when doing the job with training for dozens of hours per week.
And it’s also a very small leap compared to the average computer user who doesn’t know why smoke shouldn’t come out of the computer case during normal operation.
One of the cool things that AI will do is once again lower the barrier of entry for full time programmers.
We’re on our way to finding out just how terrible AI is as a pilot, but it makes a damn fine co-pilot much of the time. And it’ll be key in welcoming in and enabling our next batch of brilliant full time programmers.
