Harping back to my prior post about learning to program, when I spoke at my old Uni, I spoke to a lovely trio of ladies, whom wanted to be programmer/computer folks... And one thing struck me, was how narrow their knowledge was.
When they asked me how I got into programming and I explained that when I learned to program in the 1990's there was no github, indeed there was no internet, you could not just go and download a program or join an open source project. If you wanted tool, and had no BBS dial up to find someone with something like it, you wrote your own.
I wrote code to record kills in games on the Atari ST, I wrote text editors for the ST and DOS (EGA graphics FTW), I write 2D painting programs for DOS.... I distinctly remember my college tutor seeing my using DOS interrupt 11 to control the mouse and his saying "you're the first person I've seen work that out"... I didn't work it out by trial and error though, I worked it out by reading, about the DOS platform, about BIOS, about my machine.
Today folks seem to know more about the bits they're interested in, than the whole machine, because they're not driven out of the comfort zone to explore and push the boundaries. If today you're only interested in writing a neural network, you don't have to get your hands dirty with nodes or sigmoids or anything really, you can just get google to do the thinking for you, indeed they can even provide the solution.
So, I say folks, if you are of a technical bent, whenever you do a task, even if you use a pre-formed library, take time to explore what it does for you, look at your machine could it do things better.
A notable interview technique I've seen in action (and indeed practiced) is to give someone a multiple looping piece of code and ask them to edit it... It works single threaded, but could be multiples of times faster, I want to know if they think about threads and lambdas, and then I also want to know whether they think about the machine itself... Do they think about the number of cores, to optimise the number of threads being sprung up? Do they think about cache hits and cash orientation of data (row verses column order)?....
And I want to know if tech folks read this, and they don't know about cache hits, or finding the number of physical processors, that they take heed and go look at and think about how to accomplish those points!
To that end I have a set of sites for such folks to subscribe to, along with my pages here of course...
And then look for conferences in the language you want to study... Lets say C++....
CPPCon and their YouTube Channel
C++ Now (formerly BoostCon)
Many folks pay to attend virtual ticket tours of game conventions, why not also take the time to follow the computer languages?...
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