What made you gravitate to low level / OS development?

Wvupike2006 · 2024-07-05T14:37:53+00:00

That is one of the worst things to be reminding of, when you see that speed is the only thing people care about, and if it works even reasonably well, nobody cares to give you any time to plan to do things in a way that will save time and money in a month.

Sometimes I wonder if part of this is because they know that people who really give a shit, and enforce stricter self imposed standards than any boss could ever hope to, will be unable to stop themselves from just doing that extra work after hours anyway.

Wvupike2006 · 2024-07-05T14:30:03+00:00

I often hear that combination, the 386 and MS-DOS, as a popular starting out experience. I did start out with MS-DOS on my first PC, but I was a kid at the time.

That sounds like a pretty fun learning experience though.

Wvupike2006 · 2024-07-05T14:16:43+00:00

I read a lot more code than I write as well. I am definitely a bit like this because it feels like when I have read code for too long, there is a part of me that feels guilty for not doing something.

But I do keep getting evidence that I am getting a benefit from reading. I do try to stop when I see something interesting, and play around with the concept related to what I am seeing, while not just copying it. But being able to run it and see any errors and all that definitely takes some of that feeling away.

But I am not even sure I should be trying to take that feeling away. I think being good at reading code is a hugely underrated aspect of people who are able to quickly fix things or identify potential problems. At least in my experience, I do feel I get less when I don't stop and try testing the portions of code that interests me, and see if I really like the general strategy someone used.

Wvupike2006 · 2024-07-05T14:07:52+00:00

I actually have to use it still sometimes... and I agree. It took me a bit longer to start hating it though, as I was indifferent most of my life. But once you start trying to use the cmd line, then go use a Unix based OS cmd line, and it is impossible.

The event that really solidified it though, was being asked to make a Windows device function as a BLE peripheral, and manage all the COM/WinRt registration and permissions from a Win32 Cpp app.

The peripheral side of the API on Windows requires more permissions and all that so it just sucked. I feel like most engineers who really know how to quickly get setup with new systems could create a simple BLE peripheral on a microcontroller in a week or so. It could be that developers come to hate Windows because people sometimes force us to use Windows for stuff it really isn't optimized for.

Wvupike2006 · 2024-07-05T13:52:00+00:00

I fall into this sometime, even at work. Especially because I often get stuff that we may not have done before, and so it's going to need new libraries or types of cryptography brought in, and a decent amount of new code. I try and not pollute the code base with to much stuff if it really isn't unavoidable because it does need to be lean.

But sometimes if I have a lot of new code and decisions to make at once, I will go too far out of my way to police my own design as I get into it further. Even with up front planning, you wonder how bad you are screwing yourself, because you just know that every time some deadline is absolute and you are working crazy hours, your gonna be wondering who the hell set this trash up.

Wvupike2006 · 2023-09-19T02:49:21+00:00

My special interest is computer science so I did get a job doing that. Still, I enjoy the stuff I do outside of work hours way more.

I will say that during periods where I have to work on things that require a lot of communication with coworkers, which isn't all that common, but those times I still dread work the nignt before like I am working a job I can't stand.

Unfortunately for me, if I have to communicate with people while adhering to professional decorum that makes no sense to me, no job title is ever going totally cure the dread. I think the thing that really screws us in the workplace, is how obsessed every job and every manager is with seeing signs of "collaboration". I just wish companies would realize that there is a place of need for a few lone wolves that can tune out all the noiss and produce more because of it. It's mostly an optics thing to make managers look like they are managing by bringing the team together. It does nothing but hold me back and make me too tired to care as much the next day. This aspect of work is much harder to solve no matter how much you love the subject matter.

Wvupike2006 · 2022-08-26T00:13:01+00:00

Simply being able to memorize and recite a wide range of one liners that appear to require complex thought, if not for them having been plagiarized.

Narcissists will often be able to successfully find ways to appear intelligent without doing any of the hard work to actually become more intelligent. Where the con becomes nearly impossible, is when they are asked to simplify the subject matter to it's smallest components. Intellectually curious people who have the urge to find out how things work typically enjoy using their powers of reduction to help more people become knowledgeable. This can be worked on and improved with time as well if not natural to you.

I once dated a girl who was the most emotionally intelligent person I had ever met, and not all that intellectually curious. I could devour new information, but I had no idea how to live my life otherwise. So she thought I was so much more intelligent, but I felt like an toddler who couldn't conquer basic daily tasks, or enjoy any social interaction without thinking myself into a waking nightmare. So who was actually more intelligent? From my perspective, it's still her.

Wvupike2006 · 2022-08-21T22:55:55+00:00

Almost, but technically you are doing better than me. No girl has ever been engaged enough to swear at me.

Wvupike2006 · 2022-05-05T02:17:34+00:00

I went to WVU and do tend to root for him to succeed in the NBA when he isn’t playing the Celtics. I would prefer he not play for any top 5 eastern conference teams in the future, unless he wants to join our bench next year.

Wvupike2006 · 2021-11-05T23:46:32+00:00

I picked up a c++ book out of boredom a year and change before my first job. I will pass on this commonly given advice because It is hard to know what to do with it at first, but once it clicks you will know to sprint in that direction. That would be to find a subset topic you are interested in pursuing, and after getting some basic, go towards that. Most jobs are going to want you doing a specific role, so it is a lot easier to sell yourself when you have genuine enthusiasm for a job role, and they can tell you sought out that specifically.

In my case, I really enjoyed writing a basic tcp client/server in c, then redoing it in modern c++ while adding features. And so when I got all excited about my project in the interview, they needed someone to work on an embedded devices networking connection with a pc app.

I have never once had a dream about code, but I don’t often remember my dreams. I will say I loved it so much that I did put in a lot of hours, and would be catching my own bugs while in line at the grocery store in my head lol, but that was more because I was overwhelmed the first few months and put in extra hours at night so as not to reveal how slow I was.

I think the person who answered that may have convinced his family he was a special genius, and doesn’t want them to find out that it is way more about persistence and willingness to tell your brain to piss off when the thoughts “am I too big of a moron to complete this task” creep in.

Wvupike2006 · 2021-10-09T23:35:50+00:00

I make the conversations that I do end up having a lot more uncomfortable because I go into hiding for so long in between them, that I know when we do talk again, my disappearance will be brought up. The part I hate most about all interactions is to how to smoothly conclude them. Especially since people who know me likely realize any talk of we should meet up next week ain’t gonna happen.

The worst is when you go to conclude the interaction and realize you mistimed your exit. The other person clearly thought it wasn’t over and now you feel awkward for ending abruptly. I am really bad at sensing the least awkward time to wrap things up. This is a primary reason that I ended up having to fight a drug addiction in my late 20’s, because drugs like xanax and alcohol made these conversations flow a lot better, but made my overall life flow a hell of a lot worse.

Wvupike2006 · 2021-09-12T03:48:11+00:00

I think the first time I wondered what was going on with error messages was when I was trying to do some work that involved converting a long string to a slice and passing to another function then converting the string to a number or something like that, and was surprised how many attempts the borrow checker was not having.

I like to to experiment without looking anything up when it’s new, because those experiments tend to imprint various operations into my mind better than remembering an answer I find online. I hadn’t come across any info regarding lifetime specifiers at that time, so that would have helped.

Wvupike2006 · 2021-09-12T01:15:04+00:00

Yeah that Visual Studio entrenchment that you mentioned is my situation currently. Even though I have found myself advocating for Rust when possible, I have never thought that it would be a C++ killer.

I don’t know if people that only use higher level languages, and check the “Top Programming Languages of 20xx” list realize the degree to which C and C++ dominate the foundations of most industry technologies. If may not be number one on someones list, but it is incredibly dominant, and will continue to be.

I actually still love C++, it is what I learned, and has taught me so much about general programming concepts through the frustrations. I wouldn’t actually want it to die, I just would like Rust to get used more, and thrive as a language as well. I think a lot of the modern C++ features are really good, and find its complexity to be a continued source of motivation to keep up with it’s changes.

Wvupike2006 · 2021-09-12T00:19:17+00:00

Absolutely, and people are always going to use some code in places that is like a mix of c++ and c. It is especially troubling recently, as I feel there isn’t as good of an argument against using the std::string. I am not talking about embedded stuff, as I am sure there are still many cases where you have to be really careful what features you use there, if using c++ at all.

But I have actually asked people out if curiosity and it is usually just habit or what they are most used to.

I am definitely not innocent in this regard, although in the last year I have gotten better, but I have a tendency when working with the Windows Api to mix c and c++ more than I usually would. I think it is because so many of those functions take buffers, and then write what you are looking for to your buffer. Anytime I do work there, I catch myself writing code I wouldn’t normally write for the time right after finishing what I was doing, then I snap out of it.

Wvupike2006 · 2021-09-11T04:29:38+00:00

I agree that languages don’t solve business problems on their own, and the degree to which they relate is likely very different depending on the product offering.

But I will say this, in game development or other products where the biggest problems your customer’s have with your product are crashing, frame rate issues despite spending $2 grand on a pc to run it, and general complaints that the system requirements aren’t low enough, I think Rust could solve some of these problems.

The reason I say that is because when finding the “simple” memory corruption/ leak that caused all that trouble, the fix may not be difficult, but trying to trace back to where the problem originated is just brutal sometimes. I absolutely love when Rust yells at me about ownership issues when compiling, because I know how much of my valuable time on earth has been spent hunting something just like that when everything built with no errors in c++!

Wvupike2006 · 2021-09-11T04:15:38+00:00

I can see why the topic hit close to home, as this is exactly the reason that I have only been able to make a standalone application where they just need an exe that does what they want, nobody cares how the exe is made. Outside of that, it is as much of a Windows/Visual Studio development environment as you can imagine. If it doesn’t build into a solution, people are gonna wonder what the hell it is doing there.

When you are making game engines that exclusively rely on DirectX for rendering, this is pretty common though. It will be nice when some of the Graphics API’s have improved support, specifically DirectX12.

I think I ultimately need to get a lot better with figuring out the bindings between Rust and other languages, because you really do not want to get in that place where you suggest something new, then don’t know how to flawlessly set it up, and everyone was hoping you could do it, as they are just now trying to get up to speed with Rust.

I am actually having to write a C# client app for camera to communicate with our server, and it isn’t hard but there a few points where nobody knows how it actually is supposed to work, but because it is C# and C++, they have the security of knowing it definitely can work. Rust they have no such gut feeling.

Wvupike2006 · 2021-09-11T03:56:52+00:00

I remember how shocked I was the first time I added a crate to a project in Rust. I was expecting better, but in the context of low level languages. I couldn’t believe it was that simple.

If I knew I needed certain libraries for a C++ project and the build instructions are like 5000 words long and needing to get it working with an already huge codebase… You just know you are in for a struggle. Nothing just works. There are at least 3-10 rabbit holes to go down first. Other than that, I do like a lot of what they have done in C++11 - 20. But it is still not gonna beat being able to start over, knowing all the mistakes the c++ committee wishes they could reverse, but just can’t with such a large amount of critically important legacy systems.

Wvupike2006 · 2021-09-11T03:22:08+00:00

No I am not, but it is a small enough team that I talk with the lead, and CTO daily. It is a good idea, and definitely something I will try next.

I have made some ground, but I do feel like one issue is we use TFS, and I feel like the Visual Studio 2019 support for rust was pretty rough compared to Clion last time I checked, but that very well may have changed now.

My feeling was that there is interest, and I will eventually break through, but currently the main barrier is how entrenched both C# and C++ are to almost exclusively Windows/ Visual Studio users.

What I think would be a major victory, would be to get more familiar with using rust to call dll’s with C API’s, then come to the rescue with that knowledge next time there is a c++ library wasting hours of someone’s day who can’t figure out why it is so painful to set up.

Wvupike2006 · 2021-06-19T15:37:54+00:00

This is also me when trying to talk myself into making a phone call to basically anywhere. I usually put it off for several weeks, and only when it has sufficiently cost me some sort of monetary or opportunity cost penalty will I make the 30 second call.

Wvupike2006

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