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How proficient do you rate yourself in your most coded language? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/programming

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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

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Knowing the footguns in your language is always useful. The more you know, the less you’ll shoot your foot.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I think that one of my issue is that I'd like to be more knowledgeable to the smaller bits and bytes of C, but I don't have the time at work to go deeper and I don't have any free time because I have young kids.

[–] nebeker 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There’s a lot to talk about from this point alone, but I’ll be brief: having gone through university courses on processor design and cutting my teeth on fighting people for a single bit in memory, I’m probably a lot more comfortable with that minutia than most; having written my first few lines of C in 10 years to demo a basic memory safety bug just an hour ago, you’re way way ahead of me.

There are different ways to learn and gain experience and each path will train us in different skills. Then we build teams around that diversity.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Thanks for the insight. I guess one thing that causes my imposter syndrome is that I want to know how everything works in details.

I agree that for other people, what I know seems like magic to them. It's easy to look at what we don't know, but we don't take the time to appreciate how far we've come. We should do that more often.

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