These days 17 year olds can get away with "programming" by gluing things they don't understand, but I think they'll eventually hit a ceiling. So what you're doing is super valuable, not for yourself, but for everyone else who will learn from your materials.
Well done :)
EDIT: now go write an emulator if you haven't already, it's a ton of fun :)
I've been doing that for 26 years.
...but I think they'll eventually hit a ceiling.
I wonder if it'll happen soon.
I'm not picking on you. If there's one thing I'm terrified of, it's blind spots.
Is it important you can recite cache eviction algorithms from memory? No.
Is it important you know there are such things as caches and roughly how they work? Yes. Because then you can quickly look up the details when/if you need them.
And what is it important for? Why, for making sure that your software makes efficient use of system resources. This is essential if you're writing application software that's used by other people – but if you're writing server-side code, or some one-a-month business-logic data-processing scripts, or code that's only ever going to run on five specific machines, it's not that big of a deal. I haven't needed this skill yet.
Agreed. Some people would have to change employers in order to break through the ceiling, or to even see how they're limiting themselves. And for some of them: why would they?
Before I studied I thought of objects in terms of Object Orientation as a memory layout plus some functions to manipulate it. When I studied, I learned that Object Orientation is much less about the implementation, but more about the principles at hand (e.g. polymorphism).
I still love good implementations, but studying gave me a whole new perspective on certain topics.
17 to 21-ish is probably my least gluey era of programming. I wrote an MVC framework from scratch, built my own interpreter, my own compiler, accidentally tried to reinvent machine learning and NLP from scratch, all sorts of cool and wonderful things.
Then I discovered money and prior art. Wow you can build things so much faster if you let others tell you “here, just use this”! And frameworks!! Omg jquery makes life so much easier this is amazing.
Many years later now, the stuff that used to count as “just gluing things together” is now considered “super low level advanced stuff”. We’ve built new abstractions on top of those abstractions.
The stuff beginners “can get away with” now, that’s the next generation’s super low level here be dragons stuff. Programming is great that way.
Far more likely someone with an academic approach to programming would be completely overwhelmed when a task requires them to get a base understanding of a bunch of different technologies before moving on.
If you work at a huge company and have a bunch of project managers and designers narrowing specifications down so you can focus entirely on execution sure, but that is rarely the case for most people.
That was me 10 years ago as 30 year old dev just breaking in. Some things never change.