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
With about 12 years in my primary language I’d say my expertise is expressed in knowing exactly what to Google…
This is probably the true highest level of expertise you’ll get out of most professional coders.
It takes a real monk level of confinement to understanding the language to break out of being proficient in looking shit up and start being proficient in being the person that writes the shit people are looking up.
I’ve been using c# since .net 2 which came out around the turn of the century (lol)
I’d happily call myself an expert. I can do anything I need to and easily dive into the standard library source code or even IL when needed.
But even then there are topics I could easily learn more on particularly the very performance focused struct features and intrinsics.
I’ve found LLMs to be super useful when you have a very specific question about a feature. I use bing ai at work so it sources all its answers and you can dive into the articles for more detail.
Programming is a never ending learning journey and you just have to keep going. When you get something you don’t fully understand to a deep dive there are always resources for everything.
Even the creators of languages don’t know their own languages 100%. I wouldn’t even call them the limit. So, I’m good enough in my main language that a lot of code doesn’t surprise me. And I try very hard to write code that others can understand as well when in a team.