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Discussion on: On Walking before Running

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_bigblind profile image
Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers

I'm a newbie in the field, and I've never been taught about what I usually think of as "low level stuff", during formal education. I've watched several video and read blog posts on things like virtual memory, interrupts, how I/O is handled, etc.but because I've never had to actually apply this stuff, the details never really stick. If you have experience with online tutorials that teach the fundamentals, which includes practical exercises, I might give that a try.

Also, I enjoyed the airplane crash stories (weird to say that about a crash, I know), but I think it'd be good to include an actual dev story where knowing the fundamentals came in handy. This way, the need to know the fundamentals becomes more clear

Lastly, I think you have a typo at "Not only was nobody was injured ..."

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dwd profile image
Dave Cridland

Air crashes are more interesting than computer crashes. Most serious computer system failures are similar in nature - not one single fault, but a set of cascading faults which might well start with a minor issue but result in a disaster. (An example would be a broken RAM module in an Amazon datacentre which resulted in a hefty chunk of AWS dropping a few years ago).

As far as trying to learn these things - write a webserver. I used to write webservers in all sorts of languages, to learn things. I wrote one in TCL (not recommended), I wrote one in C using threading, then another when I realised I'd got threading all wrong. They're simple enough things to write at a basic level - you might want to restrict yourself to HTTP/0.9 - but just complicated enough to experiment with all sorts of architectures.

And well done for spotting my deliberate typo.