DEV Community

Discussion on: Why Every Software Engineer Should Learn Computer Architecture.

Collapse
 
jaiko86 profile image
jaiko86

I'm sure developers would benefit a lot from a lot of things. As a frontend engineer at a big cloud networking company, I think a lot of people will benefit from knowing about encryption, cryptography, networking, frontend engineering, and UI/UX concepts.

So this is to say that computer architecture is not really for everyone. I won't benefit at all from knowing this information. There are far more pressing things I have to learn in this field than computer architecture.

For instance:

  • How do I improve accessibility of the website for people with disabilities?
  • How do I load faster? What sort of chunking strategy should I use?
  • Should I start to transition to Web Components?
  • How do I better optimize for search engines?
  • WebGL, web workers, etc.
  • At least have a working knowledge of all the major frameworks: React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, etc.
  • Learn webpack and other bundlers in depth
  • Get caught up in the latest JavaScript standards and syntax
  • Better use of CSS to improve site performance.

You see, NONE of these will even come close to anything related to the systems. For frontend developers, everything happens through the browser, so inconsistencies across browsers, etc. are the thing to worry about. Not computer architecture.