I guess in the earlier part of my career - enthusiasm stemming from a passion for programming that started when I was aged 7. As I've moved forward, the experience mounted up on my CV and that more than compensated for the lack of formal qualifications
Back when I started programming, the 'high level' languages on the machines I had access to were really quite limited and slow. If you wanted to tap in to the real power and capabilities of the machines, you had to start learning about how the machine actually worked at quite a technical level - directly modifying memory, calling ROM routines, etc. At that time, there were plenty of books and magazines to teach this kind of stuff - even kids books.
I've written code in Z80 assembly language which looks like this (I couldn't say exactly what this is doing, I just randomly grabbed it from Google as an example):
It's very different to working in a high level language. I think the skills that could be carried through to higher level languages are: a good understanding of binary and all the tricks that can be achieved with it, and also a knowledge of lots of optimisation techniques to speed things up or save memory. Admittedly a lot of this isn't really needed these days as the performance of machines has way outstripped our ability to take full advantage of them, but back then all this knowledge could be absolutely crucial to getting something running well (I believe the Z80 processor had a clock speed of around 4mhz 😃)
Developer advocate, full-stack engineer, startup co-founder & CTO, bringing 15 years of experience in Silicon Valley, including at Google and Yahoo!. Public speaker.
Location
🌐
Education
UC Santa Cruz Extension
Work
Developer Advocate at Weaviate, the open-source semantic search engine
I also started with assembly. But along with CPU performance and RAM size increasing by orders of magnitude, so has software bloat. Back in those days, we had operating systems that fit on a 1.44Mb floppy disk. Now they take 1.44Gigabytes. I'm not sure functionality has increased 1000 times, and performance certainly has not.
I don't have any degrees - tech related or otherwise. I've been a professional developer for 26 years, and it has never been a barrier
What do you think is your key to employability? Any advice? Human relations or otherwise?
I guess in the earlier part of my career - enthusiasm stemming from a passion for programming that started when I was aged 7. As I've moved forward, the experience mounted up on my CV and that more than compensated for the lack of formal qualifications
I heard that many older ones played / toyed with lower level programming. How much does it help with higher programming languages?
Back when I started programming, the 'high level' languages on the machines I had access to were really quite limited and slow. If you wanted to tap in to the real power and capabilities of the machines, you had to start learning about how the machine actually worked at quite a technical level - directly modifying memory, calling ROM routines, etc. At that time, there were plenty of books and magazines to teach this kind of stuff - even kids books.
I've written code in Z80 assembly language which looks like this (I couldn't say exactly what this is doing, I just randomly grabbed it from Google as an example):
It's very different to working in a high level language. I think the skills that could be carried through to higher level languages are: a good understanding of binary and all the tricks that can be achieved with it, and also a knowledge of lots of optimisation techniques to speed things up or save memory. Admittedly a lot of this isn't really needed these days as the performance of machines has way outstripped our ability to take full advantage of them, but back then all this knowledge could be absolutely crucial to getting something running well (I believe the Z80 processor had a clock speed of around 4mhz 😃)
I also started with assembly. But along with CPU performance and RAM size increasing by orders of magnitude, so has software bloat. Back in those days, we had operating systems that fit on a 1.44Mb floppy disk. Now they take 1.44Gigabytes. I'm not sure functionality has increased 1000 times, and performance certainly has not.
100% agree