Original Tweet - https://x.com/sarmag77/status/1952147743935521188
Something similar happened to me when I was working at a startup right out of college.
I was building a service on top of ZeroMQ using Python and was working along with a system programmer with 15 YoE who had used only C his whole life.
He hadn't worked on python ever or any other language except for C and a little bit of lua.
He saw a part of the code where I was using Python's dict and asked me if this was a hashmap. I said yes. Then he asked me the type of hashmap it was, mainly separate chaining or open addressing. No clue. Asked me how large was the hashmap's footprint? No clue. How did the hashmap grow when new keys are added? Is the memory freed when the hashmap keys are deleted? Are the hashmap allocations NUMA aware?
I had no answers to his questions and this was the first time I felt like I didn't know the actual internals of what I was working on.
He is one of the main reasons why I focus on internals instead of the high level stuff people keep spitting out.
I worked with him for the next 5 years and it was an amazing experience. I learnt to question everything till I understood it inside out.
Find the right mentors and it will change your life.
Archimedes' principe: Give me a large enough lever and I will move the world.
His principle: Give me vim and some coffee and I will rewrite the entire operating system.