Want to be a software engineer? The difficulty of top down learning.

Ever since I was young I have always been an extremely curious person who enjoyed understanding and solving problems. I was first introduced to programming in high school and I quickly became obsessed with it for obvious reasons.

In high school the first languages and tools I remember using were things like Turing, Processing, GreenFoot and BlueJ. All of which were learning tools, and with the exception of Turing, were Java abstractions with the main focus on graphical programming. These tools allowed me to do some pretty cool things, very quickly. These early experience are really what inspired my interest.

From there I want to my local College to study Web Development. Here I started learning things like HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Later moving onto things like PHP, Ruby, ASP.NET, Angular and many other related skills outside of pure development. It was a wonderful course and gave me all the skills I needed to be a highly effective web developer.

By the end of my college career I had a pretty good understanding of Web Development as a whole. I certainly didn't know everything but I was at the point where nothing was a mystery to me. From here my natural curiosity made me want to dive deeper. The lead me down the rabbit hole of operating systems, systems level development and embedded systems. As you can imagine, the first step was leaning C.

Learning C was far more difficult that I had expected. The concept of the stack and heap memory as well as pointers was extremely confusing. Especially coming from higher level languages with garbage collectors. It quickly came apparent to me not that C was simply more difficult, in reality the language was actually quite simple, but that I had to constantly unlearn all of the bad habits and incorrect assumptions I made over the past few years learning higher level languages!

This is what I now call the curse of top down learning!

I became extremely frustrated that I had made all of these false assumptions when learning non systems level languages. It also made the process of learning C take three times as long as it probably should have.

I had a lack of appreciation for the abstractions I was using!

Don't get me wrong, there are many people that can go an entire career with only focusing on application level development, or doing basic python scripting. However if you want to truly be a software engineer and understand the field as a whole from embedded systems to operating systems and the applications developed for those operating systems, it is highly advantageous to lean from the bottom up.

My suggestion for anyone who truly wants to be a software engineer is to start with C. Understand the difference between the stack and the heap as well as pointers. Dabble with some assembly, even if that is just analyzing the assembly that your smaller C applications produce. If you understand these things fundamentally, everything else will come much easier!

I wish that is how I started. lean from my mistakes!

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