Joel Spolsky is doing an IAmA on reddit

Post by haberman » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 6:16 AM UTC

uxp wrote: post #44

haberman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See if you can find some bottleneck in one of your Python/Ruby/Perl apps that's chewing a lot of CPU time. See if you can devise a definition for a relatively simple function that if it was REALLY FAST would make this hot spot a lot more efficient. Then implement that function in C and expose it to the high level language. It might not be a good idea to actually use your fast C function in production (if you're new a…

> See if you can find some bottleneck in one of your Python/Ruby/Perl apps that's chewing a lot of CPU time. I found that hard to do as a starting developer who didn't know what was actually a bottleneck in my code, but I did have a particular library/gem that I wrote myself that did a few things I constantly needed (think of authentication in a web app, it's almost always included). So I rewrite it in C. It didn't r…

Post by EdiX » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 9:26 AM UTC

leon_ wrote: post #6

euroclydon wrote: post #3

I really want to learn C, like he says. I get plenty done without knowing it, and I have few doubts I can continue to find decent work without knowing it, but I haven't been able to gain any traction when I try to learn it. I've got the books sitting front of me, and I've written some trivial visualizations of sorting algorithms using terminal output, but damn if I can find a way to use C as a web developer. If there…

> but damn if I can find a way to use C as a web developer Write a web app in C? ;) But yeah, in most cases C won't improve your productivity as a web developer. But it will certainly make you understand the computer better. So maybe start a recreational project in C? A command line utility, a demon, a music streaming server - something not really web-dev related.