Hi,

My question certainly stems from the imposter syndrome that I am living right now for no good reason, but when looking to resolve some issues for embedded C problems, I come across a lot of post from people that have a deep understanding of the language and how a mcu works at machine code level.

When I read these posts, I do understand what the author is saying, but it really makes me feel like I should know more about what’s happening under the hood.

So my question is this : how do you rate yourself in your most used language? Do you understand the subtilities and the nuance of your language?

I know this doesn’t necessarily makes me a bad firmware dev, but damn does it makes me feel like it when I read these posts.

I get that this is a subjective question without any good responses, but I’d be interested in hearing about different experiences in the hope of reducing my imposter syndrome.

Thanks

  • @[email protected]English
    5•7 hours ago

    I have advice that you didn’t ask for at all!

    SQL’s declarative ordering annoys me too. In most languages you order things based on when you want them to happen, SQL doesn’t work like that- you need to order query dyntax based on where that bit goes according to the rules of SQL. It’s meant to aid readability, some people like it a lot,but for me it’s just a bunch of extra rules to remember.

    Anyway, for nested expressions, I think CTEs make stuff a lot easier, and SQL query optimisers mean you probably shouldn’t have to worry about performance.

    I.e. instead of:

    SELECT
  one.col_a,
  two.col_b
FROM one
LEFT JOIN
    (SELECT * FROM somewhere WHERE something) as two
    ON one.x = two.x

    you can do this:

    WITH two as (
     SELECT * FROM somewhere
     WHERE something
)

SELECT
  one.col_a,
  two.col_b
FROM one
LEFT JOIN two
ON one.x = two.x

    Especially when things are a little gnarly with lots of nested CTEs, this style makes stuff a tonne easier to reason with.

    • @lohky
      2•5 hours ago

      I’m 100% going to try this, but I have a feeling that it isn’t going to work in my application. Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses some pared-down old version of Transact-SQL and about half of the functions you’d expect to work just flat out don’t.

      The joys of using a Salesforce product.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•5 hours ago

        Oh boy, have fun! CTEs have pretty wide support, so you might be in luck (well at least in that respect, in all other cases you’re still using saleforce amd my commiserations are with you)

        • @lohky
          4•4 hours ago

          Salesforce just gives me the other kind of CTE.