I see ASTs books, in particular the hands-on Minix ones, as sitting on the same “plane” as the philosophy espoused in The Night Watch paper. Ultimately the paper is about a level of comfort with reality that is at it’s core rooted in familiarity with rather than ignorance due to abstractions, and having learned fearlessness rather than helplessness. While it is highly unlikely you will be having a debugging session that has you executing kernel-level code alongside having an oscilloscope/logic probe hooked up to the pins of a processor chip to monitor data lines (though we all know someone who does this without a second thought), having this level of knowledge and comfort with being ever so slightly closer to the silicone, the data sheet of the processor somewhere near by, the memory segmentation modes not too alien of a concept, is a great boon to a software developer. It is a leap that I think everyone should try just once, and with it, abolish any notion of mental barriers that prevent one from understanding how things really work.
Left field comment but I’d love to be thrown into an MBA-like simulator (HBS?) and have to figure out the industry and the company and stabilize it/make it grow and whatnot within some time window.
Great read, thank you to the author who took the time to write up all that, it was very insightful and must have been fucking difficult in many ways.
