Comment by ryukoposting
1 year ago
One of the most important steps of my career was being forced to write code for an 8051 microcontroller. Then writing firmware for an ARM microcontroller to make it pretend it was that same 8051 microcontroller.
I was made to witness the horrors of archaic computer architecture in such depth that I could reproduce them on totally unrelated hardware.
I tell students today that the best way to learn is by studying the mistakes others have already made. Dismissing the solutions they found isn’t being independent or smart; it’s arrogance that sets you up to repeat the same failures.
Sounds like you had a good mentor. Buy them lunch one day.
I had a similar experience. Our professor in high school would have us program a z80 system entirely by hand: flow chart, assembly code, computing jump offsets by hand, writing the hex code by hand (looking up op-codes from the z80 data sheet) and the loading the opcodes one byte at the time on a hex keypads.
It took three hours and your of us to code an integer division start to finish (we were like 17 though).
The amount of understanding it gave has been unrivalled so far.