• A college student looking to become a professional programmer, wondering what school's not teaching them;

• A recent grad who's working but has noticed that there's a lot more to professional work than what you learned in school;

• Someone coming to programming from a completely different field, who got their feet wet and now wants to make programming a career.

Is this you? Yes? Let's talk. I'm putting together an advisory panel of "target audience" readers, whose goal is to make sure I'm answering your questions. The scope of this topic is nearly infinite; the number of pages I've got to make a high-impact book is not. I need to keep it tight and focused on the topics that are most useful to you.

In return for your help, you'll get early access to chapters as I write them. I'll try to swing a copy of the paper book for you, too, when it's printed.

Interested? Send me an email.

As a hiring manager, my job is to make sure you can do the job you're applying for. For programming that means you need to be able to program. So when I whip out a laptop in our round-one interview and ask you to write some code, try to hide your terrified expression.

The Case For

Back in the 1990's I had my moment of revelation: a pal of mine, a far more experienced programmer than me, showed me how C code compiled into assembly. This was on the Motorola 68K instruction set. I learned to walk through how the stack works, how pointers work, how loops work... it all finally made sense. From that time forward, I've had no fear of C or C++ because I know how the language morphs the code I write into the code the computer sees.

My daughter Genevieve performing in her first ballet recital. Photo toned to black-and-white using Alien Skin Exposure.

There are two approaches to building a quality product: build it in from the beginning, or beat it in afterward. The former approach requires a lot of discipline and effort from the engineering team. The latter requires a lot of testing and, again, effort from the engineering team.

I take it as a given that any product should be a high-quality product. Why bother making it otherwise? This seems like a straightforward goal, but the technology industry has had a hell of a time figuring out how to build quality software. There’s a joke that’s been around for at least a decade:

There’s word in business circles that the computer industry likes to measure itself against the Big Three auto-makers. The comparison goes this way: If automotive technology had kept pace with Silicon Valley, motorists could buy a V-32 engine that goes 10,000 m.p.h. or a 30-pound car that gets 1,000 miles to the gallon—either one at a sticker price of less than $50. Detroit’s response: “OK. But who would want a car that crashes twice a day?”

Any good joke has an element of truth to it—this one especially so. Auto makers can build cars that’ll drive hundreds of thousands of miles, but Windows 95 would crash after 49.7 days of continuous operation—a bug that took four years to discover 1 because other bugs would crash Windows 95 long before 49.7 days could pass.

Portrait of my grandmother. I don't consider myself a portrait artist but I do get lucky once in a while. On-site lighting was two flashes bounced off the ceiling. Photo toned to black-and-white using Exposure 2 and vignetted with Bokeh.

These days, there’s a lot more layers involved. Taking the “simple” example of C++, the layers could look like this:

In this example, the physical machine is a x86, 64 bit. The machine’s architecture has various ramifications, for example a 64 bit machine can allow a single process to address much more memory than a 32 bit machine. The operating system has numerous implications; any “system call” like accessing a file goes through the operating system. Then there’s the libraries, for example the C standard library which provides functions like printf() for formatted output. Then there’s the programming language itself.

In college you likely focused on one “do it all” language like Java. There’s nothing wrong with Java, in fact it’s a great language. The problem is the “do it all” part—no language does it all, at least not well. You simply cannot be productive and versatile without knowing a couple programming languages.

Programmers are pessimistic and sarcastic lot. The vast majority will tell you about a hundred things that suck for every one thing that doesn’t. The highest praise a programmer will give a product is, “it doesn’t suck.”

Pessimist programmers are in good company. I’ve read various reports saying the vast majority of projects fail. 80 or 90 percent. Adding insult to injury, it’s not the good 10 or 20 percent that succeed, it’s some hodgepodge of good and bad. It almost seems that bland to downright crappy products are more successful, on average, than really good ones. When a programmer says such-and-such sucks, chances are he’s right.

Executives and managers like to think they’ve got it all together. Walk with some swagger, put on the game face, don’t show weakness. Just as you learned about your parents, your management doesn’t always know as much as they say they do. I’m a manager, I’d know.

So let’s take a tour of myths you’ll probably hear in the corporate world. When you hear these, make a mental note: this guy is a bozo.

Now that we’ve got the foundation of stack frames and the debugger for exploring them, we can use the stack for more than just local variables. The stack is also used for passing and receiving parameters to functions.

Let’s say I’ve got this very-nearly-useless function:

int sum3(int a, int b, int c)
{
    return a + b + c;
}

int main()
{
    sum3(1, 2, 3);
    return 0;
}

Once you have some concept of registers and the stack, it’s time to play. Take our original example and save this as stack.c:

int main()
{
    int i = 0x11223344;
    char s[4];
    s[0] = 'f';
    s[1] = 'o';
    s[2] = 'o';
    s[3] = '\0';
    return 0;
}

• All variables declared on the stack.

• Parameters to function calls.

• The pointer to the calling function’s stack base.

Let’s look at an example. Say my C code defined some variables on the stack like so:

int i = 0x11223344;
char s[4];
s[0] = 'f';
s[1] = 'o';
s[2] = 'o';
s[3] = '\0';