Cross-post from lottia notes.

Cross-post from lottia notes.

There’s a weird tension in programming — on the one hand, as you learn the ropes, you (hopefully) learn very quickly that the problem is almost always in your code, and not, say, the compiler, stdlib, kernel, etc. This is usually very correct; the people who’ve worked on those things have many times the experience you did when you decided that there must be a bug in printf or something.

You’ll later realise you tried to print something through a pointer to a stack-allocated variable that’s long since gone. These accusations tend to wane as you gain familiarity with your subject matter, and wax as you step out into lands populated with ever more footguns, exposing more of the architecture than you ever suspected was there. (See also: the emails from me to the libev mailing list in 2011.)

At some point, though, your journies will take you to places where things aren’t so clear cut, and you’ll start to gain a sixth sense; a kind of visceral experience that things are not as they have been promised to be.

A few weeks ago, that sixth sense whispered in my ear: “what if, instead of your cruddy bootloader written in a pre-1.0 systems language for a platform you don’t fully understand, it’s the 20 year-old project with 80,000 commits that’s wrong?” And it was right.