by Serguey Shinder
He joined about eighteen months ago, and for the first few weeks I quietly worried about him. He could produce working code faster than anyone I had worked with at that stage of a career, and when I asked him why a particular piece of it was written the way it was, he sometimes could not say. That combination sets off every alarm I have. I had a whole speech ready about foundations.
I did not give it, mostly out of cowardice, and I am glad, because I would have been describing my own path and calling it the path.
What I eventually understood is that he had not skipped the foundations. He was building them in a different order. I had learned bottom up, because in my first years there was no other option. You read the manual, you understood the primitive, you assembled the primitives, and understanding arrived before the working thing did, by necessity, because nothing worked until you understood it.
He was learning top down. He got something working first, then broke it, then went one layer down to find out why, then broke that. By the time I had the conversation I had been dreading, he knew more about the runtime's memory behaviour than I did, and he had learned it because a thing he built had fallen over and he had been genuinely curious about the reason. Not because a chapter came next.
The gaps were real. They were just in different places than mine, and mine were invisible to me because I had had thirty years to build habits around them. He asked questions I could not answer. I knew things he had no reason to have encountered yet. Neither list was the shorter one.
What I let go of, slowly, was the idea that the order I learned in was structural rather than circumstantial. I learned bottom up because that was the only door open in 1998. It gave me things I value and would not trade. It also gave me a deep, unexamined belief that anyone arriving through a different door must be missing something essential, and I have watched people I respect turn that belief into advice, and the advice does not travel well.
The part I now think is actually permanent is smaller than any curriculum. It is what someone does when the thing in front of them stops working and nobody knows why. He does the same thing I do. He goes down a layer, and then another, and he stays curious for longer than is comfortable.
Everything else, the order, the tools, the first language, the shape of the first year, turns out to be an accident of when you happened to arrive.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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