It's been a long while since I did any coding in the Linux kernel. I was never a contributor to the kernel. I never pushed any patches. I did, however, enjoy the simple changes I made to the code that I ran on my sandbox server. This was way back around the 0.99 days. These journeys into the Linux kernel were brought on mostly for "academic exercise" while brute-forcing through my operating systems class in college many years ago. I was successful at building that kernel. It loaded with the simple boot loader that I wrote in assembly language and C. I put a notch on my keyboard and checked off two items on my nerdy bucket list. I never got more involved in kernel programming beyond these initial steps.
As you might know from previous posts, I am not a professional programmer any longer. That was many many years ago. When I switched from programming to systems administration I found that, over the years, my programming skills began to fade. At one point I was rather good at C and was growing more functionally competent with C++. Occasionally I would sit back and wish that I had stayed with programming.
When I started getting back into programming I found that, although going back to basics wasn't entirely necessary, I needed a refresher in how certain things worked. Pointers had become rusty and function references were now as foreign to me as the surface of Mars. I took to task going over each and every page of the C++ Reference which served as an excellent catch up tool.
I then jumped head first into the waters of game engine design. And drowned almost immediately.
I had forgotten Rule 1 of learning programming. Stay in the shallows until you learn to swim.
As much as I wanted to write my pet project game engine I realized that I absolutely had to start smaller. The years away from formal programming had taken their toll and I was no longer able to "think like a programmer".
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