I noticed that the higher up the technology stack I’m working, the less I’m excited about it. It might be because more and more is hidden from me and I feel powerless to understand it all. I also feel like the knowledge I gain from understanding some high level, specialized component is not that valuable. It won’t transfer well to other domains of computing, so I’m not that motivated to understand them either.

Every now and then I get the urge to expand my knowledge of lower level concepts. These explorations always lead back to concepts and technology developed decades ago and they bring with them a sense of nostalgia and mistery and excitement. The stories of the now old pioneers of the field. There is something very charming about old technical writings.

This time I started down the rabbithole with system calls. This article references pieces of kernel source code that were committed 12 years (!) ago. That is even before I started programming. I remembere how excited I used to feel about it when I started out (only in 2012) - it was all very misterious and magical and the famous programmers seemed like wizards wo spend their time in some other magical world.

As I’m reading these articles I feel like I’m getting tiny little doses of that excitement and wonder that I used to feel about computers.