he points out that MIT degrees are for the people who make the chips.
You never know when background knowledge and first principles might come in handy. One of my favorite YouTuber practical engineers has this story about going on a boat trip. The new coffee maker on board was freaked out by the noise from the inverter and kept shutting itself off. A total disaster! There would be no coffee the whole trip. So he turned on the blender while making the coffee, and the coffee maker started working. How did he know? He knew what kind of motor was in the blender, and knew its windings would increase the inductance of the circuit the kitchen appliances, filtering out the higher frequencies put out by the cheap inverter.
This guy isn't an electrician. ("Elekchicken") His day job is just to put pieces of "industrial lego" together -- just like how so many programmer jobs now are mainly about gluing libraries together. But he never shies away from knowledge of first principles, and he demonstrates all the time why such knowledge is valuable.
As discussed in the original PR https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/4400 the original checksum used a naive adler-32 algorithm, but with some basic math you can find a much more efficient implementation that eliminates most of the mod operations without risking a hidden deoptimizing overflow.
It's not everyday that you get to use your background knowledge, but when you do it feels great!
You never know when background knowledge and first principles might come in handy. One of my favorite YouTuber practical engineers has this story about going on a boat trip. The new coffee maker on board was freaked out by the noise from the inverter and kept shutting itself off. A total disaster! There would be no coffee the whole trip. So he turned on the blender while making the coffee, and the coffee maker started working. How did he know? He knew what kind of motor was in the blender, and knew its windings would increase the inductance of the circuit the kitchen appliances, filtering out the higher frequencies put out by the cheap inverter.
This guy isn't an electrician. ("Elekchicken") His day job is just to put pieces of "industrial lego" together -- just like how so many programmer jobs now are mainly about gluing libraries together. But he never shies away from knowledge of first principles, and he demonstrates all the time why such knowledge is valuable.