> thinking the design decisions made by the "expert" were ridiculous, and talking with the expert, and finding out I didn't know everything and I was wrong
I'm laughing pretty hard at this. The codebase in this current project is definitely a bit... quirkly. It's semi-embedded (Linux on an 8-core ARM unit) and doing high-performance image processing (C++ on Linux). The new guy last month has a fair bit more programming experience than "fresh grad" would lead one to expect, and the first week he had a lot of questions like that.
Him: "Why is it like this? Couldn't we just..."
Me: "Would that keep all 8 cores busy processing things as fast as possible?"
Him: "Oh. Yeah. I guess not!"
Him: "Wait... couldn't we just...hmmm...no... that would serialize everything..."
I suppose one other angle to it is that I don't have a lot of ego in it; if someone figures out a way to squeeze more juice out of the system we've got, they're going to get high-fives.
I'm laughing pretty hard at this. The codebase in this current project is definitely a bit... quirkly. It's semi-embedded (Linux on an 8-core ARM unit) and doing high-performance image processing (C++ on Linux). The new guy last month has a fair bit more programming experience than "fresh grad" would lead one to expect, and the first week he had a lot of questions like that.
Him: "Why is it like this? Couldn't we just..."
Me: "Would that keep all 8 cores busy processing things as fast as possible?"
Him: "Oh. Yeah. I guess not!"
Him: "Wait... couldn't we just...hmmm...no... that would serialize everything..."
I suppose one other angle to it is that I don't have a lot of ego in it; if someone figures out a way to squeeze more juice out of the system we've got, they're going to get high-fives.