Descartes and C Programming

"Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the sense or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once." - René Descartes

I have always been moved by the nature of thought that produced the ideas of Descartes and the Cartesian coordinate. Also, I am writing C codes for the last thirteen years. I would say that I find it to be the closest of the idea of the Cartesian coordinate.

I have not yet went through one standards of the C language fully. I have found C to be intuitive and I thought know how things can be achieved with it. I have been proven wrong earlier as well. Very recently, I wrote a code similar to this and it crashed with newer GCC.

It turns out, that if I perform pointer arithmetic, I tell the compiler that it is a valid pointer and it is guaranteed to be not equal to NULL and such checks can be optimised out (or "in")!

I tried with GCC-8.3.0 and 9.3.0 with "-O3" option and the latter crashes because the while always evaluates to true.

Please refrain from suggesting "better" ways to do something. This post is contains a snippet and not the whole code and the post is about standard behaviour and not how to write better C code ;)

Just like life, it is wise to be not too trusting with C.

Something About Professional Growth

I have done job search very recently and a few years back to extend the career horizons. This post is not to provide tips, but to share one realisation that I have gone through during the process.

What happened a lot of times with me is that, it seemed to me that I would be a perfect fit for a role. My interview would go well and I would be certain that the people at the other end of discussion loved me. But, then I would get a regret mail. Whereas, I would get green signal response for roles which would not match my exact past experience. I used to be flabbergasted.

But not anymore. What I realised is that when a potential employer look at your past experience, they are trying to assess you based your past achievements and determine how you take challenging situations. Most of the time they are not looking for exact matches. Of course, for very specific roles, this is not true. But, this holds good for most of the situations.

What they want most of the time is that you have a room to grow. If you are an exact fit, you would become bored quite soon, well unless you have home loans.

I believe this is a good thing. Variety and diversity always help. Maintaining diversity in anything is helpful when things start going south, and you would not realise about problematic nature of mono-culture when things are good. I personally believe even a very technical role needs certain room to grow.

Something to think about when you do not hear positively from a potential employer for a role that exactly matches your past experiences.