For my final blog post I would like to discuss what I have learned and plan to utilize in the future from this course.
So although I was not able to successfully improve my package to operate functionally like it did in its original state with my optimization I still feel like I have learned and managed to pull things from this course which I would not try otherwise.
Assembler
I never used assembler before this course so having the opportunity to actually work with it was really interesting, especially working directly with the registers and getting the machine to move memory around in such a high level atmosphere really helped me gauge the whole scope of programming in general and how we need to take into consideration memory and certain functions we are asking the computer to do. It was also interesting to review existing assembler code in current programs and see exactly how our source code translates into assembler which the compiler will later translate into machine language. With that being said I am pretty relieved that we have come so far as an industry as to be able to not rely on assembler anymore because it is very time consuming when you are trying to do a lot and although you are closer to memory and therefore have greater control of your program in assembler modern CPUs and compilers are optimized to take care of these issues for us so we can focus on lower level aspects of a program and leave assembler alone.
Compilers
Understanding that the compiler does a lot of optimization during the compilation process was very informative because not only does it help paint a better picture of what the compiler and CPU are doing when converting source to binary but it can also help save us time when we know what the compiler will do for us.
Profiling
Although I have done it in the past I don't make a habit out of it, and this course helped refresh my understanding of how beneficial profiling is in regards to seeing what your code is actually doing and how it may be improved upon.
Other Thoughts
This is one of the more technical courses offered and although I am somewhat fortunate that I spent 16 months at an internship working with linux and aix shells debugging and performing various other devops I found that many other students were deterred or dropped out of this course because of their lack of experience when it came to the linux operating system which I find somewhat discouraging because it is such a big part of the information technology umbrella I would have hoped that more students would take the time to try and learn it rather than be scared away.
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