2020-05-26

Today I walked through an many years (decade+?) frontend (desktop) developer through bitwise math. It went well enough, it was just a good reminder of how it is possible to have such difference in experience (as in the types of programming exposed). We had a bit-packed byte that we needed to extract some values out of (so like bitwise AND with a bitmask and shift) - this was something that I remember learning in school. It was really interesting how difficult it was for us to communicate between stuff like... why would we bitshift? Like I was asked why we were bitshifting to extract a value from the middle of the byte after we bitmasked. I had a disturbingly hard time formulating an answer to that. In the end, I fell back to showing by example, by showing how after shifting, we got nice simple integer values that mapped to our spec nicely. But I'm still disturbed by the time it took me to figure that out.

I also today got to pair with a junior who was working on detox on react native (on Android) and trying to get snapshot (with screenshot) testing going.