today I'm thinking about why it's useful for someone who mostly works in higher-level languages (python, JS, scala, etc) to understand how computers represent things in bytes.
some ideas I have so far:
- reading the output of strace
- doing back-of-the-envelope storage calculations
- choosing the right size for a DB primary key (to prevent overflow)
- knowing the limits of JS numbers
- optimizing algorithms (like knowing that multiplying by 2^n is fast)
- debugging encoding issues
what else?
I'm also curious about whether there's ever a reason to understand how two's complement works (I'm sure it's cool but I've never needed to learn it so far, only that signed and unsigned integers are different)
