Some top geeks I know are fast at reading code + logs. Few rely on documentation. I’m OK not the fastest.
Some top geeks in “sister” teams of my team are experts with instrumentation tools and techniques. I guess other top geeks seldom need a lot of instrumentation. I feel they lack the experience but make up for it in other skills.
Some top geeks keep gaining depth if they focus on one complex system. I might have potential here. “Deep” is slightly different from “complex”. Deep means you need to slow down, /quiet down/, absorb, go through thick->thin cycles, get a laser focus, look again, and think deeper.
Perhaps related to my Depth capacity, I’m not that fast with timed online coding tests.
- — some well-defined, often named technical subjects with depth, often opaque to the uninitiated
- rvr, RVO
- RAII, swap
- [b] TMP including SFINAE, CRTP
- [b] java generics
- [b] JNI, python extension module — complexities lurking by the /dimly lit path/ due to low-level interfacing
- java/c# reflection techniques in practice
- ? python introspection
- [B] concurrency in general and java threading in particular
- [B] algorithms and data structures
- clever SQL single join to solve tricky problems.
- [B] query/sproc tuning — depth created by the large number of tables/indices and variations in queries
- ? serialization over network
- ? ADL techniques
- any math and statistics subject
- [b/B=books have been written on this topic]
