Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

How often does a front-end developer need to know about /proc/pid/mem?

I think it's important to keep things in perspective here - when I took my first programming job the first week was setup. On my team, our onboarding has you branch, review and merge on your first day. Those abstractions allow for people to focus on the areas they're working on, and iterate there. A game developer doesn't need to understand the complexities around js type conversions, any more than a js developer needs to understands rendering thread latency in a browser.

On every team I've ever worked on, that headspace from the team would have been much better served by understanding the product and project, IMO.



"How often does a front-end developer need to know about /proc/pid/mem?"

It's not about any particular detail, obviously.

He himself does not ever have had to previously see /proc/pid/mem before in his life in order to solve a problem involving it.

However many times a day he gets a question of any kind, that's how often.


Great question - is their app deployed to a container? In that case, they should know about it, because buried deep under layers of abstraction are cgroups. Answering questions like “why did Node try to use 32 cores” is much easier when you understand this.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: