front matter
I’ve experienced many distinct aspects of becoming proficient in software development as a self-taught programmer (other than reading books), ranging from trying to learn machine language by putting random numbers in memory and observing whether the results were anything other than a simple halt, to spending nights in smoke-filled offices, to sneaking off the university campus in the middle of the night after working clandestinely in the lab as a high schooler, to reading the contents of binary files and just hoping that getting exposed to some bytes would make me magically understand how the code works, to memorizing opcodes, and to trying every combination of the order of arguments to figure out the correct one in a function due to lack of documentation.
Back in 2013, my friend Aziz Kedi, who used to own a bookstore in Istanbul, asked me to write a book about software development based on my experiences. That was the first time I considered writing a book about my profession. I had to shelve the idea soon thereafter because Aziz closed his bookstore and moved to London.