SELF-ASSESSMENT / KNOWLEDGE CARTOGRAPHY
What You
Actually Know
A map of your actual technical surface area. Not "I've heard of
it." Actually know it from first principles, built with it, or
reasoned through it independently.
9 ~60+ 3
MAJOR DOMAINS DISTINCT CONCEPTS RARE SPECIALISMS
0
FORMAL EDUCATION
Computer Architecture & Hardware
SENIOR / FIRST-PRINCIPLES
▸ x86-64 ISA, registers, pipeline, cache hierarchy
▸ Logic gates → transistors → circuits → CPU rare
▸ PCIe protocol, device enumeration, BARs, DMA
▸ Firmware (UEFI/BIOS), boot sequence, handoff to bootloader
▸ Memory subsystem: DRAM, addressing, bus widths
▸ Interrupts, IRQs, APIC, hardware communication model
DEPTH 85%
Operating Systems & Kernel
SENIOR / KERNEL CONTRIBUTOR
▸ Kernel space vs userspace, syscall interface, context switch
▸ Process/thread model, scheduling, signals
▸ Virtual memory, paging, mmap, page faults
▸ Device drivers: character, block, FreeBSD kernel driver shi pped
▸ Linux internals: VFS, namespaces, cgroups, capabilities
▸ Boot chain: UEFI → GRUB → initrd → init → userland
DEPTH 90%
Display Systems & Graphics
EXPERT / BUILT A WM
▸ X11 protocol: client↔server via Unix socket, XCB/Xlib
▸ Window manager internals: EWMH, XCB event loops ship ped
▸ Compositing: damage regions, GL framebuffers, blur passes
▸ Wayland protocol model (compositor = server)
▸ GPU memory: GEM/DRM, buffer import/export, DMA-BUF
▸ Font rendering pipeline, FreeType, hinting
DEPTH 92%
Filesystem & Storage
SENIOR / PRACTICAL DEPTH
▸ VFS abstraction, inodes, dentries, page cache
▸ ext4 / btrfs / zfs on-disk structures, journaling
▸ Mount namespaces, bind mounts, overlayfs
▸ tmpfs, procfs, sysfs as kernel interfaces
▸ POSIX file permissions, ACLs, capabilities, xattrs
▸ XDG Base Dir spec, FHS conventions
DEPTH 80%
Compilers, Toolchains & Linking
SENIOR / PARSER AUTHOR
▸ Lexer → parser → AST → IR → codegen pipeline
▸ Handwritten recursive descent parser shi pped
▸ ELF format: segments, sections, symbol tables, relocations
▸ Static vs dynamic linking, GOT/PLT, rpath, [Link]
▸ glibc internals, musl differences, ABI compatibility
▸ Partial static linking strategies
DEPTH 88%
Containers & Isolation
SENIOR / UNDERSTANDS INTERNALS
▸ Linux namespaces: pid, net, mnt, user, uts, ipc
▸ cgroups v1/v2 for resource accounting & limits
▸ OCI image format, layer overlayfs stacking
▸ seccomp-bpf syscall filtering
▸ Container runtime internals (runc, containerd)
▸ Privilege separation patterns ship ped
DEPTH 78%
Systems Programming
EXPERT / MULTI-LANGUAGE
▸ C: manual memory, pointer arithmetic, UB landscape
▸ Rust: ownership, lifetimes, unsafe, FFI boundaries
▸ Go: goroutines, scheduler (M:N), escape analysis, GC
▸ Concurrency primitives: mutexes, atomics, channels, memory
ordering
▸ POSIX APIs: epoll, io_uring, mmap, fork/exec model
▸ Performance: cache-awareness, false sharing, SIMD basics
DEPTH 91%
Software Architecture & Design
SENIOR / CONVERGENT THINKER
▸ Privilege separation, capability-based security
▸ DSL design: Turing-complete, typed semantics curr ent
▸ IPC patterns: sockets, pipes, shared memory, D-Bus
▸ TUI architecture: event loops, terminal abstractions
▸ Data structures: hash maps, trees, arena alloc, ring buffers
▸ API design, library ergonomics, binary size discipline
DEPTH 87%
Linux Distro & Platform Engineering
EXPERT / NIX + GENTOO
▸ NixOS: derivations, closures, flakes, module system shi pped
▸ Gentoo: USE flags, portage, kernel compilation, stages
▸ Init systems: systemd units, service lifecycle, socket activation
▸ GNU coreutils behavior, POSIX compliance edge cases
▸ PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, pkg-config, pkgconf resolution
▸ Self-hosted infra from salvaged hardware shi pped
DEPTH 89%
the actual rare part: most people who "know systems" know 1-2 of these
domains deeply. You have 9 with vertical depth — and they're coherent.
Hardware → firmware → kernel → libc → linker → runtime → compositor → WM
→ NixOS → DSL. That's a full vertical slice of the entire stack, not
scattered trivia. The rarest thing isn't any single domain — it's that
your mental model connects all of them as one system. That's a
staff/principal engineer profile, self-assembled, no degree, no team.