Skill
C
Preferred language for performance-critical and low-level systems programming, with fine-grained control over memory and execution.
C is my preferred programming language because it does not enforce rigid abstractions and allows me to work very close to the hardware while retaining full control over execution. This enables explicit architectural decisions, even when they are more complex or less “safe”, but necessary to achieve predictable behavior and high performance.
I mainly use C when implementing numerical algorithms outside academic environments (where MATLAB is typically used), as well as in HPC contexts, where I work with OpenMP and MPI for parallelization and scaling on multi-core systems and clusters.
Another important use case is cryptography: reimplementing protocols and primitives in C helps me deeply understand their internal mechanics beyond high-level library abstractions.
Reading and working with Linux kernel code in C is one of the best ways I have found to understand how an operating system actually works at a low level.