Trust me, if you're really a good developer you'd be able to swap all this stuff in your head in a reasonable amount of time.
For example: I'm not generally a Java guy and I'm not an Android expert, but I once had to create an android touch interface to some custom hardware... and it had to run on one of the first "embedded tablet-like" systems available (this was 2009-ish).
In a month or so, I went from knowing nothing about Android and being extremely rusty with Java to:
- Doing nifty tricks in Java to make code DRY and maintainable
- Writing a fancy flashy Android app
- Using the NDK to write a native component that integrated the app with a couple of device drivers
- Deeply investigating the performance characteristics of the Dalvik VM and tuning all sorts of things (both in the OS and in my code) to keep things working smoothly
Could I do any of this again right this second? Nope. I've moved to other projects and other technologies and all this has been swapped out of my head. But the point is that I could get back there again if I needed to.
As a "good developer", you would no doubt experience something similar in this situation. If someone sat you down with a poorly-performing game, some C++ code, and pointed you to enough reference information and profiling tools, in a few weeks you, too, would be talking about cache misses and alignment boundaries and SIMD intrinsics, and...
The funny thing about tech jargon is 99% of it sounds like gibberish even to those of us who've been there before! Don't be too hard on yourself :)
For example: I'm not generally a Java guy and I'm not an Android expert, but I once had to create an android touch interface to some custom hardware... and it had to run on one of the first "embedded tablet-like" systems available (this was 2009-ish).
In a month or so, I went from knowing nothing about Android and being extremely rusty with Java to:
- Doing nifty tricks in Java to make code DRY and maintainable
- Writing a fancy flashy Android app
- Using the NDK to write a native component that integrated the app with a couple of device drivers
- Deeply investigating the performance characteristics of the Dalvik VM and tuning all sorts of things (both in the OS and in my code) to keep things working smoothly
Could I do any of this again right this second? Nope. I've moved to other projects and other technologies and all this has been swapped out of my head. But the point is that I could get back there again if I needed to.
As a "good developer", you would no doubt experience something similar in this situation. If someone sat you down with a poorly-performing game, some C++ code, and pointed you to enough reference information and profiling tools, in a few weeks you, too, would be talking about cache misses and alignment boundaries and SIMD intrinsics, and...
The funny thing about tech jargon is 99% of it sounds like gibberish even to those of us who've been there before! Don't be too hard on yourself :)