Assembly language — a voice that’s still shouting in my head.

Everything started with an article. I was a teenager, sitting there reading a post about hacking and security. The author was excitedly explaining how a hacker opened up a program and found its bugs. Thanks to assembly—yes, that dry, scary language most people run away from—he managed to pull it off. That was the first time I ever saw the word “assembly.” And my brain went: Broooo what the hell is THIS?!

Even the name sounded mysterious. Like something hiding behind the curtain of software, sitting inside the brain of the computer itself. And that alone was enough to make me curious.

Closer to the metal than ever

What attracted me wasn’t that hackers used it for reverse engineering. To be honest, I was chasing something even scarier:

I wanted to understand how hardware actually thinks. I was a kid, clueless as hell! I used to imagine that computers would one day become conscious. (And considering today’s language models, maybe I wasn’t that wrong…)

When I learned that a simple loop, a tiny condition, or even a return in high-level languages becomes a bunch of mov instructions, conditional jumps, and register operations, I could never look at coding the same way again.

Realizing that even a variable could take a few microseconds or nanoseconds of CPU time, understanding how the stack actually works, and seeing memory interactions directly… that changed the way I viewed every other programming language.

The only assembly code I’ve ever written — with pride 😎

Okay, confession time: I’ve written assembly exactly once. A simple “Hello World.”

Not for practice. Not to build a tool. But for one very important reason:

To flex on my friend. 😂

But when I finally typed everything, ran it, and it actually worked… it felt like a spell had broken. I felt like I was speaking directly to the machine—straight to the CPU itself. No high-level layers, no abstraction. Just me and the metal. And man, I really felt like I had slayed the giant.

A sheriff inside my head

At some point—I don’t even remember when—I realized something weird had stayed with me.

A voice. Like that vulture in the old Robin Hood cartoon yelling “It’s midnight!” or maybe the sheriff himself.

Whenever I write a heavy piece of code or a pointless loop, this sheriff appears and whispers:

“Are you sure this is okay? You know what this turns into in assembly, right? You realize how badly you’re trashing the cache?”

Assembly, for me, isn’t a language anymore. It’s a reminder. A mental whip that forces me to write better Go, Java, or Rust (even though I lack the actual skill 😂). It makes me think deeper and be more precise.

Reverse engineering — just for fun

One time, I joined a CTF just for fun. Our team wasn’t anything special, but in one of the challenges, we had an executable with a hidden flag. Using Ghidra and some simple assembly reading, we managed to reverse its encryption algorithm and extract the flag (thanks to Jadi’s RadioGeek podcast).

In that moment I realized: even if I never become an assembly programmer, even if I only touched it once, assembly is real, useful, and worth knowing.

Why you still need assembly today

Most developers work with languages that never even mention registers. But deep in the Linux kernel, inside projects like ffmpeg or libav, there are still hand-written assembly sections. Why? Because sometimes even GCC or Clang can’t generate code that’s optimized enough.

That’s where a sharp, detail-obsessed, giga-geek human can step in and make a real difference.

Conclusion: Assembly — a voice that never shuts up

If I had to describe it in one sentence:

Assembly is my internal sheriff—a technical conscience that yells from the back of my mind: “This will turn into some ugly mov and jmp instructions, you know that, right?”

And of course, I still go ahead and write my ugly code anyway 😂

I might never use assembly in my actual projects. But its effect is always there—like a silent measuring tool in the back of my mind.

Assembly taught me that behind every line of code, there’s a hidden world. And if you want to, you can step into it.