[afarrell]

This is a bit of a tangent, but do you know of good tutorials, blog posts, videos, or books which help build a mental framework of how javascript packaging works internally?

My goal is to be better at debugging development environment issues.

To be more specific, I am asking this from the perspective of a user of the node ecosystem who has repeatedly had the experience of running into problems with my development environment or packages and not really knowing what to do to get myself un-stuck. I can totally search google/stack overflow/github for an answer and sometimes there is a clear one. Sometimes I fond a command to run, sometimes I don't. In either case, I come away with a strong feeling that I've not actually learned anything. If the same thing happened again, I might remember what to google for next time, but I wouldn't be able to reason clearly about what I'm working with. In the past when I run into these issues, I've just thrown time at them until something sticks. That kinda sucks.

I'd like to find a way to put in some work and come away with a solid understanding. When you were starting this project, how did you go about building up your knowledge of the underlying abstractions that npm/yarn/webpack/etc. use?

When you see a misconfiguration or get a bug report with this project, how do you go about investigating it?

Have you ever seen a really good explanation of a bug/misconfiguration which helps the reader build a solid mental model?