[zphds]

Same here. I had the same problem especially when dealing with problems that required me to go back and (un)learn stuff from scratch.

I found that the greatest barrier to deal with seemingly hard concepts was getting the right intuition on what "might" be happening under the hood. For me, this is absolutely crucial even if my intuition about a "thing" might not be completely correct.

As someone who didn't go to a classroom to be taught a lot of the basics, I dive in head-first to read papers, I mean a lot of papers, to help build this mental model EVEN though I don't understand everything in it, but it lets you pick up patterns for solving similar problems you might be having.

For things you don't understand, you can always fit in these gaps in your mental model as you dig deeper into the abstraction cake and repeat the whole "intuition" building loop.

I find that the same also applies to Math and other domains which build on a bunch of primitives that has to be really well known to be able to reason in higher abstractions.

I feel software is no different... dig deep enough, there will be a hashmap of some sort.