[itsokimbatman]

"How to Learn complex Things Quickly by realizing they are not that complex at all."

This is such a good observation. When I was first getting into my field, I looked around at the smart senior people around me and thought there was no way I could ever do what they did. Total case of imposter syndrome.

Things like compilers, operating systems, etc. all seemed like magic, and I thought I was too dumb to do that kind of stuff.

But once I started working, I didn't really have a choice... it was either learn or get fired. And digging down into the code made me realize just how... simple? ... some things are. Being able to pull back the curtain and realize there's no magic there. Want to talk to this piece of hardware? Just write this bit pattern to this particular address, then put your data over here, and then send it this command and it works.

Not to say I immediately figured everything I read out. Sometimes it took me hours or days to work through something, especially if it was heavily templated C++ code.

One of the things that really surprised me was looking into build systems for large projects. When I thought about how I'd do it, I could only imagine a disgusting, hacky series of scripts and code generators and things that any sensible developer would scoff at. But when I actually looked at how some projects are put together... they're a disgusting, hacky series of scripts and code generators.

Learning that there's nothing magical about any of this was life changing. I still deal with imposter syndrome, but I feel much more confident that I can learn if I just make myself dive in, even if it seems scary at first.

[the_only_law]

I’ve gone through the demystification phase a number of times. Unfortunately it’s always very surface level. There’s been a ton of things I’ve been trying to read about and learn about the past couple years. I could probably give a pretty decent, albeit rough description of most of them and how they work, but I could not implement them myself from scratch or anything.

And I still look up at some people and wonder how the hell I could ever get to that level. People who seem both wide and deep in knowledge. Even people who cross outside different domains and seem well versed across all sorts of fields. I recall being among some reverse engineers quoting seemingly from memory undocumented behavior of random Windows API calls.

[bostonsre]

At least for me, reading is not enough. It gives some good context, but actually using that knowledge to accomplish tasks helps to solidify that knowledge. Viewing my knowledge as a network of interconnected nodes also helps me reason about it. Reading a key/value dictionary from start to finish doesn't leave enough interconnected nodes for that information to persist long. Knowledge seems to solidify when it is connected and linked to other bits of knowledge but islands of knowledge seem hard to retain. E.g. Those seemingly random windows api calls are easier to remember when you know of their Linux equivalent, in what cases you call those methods, what other methods call that method, what methods that method itself calls, what happened last time you called those methods, etc. I doubt they remembered them because they read the source code once and have a photographic memory.

[nneonneo]

Or, having been there, maybe they remembered them because they were interesting/weird tidbits that caused them to have to debug something for hours. Or perhaps they ran into those weird things last week. (I will never forget, for example, that certain glibc functions such as system() use movaps to copy data from the stack - because it’ll crash the program when you call them from an unaligned stack ROP...)

[iagovar]

I hope to get there some day. I'm learning to code currently (until now, I was only capable of scripting, which is code, but you know what I mean) and I feel like there's just massive knowledge out there just to make simple things.

Managing systems and environments make my head spin very fast. I try to keep it simple but now im peaking into the node/react ecosystem and I feel all over the place.

[depressedpanda]

> I try to keep it simple but now im peaking into the node/react ecosystem and I feel all over the place.

If you want to keep things simple you should probably stay away from modern frontend web dev.

Or, if you must do web, start with vanilla HTML, CSS and ES2015+. A solid understanding of the basics will always be valuable, and you can always build upon that knowledge when you reach the pain points that node, webpack, React etc help you solve.

[Jgrubb]

I'll get blown up for this but you're not all over the place, the node ecosystem is.