[zallen]

Answering this question feels like the hardest problem I've solved yet... ;) Because, I don't know: I've never really thought "this one! THIS is the hardest!" You just iterate and things get more and more challenging as you build skills. What seemed hard to a junior tech doesn't seem hard to me as a senior tech now. It's all just engineering. It is all just sitting down, reading manuals or prior art, getting familiar with protocols or fundamentals, and building maps in your head until you understand something. Then building proofs of concepts and outlines; then, applying a bunch of troubleshooting principles; repeat until problem is solved. I've written academic papers this way, I've built streaming servers off esoteric industrial process-control database APIs, I've done process visualizations, I put a model railway online (before that was an out of the box thing)... and it's all the same: use what other people did, understand it, and then build from there.