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Leaky abstraction is an interesting way to put it. That makes sense to me. I really do feel like I'm building something on a certain layer of abstraction. I gu

Leaky abstraction is an interesting way to put it. That makes sense to me. I really do feel like I'm building something on a certain layer of abstraction. I guess when something new comes up it has the potential to push you down a few more layers than you intend and you can get caught trying to race to the bottom of the stack and learn everything. A certain amount of curiosity for what's going on 'underneath' is surely a healthy thing and probably helps long term progression, but for learning it can be a bit distracting!

jdbernard 11y ago
To expound on your last point: I agree that you have to be able to stop yourself from always getting drawn by curiosity into the rabbit-hole, but in my experience one of the things that has separate the mediocre developers from the great ones is their ability to cross those layer boundaries. You don't have to know everything about every layer, but it helps to know enough about each one to have a general sense of how it works, and to know where to start digging if you do need to go deeper. Obviously this kind of experience takes time to build up. For example, if you are doing front-end JavaScript development it can be very good to understand HTTP, and have at least a vague idea of how things like TCP/IP and DNS work. Nothing kills productivity like hitting a bug that you can't even investigate without someone else's help.