There are strong parallels in the programming world as well (with the exception that many of the big stacks are open source). One of my favorite classes in sch

There are strong parallels in the programming world as well (with the exception that many of the big stacks are open source). One of my favorite classes in school (CS major) was a microcontrollers lab class, wiring up simple processors and microcontrollers and then programming them in assembly. At that level, everything is transparent, there's no hazily-understood stack of abstracted layers written by others. I think the reason I found it so refreshing was that transparency. The entire system could be viewed and understood at once. On the other end of the spectrum you have something like Rails, where things happen seemingly by magic, and when they break, it's impossible to know why as a novice.