I learned programming by reading user manuals, books, and magazines. It was kind of like Googling, except less random-access. But your documentation was much mo

I learned programming by reading user manuals, books, and magazines. It was kind of like Googling, except less random-access. But your documentation was much more complete, because the tools were comparatively smaller. Now fast-forward to 2016, and take something like Docker, which seems conceptually simple but has lots of sharp corners like capabilities for mapping mounts to userspace fuse volumes. The documentation would go obsolete while it was being printed. So don't be so hard on yourself -- most of us are just hot-gluing components together, and if you are lucky enough to get paid writing that red-black tree they interview for at Google/Facebook, then consider yourself lucky, and also consider ripping someone else's version with unit tests.