You may be right. You are missing something. The way to build big things is to build small things right. Small functions/classes that work correctly, no matter

You may be right. You are missing something. The way to build big things is to build small things right. Small functions/classes that work correctly, no matter the input. Next up, you wield them to build up a layer and so on. Long story short, you may be missing the concept of abstraction. I say that because you mentioned code interactions; that tells me you are looking at things so closely, the bigger picture seems much larger than it is. Also, understand that people have different perspectives; that they came up because of some random events. It is a mistake to think people who do a lot of work, think a lot. They don't - They usually have a simpler/more powerful perspective than you have ie, they refactored the thinking required to do a job into smaller number of steps. This is what chess players or the mathematicians do. Also, you may be aiming too high without background knowledge. An object cache layer for SQL? - Who said this was easy? Automatic code gen via YAML? - Did you write a toy interpreter before? MIDI over Wi-Fi? Audio destuttering? - I don't even know what those mean, and Im working as a programmer for more than 10 years, and now in a "big" company. Do you read a lot? Many of the successful people (coding or other fields) do May be you can start by reading SICP. It certainly cleared a lot of cobwebs for me.