Oh I'm not sure I personally completely agree with any of those statements I quoted, including that one "needs to think at a different level" whatever that migh

Oh I'm not sure I personally completely agree with any of those statements I quoted, including that one "needs to think at a different level" whatever that might mean. They were written by people who had an entirely different path into programming than me, and I think it's important to keep that in mind when consider what makes sense for you. I think practically each one of us can only think at the level at which we are currently capable of thinking, while understanding that we are capable of more. Single stepping through code for me has also been a great entry point into large code bases. I think what happens over time, especially if you look into the internals of open source project and libraries, is you lean to identify what kind of thing you're looking at: like, Is this a thing that's driven by an event loop? Is this an event driven system that calls some pipeline of functions through the stack? You begin to see that people generally make things in only a handful of different ways, and so it's easier figure out how things are connected. But for me it took a lot of stepping through code to figure out a lot of these things, so I'm not sure either how else you can go about it.