Learn your environment and learn it well (over time). Every single thing that seems like weird arcane magic invented by brilliant wizards is just code or words,

Learn your environment and learn it well (over time). Every single thing that seems like weird arcane magic invented by brilliant wizards is just code or words, and often not a lot of it. Go find that code and read it. Docs are good, but they are almost never complete enough, because truly exhaustive docs would simply be the code [1]. Similarly, with something like CSS or OAuth that have specs, blog/tutorial content often leaves out important details that will be relevant to you. If you get stuck, quit wasting your time with them, and go read the damn spec! If you're still stuck after that, go read the implementation. Wherever you work, there is probably a page with like hundreds of ugly graphs of it. Learn what the graphs mean. When you do this, a day will come where someone will say "Kanye, I've been banging my head all day on why users are sometimes seeing outdated results after updating their page". A little thing will happen in your head, and you'll say "That sounds like replication lag/a weird quirk of the CSS spec/a bug I noticed in the graphics code", and suddenly you'll discovered that you are the wizard. I'm not saying to do this instead of doing those other things, or instead of whatever you're supposed to be doing. I'm saying do it as part of your practice of making software. You're probably gonna do it for like 40 years, so might as well make the investment. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation (Second time referencing this on HN today)