The most successful engineers, to me, seem to be the ones who rise about the lower levels of technology and abstract out minor details. They understand what th

The most successful engineers, to me, seem to be the ones who rise about the lower levels of technology and abstract out minor details. They understand what the technology in question can do and cannot do. They know what other technologies can be paired and cannot be paired with the current one and they understand the performance, development, deployment and maintenance aspects of all the combinations. They can then design applications or platforms, learning as they go. Take, for example NodeJS. Ryan knows what V8 is capable of, knows what it's not capable of outside the browser sandbox, and built himself an alternate sandbox. The implementation details, while complex, are minor in the grand scheme of things.