Even the most trivial of applications today will depend on an incredible amount of carefully crafted, clever to genius code (operating systems, databases, compi

Even the most trivial of applications today will depend on an incredible amount of carefully crafted, clever to genius code (operating systems, databases, compilers, VMs, ...). I'm always deeply humbled when I think of all the engineering smarts and effort that went into the stack I'm working with every day. There's no chance in hell to understand all the tools. It's quite possible to understand the concepts and general principles these tools are built around (i.e., all the stuff you get taught in a proper computer science course), which I think is what one should thrive for. Note that even understanding the concepts will not even nearly equip you to (easily) understand and re-implement these tools, there's a lot more to any properly crafted tool than just the rough concepts.