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You should understand the internals of tools that you use. Abstractions and simplifications do only one thing: delete features in the hope of being easy to und

You should understand the internals of tools that you use. Abstractions and simplifications do only one thing: delete features in the hope of being easy to understand. As a software engineer you have the unique privilege where the people that make your tools have literally the exact same job as you, so you can pretty easily understand their work. As for understanding Visual Studio's or Firefox's internals, that's basically what you do to write Visual Studio plugins or apps that run in Firefox.

alexchamberlain 3y ago
When I work with graduates, I often encourage them to try and understand "1 level down" - that is to say, understand the general design philosophy and how to navigate the tools and libraries you are using. That gives you a better understanding for how to use them, whilst also allowing you to side step the documentation when you need to. On the other hand, if you try to understand what the atoms are doing on the silicon when you run an SQL command, you might be a tad overwhelmed...
BoorishBears 3y ago
VS and Firefox don't demand you understand writing plugins to use them. They wrap their internals with an interface that has well documented entry points, but you don't need to delve into them to get a lot of value out of them. > As a software engineer you have the unique privilege where the people that make your tools have literally the exact same job as you, so you can pretty easily understand their work. That's not how that works. Writing frontend apps doesn't teach you MUMPS. _ At the end of the day Git gets "easy" but honestly most people who say Git is easy are like people saying JS is easy: the people who know either well enough will claim anyone who thinks either is easy simply doesn't know them well enough Linus himself: Generally, the best way to learn git is probably to first only do very basic things and not even look at some of the things you can do until you are familiar and confident about the basics.
tester756 3y ago
>You should understand the internals of tools that you use. Abstractions and simplifications do only one thing: delete features in the hope of being easy to understand. Just because you should understand internals, it still doesn't mean that git's cli isn't terrible. Also I don't have time nor desire to understand internals of all software that I use do I have to learn internals of github, jira, email client, teams/discord/slack/irc, power point, etc, etc? They have similar or higher value to git in work setting (I mean I could switch to other letters management system)
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alexchamberlain 3y ago

When I work with graduates, I often encourage them to try and understand "1 level down" - that is to say, understand the general design philosophy and how to navigate the tools and libraries you are using. That gives you a better understanding for how to use them, whilst also allowing you to side step the documentation when you need to. On the other hand, if you try to understand what the atoms are doing on the silicon when you run an SQL command, you might be a tad overwhelmed...

BoorishBears 3y ago

VS and Firefox don't demand you understand writing plugins to use them. They wrap their internals with an interface that has well documented entry points, but you don't need to delve into them to get a lot of value out of them. > As a software engineer you have the unique privilege where the people that make your tools have literally the exact same job as you, so you can pretty easily understand their work. That's not how that works. Writing frontend apps doesn't teach you MUMPS. _ At the end of the day Git gets "easy" but honestly most people who say Git is easy are like people saying JS is easy: the people who know either well enough will claim anyone who thinks either is easy simply doesn't know them well enough Linus himself: Generally, the best way to learn git is probably to first only do very basic things and not even look at some of the things you can do until you are familiar and confident about the basics.

tester756 3y ago

>You should understand the internals of tools that you use. Abstractions and simplifications do only one thing: delete features in the hope of being easy to understand. Just because you should understand internals, it still doesn't mean that git's cli isn't terrible. Also I don't have time nor desire to understand internals of all software that I use do I have to learn internals of github, jira, email client, teams/discord/slack/irc, power point, etc, etc? They have similar or higher value to git in work setting (I mean I could switch to other letters management system)

deleted 3y ago
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