I think it's critical to have both (1) actual experience working with something and (2) then reading about how it works. You gain natural intuition when you hav

I think it's critical to have both (1) actual experience working with something and (2) then reading about how it works. You gain natural intuition when you have done both. When I'm listening to someone suggest an idea, you can tell - if they're just working off something that they heard about (i.e. let's implement Redis, I heard it was fast), - if they've done it before but don't really know how it works (i.e. MongoDB worked for me once, don't need to consider Postgres), - or if they did both