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Magic Isn't Real

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

You ‘go to definition’ on enough methods from libraries you use to see how they are implemented and you build enough side projects and watch enough ‘tsoding daily’, ‘sphaerophoria’, and ‘awesomekling’ to begin to demystify at least how things like web/network protocols, or image/video encodings, syscalls/file IO operations work at some level. You no longer would feel completely lost if you had to write a shell or a lisp interpreter: you would at the very least know that to begin, you would probably have to read the source file into memory and break it up into tokens before trying to parse it to build the syntax tree needed so you can traverse and analyze it before stepping through it to execute the code. Now I definitely don’t claim to know how kernel internals, 3d rendering, or GPU drivers work, but what I mean is most things have lost the shadowy mystique, and feel more like something I can get excited to learn about, rather than a scary forbidden knowledge I will never be allowed to possess.

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