On taking systems apart

There’s a particular kind of satisfaction in understanding a system all the way down — past the API, past the library, past the protocol, until you hit something you can’t usefully decompose any further.

The reward for understanding is more understanding.

I don’t always need to go that deep. But I keep doing it anyway, and over time it’s the thing that’s compounded the most in my career.

A worked habit

When something surprises me, I try to resist the urge to just patch around it. Instead:

1. Reproduce it in the smallest possible case.
2. Form a guess about why.
3. Go one layer down and check.

Most of the time the bug is boring. Occasionally the layer below turns out to be far more interesting than the problem that sent me there.

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