If anyone were to ask me what's the number 1 thing they could do to improve their technical skills, I would say to adopt the mindset that there's no magic under the hood.
What does that mean?
It means everything you're working on is made out of code.
There's no magic incantation happening inside React that makes your variables reactive.
There's no spells powering the JS event loop in the browser.
No matter what stack you're using and what you're trying to implement, all the layers you depend on have been thought out and implemented by people.
And that means that they are comprehensible by humans, there's no magic to them. From top to bottom, it's all code.
How does adopting the mindset look like?
Understanding that everything is potentially learnable doesn't mean you should go out and study how every single thing in your stack works, from logic gates all the way to JS.
There's thousands of man-hours that have gone into improving and refining each of these layers. So while they are understandable, there's definitely a time/effort concern that should be taken into account.
But, next time you run into an issue with a particular library and googling (or ChatGPTing) didn't offer any working solutions...
Think to yourself: "What's this library made out of? Code!".
And if it's a JS library chances are you can easily find its github repository and start reading the source code.
Maybe you find out the function you're using is actually doing something different than what you thought it was. Maybe there's a bug, or the documentation is slightly wrong.
Either way, now you have the ability fix your issue and contribute to an open source project!
All because you didn't just assume that whatever your tool does is magic and there's no point to look at it more closely.
Repeat this for 50 issues you run into in the course of an year, and you'll naturally pick up on new coding patterns and ideas.
Next time there's an interesting challenge at your job, you'll be able to draw from all the breadth of knowledge you've accumulated and apply those patterns.
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