Why "Best Practices" & Frameworks Are Keeping You Junior

#webdev #typescript #programming

There is a piece of advice that Experts or Senior programmers give to Juniors, which Juniors dutifully repeat to each other until it becomes a dogma:

"Don't reinvent the wheel."

On the surface, it makes sense. Why build a database when Postgres exists? Why write a message queue when you have NATS or Kafka? It seems efficient. It seems smart.

But if you blindly follow this advice, it will cap your career.

You will remain a "User" of software, never an "Engineer". You will be an expert at gluing together APIs you don't understand, terrified of the day the abstraction leaks and you have to debug a connection error that StackOverflow can’t solve.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: To become a 10x Engineer, you must reinvent the wheel. Not to use it in production, but to understand how it works.

The "Magic Box" Trap

Most developers treat their infrastructure like magic black boxes.

You send data to Redis. It comes back.
You open a WebSocket. It connects.
You send a request to a Serverless function. It runs.

But what happens when the latency spikes? What happens when the TCP connection hangs? If you have never used TCP socket directly, never handled buffer management, or never written a byte framing protocol, you are helpless. You are at the mercy of the vendor.

The "10x" Engineer isn't 10x faster at typing. They are 10x deeper in understanding.

They know that "Serverless" is just a server someone else manages. They know that a Message Queue is somewhat a fancy way of managing TCP sockets and in-memory buffers. They possess what Richard Feynman called "Generative Knowledge":

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

The Path to 10x Sovereignty

If you want to move from "Senior React Dev" to "Senior Software/System Engineer," you need to stop consuming libraries and start building them.

You need to strip away the frameworks, the ORMs, and the "easy mode" tools. You need to look at the metal.

Don't just use HTTP. Build a parser that reads raw bytes off the wire and decodes the headers.
Don't just use Pub/Sub. Build a message broker that handles topics, wildcards, and fan-out patterns.
Don't just use JSON. Write a binary serializer to understand endianness or framing.

When you do this, something shifts in your brain. The "magic" disappears, replaced by foundational knowledge. You stop guessing why your system is slow, and you start knowing.

Protocol Zero: The Initiation

This isn't about building a startup; it's about building you.

I created Protocol Zero for the engineers who are tired of the black boxes. It is a refusal to be a "glue-code" developer.

It's a workshop with a Discord community of like-minded engineers. In this workshop, we are going to do the irrational thing. We are going to build a NATS-compatible Distributed Pub/Sub server from scratch.