Abstractions
Today I went back and re-read Joel Spolsky’s advice The Law of Leaky Abstractions and it hits a nail on the head about what peers from EWU were missing:
“Learn how to do it manually first, then use abstractions to save time. Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning. And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.”