Add a chapter about frustration with lack of knowledge, complexity (related to impostor syndrome)

[ms]

I’ve mentored a few software engineers (out of college and out of boot camps) and I’ve noticed that the sheer amount of things it seems you must know is very overwhelming. Julia Evans has written about some of these issues and they relate strongly to your teaching tech book, I think. This topic is related, but distinct, from the “thinking” appendix, in that it’s less about learning as a long term strategic effort and more a short-term set of tactics to tackle a specific understanding challenge.

A first draft of the advice could be:

• identify what you truly need to understand; everyone lacks context in some areas, it’s one of the benefits of abstraction and it’s normal/desirable
• run experiments to understand systems (REPL, unit tests, debugger like dev tools): start with a hypothesis and prove or disprove it with minimal examples
• go read code; don’t hesitate to read code in dependencies in particular
• actively build a mental model of how things work (simplified is good); draw, use analogies; run bare bones experiments to confirm your model, focusing on the fundamentals (of the language, computing in general, the framework, the environment, etc.)