To be honest, the majority of my work is just man and grep, and these two things already somehow make me better than the vast majority of my colleagues. Impostor syndrome doesn't think so though.

I think as devs and really anyone technical we boil stuff down to pretty basic steps as far as what we 'do' but in reality knowing that's the right thing to do and doing it right involves a lot more experience and etc that we just internalize and don't really think about.... but it is very much how it gets done.

I kinda see the inverse of that when a senior person explains some issue down to this is 'how arrays work' and really ... that's not what he less senior person didn't get it in the first place, it's all the stuff that lead to it...

@N00bPancakes 'man' knows how to do things right, alright? That why it's called so!

Seriously though, man and grep aren't enough of course. It's just that they do things WAY too easy even when you have no clue. There's a lot more to writing something well, from the knowledge of lower-level quirks of the tech in question and to subtle style-related decisions (as in "I wrote this line this way because..."). The latter ones are arguably the most important part of making your stuff maintainable and understandable.

That said, I usually don't even remember the codebase layout and what does what, especially if it's a huge project. I just grep my way to victory. Sometimes you can grep your way to the cause of some obscure bug, no debugger, no profiling, no "what if" runs or recompilation, just by going for an educated guess and grepping around.

@0x5d0 I credit a lot of my progress on getting better on knowing "WHAT" to google ;)

Like "What are the words someone would use when googling for this, who can find the answers and knows more than me, but still doesn't know the answer" .... when I started that was a big roadblock.

Just googling or grepping, easy peasy, doing that 'well' kinda an art unto itself IMO ;)

We don't divide by "programers who know more and less languages"
We divide into monkeys and hackers

If you enjoy hacking things apart it barely matters if It's frontend, backend, sysadmin, security.. you just do it because It's fucking fun :)

@Hazarth

There's a lot to be said for the mentality of finding a way, overcoming it, improving, roll on.

Lotta folks (including me sometimes) sort of pause and get caught up in worry / fretting when focusing that energy on a solution is way better.

"I don't know this shit, this stupid as fuck ... whelp, let's get to it!"

@N00bPancakes
That's exactly right, we're all just human in the end, aren't we?

But in the end the mantality comes down to people that can accept a challenge on a good day, and the ones that can't.

I think OP wouldn't get to sysadmin stuff unless he can!

@Hazarth Depends on your definition of sysadmin stuff actually.