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Funny thing was I never even thought to do this until I was working on a very strange bug, and a senior engineer at my company suggested I look at the source code for one of our dependencies. Sometimes really obvious and basic advice can be a big step for people.

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Yeah I think it's helpful to recognize that this isn't always obvious to people, even folks who seem like they'd instinctively do so–I had a similar experience a year or two into being a professional programmer, despite being someone whose first experience with dependencies years beforehand was downloading Perl files and directly editing them.

Had a similar experience during my Bachelors thesis. I was adding new functionality to an existing code inspection framework and was also supposed to add a graphical interface with GTK (this was 2014). At some point I identified a performance bottleneck within a GTK component. My advisor suggested fixing it and I just couldn't understand how I lowly student am supposed to tackle anything in this big behemoth. In the end, I didn't do it but it made me think and jump into various big open source projects in the following years. And you get used to navigating these suprisingly fast.

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