When debugging interactions with third-party code, or figuring out how some library works, you don’t need to treat external code as a black box. These days, much of the code we work with is open-source, and the source is either already on your machine, or just a few clicks away.
Adopting an “it’s just code” attitude, and being unafraid to crack open the library and look at its internals, is empowering. It builds confidence. It gives you exposure to how other people build code. You can learn new ways to write code by looking at high quality libraries. You may find bugs, and contribute fixes to them, thus moving the world forward.
Be warned, though, that you may shudder at the quality of some code you come across. The fact that a library is public and used by many people does not guarantee that it is well written. Even though most code is just plumbing, and is far from rocket science, some of can be difficult to understand because of unwarranted complexity that results from either poor or nonexistent up-front design, or reasonable up-front design followed by incremental changes without redesign and cleanup rounds to keep the system coherent.
Whether the libraries you read are top notch or full of closeted skeletons, you’ll end up learning a lot, either about how to code better, or about what patterns to avoid. The sooner you understand that there’s no magic, and it’s all just code, the more confident and comfortable you will be with any development task.
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