Analysis and synthesis about ama

[gaearon]

If I want to understand how a library works, I put console.logs everywhere. If I don't understand something I don't worry and forget about it. I still don't understand a lot of parts in React, for example.

To "put things together" I like to try to reimplement them. This let me see the obstacles and complications, and then I can come back to the code I'm trying to understand with a new understanding of the challenges and constraints its authors had in their minds.

I'm trying to see what people in relatively disconnected parts of the ecosystem do in case I can figure out how to connect their creations. I'm bad at inventing new stuff, but I like to notice when some projects or ideas can be connected together to create something greater than sum of its parts. For example, I created React Hot Loader when I noticed Webpack's Hot Module Replacement and React go together really well.

[gaearon]

In the real world, I don't create anything original. I like listening to music and trying to figure out how they came up with a particularly brilliant piece of sound engineering but it's always a mystery to me.