Beyond the Basics: How Deep Knowledge Elevates Your Coding?Skills

Have you ever seen someone debugging a tricky issue and thought, How did they even know to look there? It’s like watching Dynamo casually walk across the Thames?—?you know it's happening before you, but your brain just can't accept it. While I can’t explain how Steven Frayne pulled that off, I can tell you what sets them apart. If you gonna tell me Dynamo waking on the Thames is fake, we gonna have a problem.

Before we go any further, I would like to define the levels of knowledge:

• Level 1: Surface-Level User?—?Knows what was learned but doesn’t question how it works.
• Level 2: Informed Practitioner?—?Understands and questions the tools, and can reason about their behavior.
• Level 3: System Architect (GOATED, CRACKED, SIGMA)?—?Knows the system like its creator and can improve or rebuild it.

Why Deep Knowledge Matters?—?Level?2

Even if Level 3 isn’t necessary for most jobs, understanding the tool you use beyond the surface level brings real advantages:

1. Smarter Decision-Making

Developers at Level 2 understand trade-offs and avoid common pitfalls. research shows that deep knowledge helps reduce tech debt and results in better long-term maintainability. For example, knowing how database indexing works means writing efficient queries instead of blindly using SELECT * and wondering why the DB having near-death experiences every time someone tries to use your application.

2. You become a Better Teacher & Communicator

Once you get past the first few years of simply completing assigned tasks and attending meetings set by others, you’ll find yourself in a position where colleagues and juniors look up to you for guidance. In these scenarios, your expertise needs to be communicated clearly and effectively. The better you understand the tools you use, the easier it becomes to explain them to both technical and non-technical team members. This removes confusion, keeps everyone on the same page, and fosters better collaboration.

3. Thinking like the?Creators

When you truly understand a system, you stop treating it like a black box. Instead of blindly Googling error messages, deep learners build a mental model of how things work, allowing them to debug and optimize efficiently. And let me tell you, nothing grinds my gears more than that C# dev who reaches for reflection to access private members instead of just refactoring the class ??. Yes, it technically works, but so does using a chainsaw to cut a birthday cake. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should!

Level 3 Perks?—?If Level 2 is not?enough

I’ll be real with you, most jobs don’t require Level 3 knowledge. If you can reason about something, you’re more than capable of landing solid engineering roles and solving pretty much all the problems thrown at you. You don't need to understand how a compiler is built to write good code (although it did help me one day).

But if you love optimizing performance, or just feeding your curiosity, Level 3 can be incredibly fun and rewarding. This level of knowledge lets you:

• Debug like a pro: Instead of guessing, you know where the problem is.
• Optimize performance: You know what works fast and what doesn’t and if nothing works then you can tweak things at a low level for serious efficiency gains. (Low-level optimizations may impact the maintainability but, if speed is all you need, then it works!)
• Building better solutions: By understanding the meaning and reason behind the tools, you will make better decisions about incorporating them into your solutions.

How to Learn Beyond the?Basics

If you’ve ever tried to reach Level 3, you’ve probably realized there aren’t many online courses for it?—?because, honestly, not many people are going to do it. Companies are out here looking for unicorn developers who can build software, deploy to intergalactic servers, and scale it beyond the known universe and not someone who knows something really well. So how do you actually get there?

I got you, homeboy, Here’s how I keep my curiosity fed, and let me know your approach in the comments:

• Break Things Apart?—?Instead of just using Docker, try writing a simple container runtime. Check out Coding Challenges, CodeCrafters.
• Read Source Code?—?The best way to learn how something works is to dive into its internals. And given that we have GPTs, there’s no excuse to skip foundational knowledge?—?use AI to guide you through unfamiliar concepts before jumping in.
• Experiment?—?Play with configurations, tweak settings, and push limits. The best lessons come from breaking things and figuring out how to fix them.
• Teach What You Learn?—?Teaching forces you to solidify your understanding. Find someone as curious as you and try to blow each other’s minds with what you’ve learned.

Deep knowledge isn’t required to be a great developer, but it makes you sharper, more efficient, and better at solving tough problems. If you’re at Level 2, you’re already in a great position. But if you’re the kind of person who just has to know how things work, diving into Level 3 can be an incredibly rewarding journey.

Stay Curious. Adios ??

This article was originally written on Medium.