1. First Principles Thinking
Understanding complex topics by breaking them down into basic fundamentals and reasoning upward, cutting through the distraction of frameworks and libraries.
Hear it at 0:04 →Engineering video
0:58 · 16 August 2023
Senior Developer Mental Model: First Principles Thinking
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Transcript
senior developer mental model six out of 10. First, principles thinking. This mental model, it's almost a cliche, and it has been made famous by Elon Musk. He uses this model when building his companies, from Tesla to SpaceX. Musk discovered that the easiest way to understand something is by breaking it down into its most basic fundamentals and reasoning up from there. Just like physicists do. In a time and age when software development is dominated by shiny frameworks and libraries.
Developers that manage to see beyond that, beyond the noises and to understand the principles behind it, will be able to navigate this crazy landscape with ease. For example, if you look at JavaScript frameworks, you can quickly be distracted by all the fancy features, from hooks, to context API, to tree shaking, when, in the end, what we are talking about, it's a bunch of paradigms, virtual DOM, declarative programming, component based architecture, applied to the same good old JavaScript.
Once you see it that way, it becomes straightforward to master. First, principles thinking works every time.