Partitioning complexity
I’ve found that I keep coming back to the ideas Kent Beck shared in this article. He describes how some engineers have brains built for holding lots of complexity and can thrive in highly complex code bases and systems. But others (🙋♂️) cannot. For us, the challenge becomes finding modes of working which systematically tame that complexity.
Like finding a sub-linear algorithm, mastering this meta skill can let us feeble-brained engineers keep pace, or even outpace our big-brained peers.