The Apprenticeship.

College began as a race for technical depth. While the syllabus covered the basics, I was building my own detention center for bugs. Writing malloc from scratch to understand segfaults, scraping portals before there was a polite reason to, and obsessing over the distance between a textbook example and the actual wire.

Learning to see the system.

What I was actually learning was the distance between a textbook example and the wire. Reimplementing things that already existed, badly at first, until the failure modes stopped being surprising. The path from a first-year exercise to a system other people depend on is not a leap, it is a thousand boring repetitions.