You have a question about how something works. You search, you open three articles, two of them turn out to be the same article, one is four years old, and you assemble an answer out of the overlap. Then you move on, quietly unsure.
Meanwhile the people who built the thing wrote a document that answers your exact question, and it is shorter than the articles were.
Going to the primary source is a habit hardly anyone builds, and it separates people faster than any framework you could pick up this year. The specification. The RFC. The official guide. The reference page maintained by the team that owns the code.
The objection is always the same. Specs are long and dry and written for implementers. Some are. But you are not reading one end to end, you are reading one section, and specs tend to be unusually well indexed because they were written to be argued over. The caching rules in HTTP are a few pages. The isolation levels page in the Postgres documentation will settle an argument your team has been having for a year. Your framework's own page on how it loads configuration is almost certainly clearer than the tutorial that paraphrased it.
Here is how to read one without drowning. Find the section, not the document. Read the definitions first, because most confusion turns out to be vocabulary rather than logic. Read the examples, which authors include far more often than people expect. Ignore the rest without guilt.
Two things happen after a few months of this.
You stop inheriting other people's misreadings. A surprising amount of what our industry believes is a game of telephone, where somebody misunderstood a default in 2016 and forty articles repeated it faithfully. You are carrying a few of those right now and you do not know which.
And you become the person who can end a debate quietly. Not by being louder, but by saying, there is a paragraph on this, let me find it. That is a small kind of authority, and it is available to anyone willing to open the boring document.
Try it once this week on something you already half know. The half you had wrong is the interesting part.
– Asael Shinder
