pistolpete333

Working through the original SICP (including doing ALL of the exercises!) had the largest tangible positive effect on my ability to code as someone who has a CS degree. After finishing I felt much more confident as a programmer.

I’m mainly a TS/JS node and react dev and found much of what I learned from SICP translated into a deep understanding of both, especially with regards to higher order functions, closures, state management/hooks in react etc. The subtler aspects of coding (at least in JS/TS but also generally) all kind of just started to make sense.

Would definitely recommend

You should check out Matt Stoller and the work he is doing to call out this kind of monopolization/corruption/regulatory failure across industries. His articles are extremely informative, eye opening and generally non-partisan in their analysis.

He wrote an article calling out this situation with recreation.gov about a year ago

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...

As an anecdote to how developers treat "legacy" code:

As a fresh developer out of college I had the mindset that frameworks were something you use and they always work and all you need is the documentation. My first job had a lot of "core" code written by another team in another office we would use with exactly 0 documentation. I was trying to get our UI to do something specific but couldn't figure out how to do it by just looking at the functions available, so I ask my manager and he immediately knows what to do, makes 2 small changes (in my defense it was pretty hacky how it was set up imo) and I get what I want.

I remember being moderately pissed because I was already feeling the heat of asking my manager too many simple questions and I just apparently asked another one, so I say something along the lines of "How the hell would I ever have known how to do that, there are no docs available to say that is possible and that is not obvious at all."

He just looks at me and says "You read the core code" and I remember having my mind blown at missing something so obvious for so long. After that I voraciously read almost all "framework" code I could get my hands on, I asked more intelligent questions and my relationship improved my manager and eventually came to be considered a generally good developer.

Once I had this breakthrough I was seeing it in younger developers all the time, and now any time someone asks for general advice on becoming a better developer one of the things I say is "read a lot of code", and more specifically "read the code in your frameworks"