You don't understand a system until you've rebuilt it

Short summary

The author argues that true understanding of a system comes only from rebuilding a worse version of it yourself, not from reading source code or documentation. Drawing on Peter Naur's 'Programming as Theory Building,' they explain that the theory behind design decisions lives in the builder's head and cannot be inherited by reading alone. Rebuilding forces you to hit the same walls the original designers faced, converting passive knowledge into active understanding.

• •Understanding a system requires rebuilding a worse version, not just reading its source
• •Peter Naur's 'theory building' concept explains why code alone can't transfer understanding
• •Rebuilding a TCP server seven times taught the author why non-blocking I/O matters

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