The number of things you can learn in this field is mind blowing. The rate at which change happens, frameworks come and go and the various levels of abstraction can be daunting at times.

Regardless of how much or little you know, there is always a new level of abstraction you can dive into and get a better understanding of what's going on. I love the example Scott Hanselman uses about this topic in Please Learn to Think about Abstractions.

It is amazing how much you can accomplish without having a clue about what is going under your abstractions. But if you were to take a moment now and then to try to understand what those abstractions are hiding from you, it will likely open your eyes to a level of understanding and insight as to how to use the abstraction that you may likely not understand how you made it work without that deeper insight. The understanding may help you get just needed bit of performance improvement, or fault tolerance in your projects, or how to set things up to be more maintainable.

An example of this for me recently is while working at Vertigo I have helped to ship a number of streaming video based products without having to know anything about some of the specifics of say HLS. On this recent project we were having issues with a live stream and it just so happened we could peek through an HTTP Debugger proxy at the raw streaming manifest. This was previously a scary place for me to dig in an try to understand. However, taking the time to understand various parts of the HLS Spec have not only made me appreciate what it takes to put together one of these live streams, but I have now become just that much stronger as a team member on a video related projects.

As the famous philosopher Dory once said:

Happy Digging!