Reading primary sources (official docs, RFCs, source code) is a fundamental engineering skill that separates junior devs from senior ones. Many engineers never develop this habit and rely entirely on secondhand info - Stack Overflow answers, blog posts, YouTube tutorials.

The problem? They lack the confidence to form independent technical opinions. They wait to see how others react before deciding if something is impressive or not. They can't experience the raw excitement of discovering how something actually works under the hood.

This dependency creates a ceiling on technical growth. You can't debug deep issues, evaluate new tech critically, or architect novel solutions if you're always waiting for someone else to digest and interpret information for you.

The best engineers I know have one thing in common: they go straight to the source. When a new framework drops, they read the implementation. When a bug appears, they trace through the actual codebase. When evaluating a database, they benchmark it themselves rather than trusting Medium articles.

It's uncomfortable at first - primary sources are dense, technical, and require effort. But this is exactly what builds real engineering intuition and independent judgment.