This post talks about the importance of schlepping through the details of the tools you're working with. As you can probably guess, I love it. It really rings true for me: the times I have learned the most as a programmer are the times I explicitly said "heck it, I'm going to write my own ORM / template language / implementation of the deflate algorithm." Or "I'm going to learn how Django works by reading the source for the area I'm interested in." It's important on multiple levels -- "blub studies" make you engage deeply with your tools and build a theory of how they work, which inspire you to build new tools, save you time debugging (as the author notes) or help you put the tool in context. This link comes to me via simplermachines, which is another great blog I urge you to follow. Linked terms include:

• "Blub", via "Beating the Averages", a Paul Graham essay. (So, uh, take that for what it's worth.)
• "An Introduction to Computer Networks", which might be just the thing I've been looking for, re: network engineering.