A version of this post originally appeared in Refactoring, a Substack offering advice for software engineers. Most of us have encountered a few software engineers who seem practically magician-like, a class apart from the rest of us in their ability to reason about complex mental models, leap to nonobvious yet elegant solutions, or emit waves of high-quality code at unreal velocity. I have run into many of these incredible beings over the course of my career. I think their existence is what expl...