Before getting sucked into the enterprise world, I reinvented a bunch of wheels and this indeed gave me a deeper understanding of the inner workings of various frameworks and technologies. I noticed that my colleagues who had ten years or more on their resume rarely had any idea what I was rambling on about or the basis for the things they were using.

Their were so busy trying to get stuff done that they never had time to explore. I don't mean blog post or tutorial explore, I mean weeks and weeks of implementation and testing of patterns and low level engineering. Building database engines from scratch or writing a compiler or a distributed message broker, for instance.