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Nowadays, we write code faster and faster, but understanding code becomes harder and harder.
You ask AI to generate an RAG system, a database connection pool, or a simple Agent, and it runs in ten minutes. But once memory spikes, concurrency goes haywire, or indexes fail, all people can say is: "Why does it do that?"
What’s even more painful is that many can use Git but can’t explain how objects are stored; can tune Redis but don’t understand its protocol; can call large language models but have never actually written a training loop by hand.
This isn’t about being unable to write code—it’s about the gap between “knowing how to call” and “truly understanding.” Today we’re talking about Build Your Own X, which teaches us how to build wheels and build the underlying layers.
Project Introduction #
build-your-own-x does one simple thing: It collects and organizes tutorials across various technical domains that teach you to build from scratch, so you understand the underlying principles by writing code yourself.
The README.md quotes Feynman:
What I cannot create, I do not understand