Yeah when I read the post, I kept thinking about the fact that there are a number of areas in which the just plain interested individual could focus their efforts to achieve the same general feeling of depth the author had back then. And this can also transfer across technical domains in unexpected ways. For example, in-depth knowledge of how the Linux Kernel's network stack works could transfer to a large eventual cost savings when some BGP implementation is improved based on that knowledge. And maybe that improvement turns out to be mostly 'algorithmic' and maybe that algorithm was devised by someone working in JavaScript.
I think the network hardware issue alone is a good example of where the complexity in the stack has probably increased exponentially since the 90s.
I think the network hardware issue alone is a good example of where the complexity in the stack has probably increased exponentially since the 90s.