I’ve finally figured out how to reliably get engineers from beginner/intermediate at Solidity to reading large codebases without breaking a sweat. Math is the biggest blocker. I’ll just say it — if you have no formal STEM training and you work as a smart contract engineer, commit to @_MathAcademy_ for at least 6 months. If you can’t afford it, for the love of Satoshi, please at least complete a free algebra course online and have Grok serve as an examiner to test your knowledge. The level of math knowledge you have limits the level of complexity you can handle. DeFi is finance. Finance is math. If your math is weak, how do you expect to be good at DeFi? If you can’t reason mathematically, especially quickly, then some knowledge is locked away from you. Example 1: when dealing with “fractions” in Solidity, a lot of engineers get lost because they don’t know how to multiply two fractions together then normalize the denominator. When they see code doing that, they can’t interpret it. Example 2: devs can’t compute compound interest and therefore don’t know reasonable bounds for how large an integer can be Example 3: devs don’t know what a logarithm is, so they can’t quickly predict how large an integer they need to store a certain value. Then, uint sizes in the codebase seem totally random. Example 4: due to limited algebra, some devs cannot see how the formula in the whitepaper is really the same (or has a tiny variation) with the one in the code. They end up trying to reverse-engineer the behavior from scratch and get totally lost. Example 5: devs get lost looking at math that has been algebraically re-arranged to avoid a temporary underflow — or aren’t aware that is even a concept. I don’t share resources I haven’t used for clout. ...