Reading blog posts like this this is kind of like listening to Usain Bolt talk about how to run fast. Step 1: be better than anyone else. Step 2: work crazy hard.
It might seem that way if you're new to hardware stuff, but it's really not all that complicated. I'm not super knowledgeable myself (took all of 3 undergrad courses in digital logic design a few years ago and haven't worked with it since) but found the post very readable and interesting.
I've actually written the intermediate section of that in production code. The DEF netlist format contains a "wire" as a set of rectangles linking an input A to outputs B,C,D...etc, and we wanted to show only those rectanges involved in e.g. the A-D part of a route. The solution was to make a graph and then use standard graph traversal algorithms to select only the needed rectangles.
This reverse engineering challenge is made a lot easier by all the preparatory work of decapping and photographing the layers not being necessary.
