This was a very powerful episode. The strongest part for me was the description of Apple's developer workflow or philosophy, where you can look through the stack all the way through. When I first joined the JVM on Linux camp after mostly being in the .NET world on Win, seeing the system all the way through was a revelation, incredibly empowering.
Andreas with Serenity not only sees the system through but can modify any part of the layer to make the abstraction of each layer just right.
It's something that really doesn't get talked about enough. So much of modern tech is just abstraction on top of abstraction, being able to get in there and play around in those same spaces as your tools is important, though.
I've been doing this with Flutter recently. Turns out it is both a toolkit and a package/platform. If you take out all the 'flutter' code, you're left with something that looks like sdl or glfw, just written in Dart. And it 100% has made me a better Flutter dev to do so. I now get a lot more of _how_ Flutter's drawing loop works, and how the framework beneath reduces all of app startup to one `runApp` call.
Not being able to inspect the insides of a tool easily is a major turn off to me on anything.
Andreas with Serenity not only sees the system through but can modify any part of the layer to make the abstraction of each layer just right.