Whenever something doesn't work the way you believe it should have, whenever you see something that does not make sense, that is your understanding at odds with reality. Something doesn't work the way you think it does! Every time you don't get to the bottom of why it doesn't work the way you think it should work you are continuing to be a little worse than you might have been.
Accumulating moments like this over time adds up to the difference between being a great programmer and being complete crap. It's the difference between someone who overhears two people talking about a problem and says "Did you check that the locale is not set to iso8859?" and blows their minds that you could debug the problem they have spent 2 days working on in 5 seconds and the person who tells people "oh, yea, sometimes our app just crashes, it's something about text encoding but if you just open the file and save it as utf8 then you can manually fix the broken characters after you import it".
Whenever something doesn't work the way you believe it should have, whenever you see something that does not make sense, that is your understanding at odds with reality. Something doesn't work the way you think it does! Every time you don't get to the bottom of why it doesn't work the way you think it should work you are continuing to be a little worse than you might have been.
Accumulating moments like this over time adds up to the difference between being a great programmer and being complete crap. It's the difference between someone who overhears two people talking about a problem and says "Did you check that the locale is not set to iso8859?" and blows their minds that you could debug the problem they have spent 2 days working on in 5 seconds and the person who tells people "oh, yea, sometimes our app just crashes, it's something about text encoding but if you just open the file and save it as utf8 then you can manually fix the broken characters after you import it".