Making Hard Things Easy
The part that resonated most with me is "Show things that are normally hidden".<p>Tools that do this make things clearer almost immediately. Consider the developer tools in a web browser. Do you remember the "dark ages" before such things existed? It was awful because you had to guess instead of seeing what was going on.<p>Tools like Wireshark that show you every last byte of network packets that it has access to AND parses it to help you see the structure. This isn't just for debugging networking data; it's hugely beneficial in teaching networking concepts because nothing is hidden.<p>This is also one of my favorite things about open source software. I can view the source to understand what's causing a bug, to fill in knowledge gaps left by the documentation, or just learn more about programming concepts. Nothing is hidden.