By curious coincidence, I learned a lot about craftsmanship from two people who built fences.

One was a country fencer - a quiet man who did a physically brutal job and took great pride in getting it right. You could look along the posts running up a hill and they were dead straight - no mean feat, considering they were set in holes drilled with a tractor-mounted auger and refilled by hand with shovel and fencing bar (like a crowbar with a blunt end for compacting soil). He didn't take shortcuts and he did little things to make the end result a little better. I hammered in hundreds of fencing staples on the posts he'd set.

The other was a carpenter - rarely stopped talking unless using noisy power tools, worked fast but without haste. He measured twice, cut once; and checked everything was true before nailing them fast. I worked with him to build a picket fence. He cut and fit all the bars and palings, then pulled them apart again so we could paint over the cut ends - a detail that would never be seen but hugely extended the life of the fence.

Both men would do the job right when nobody was watching, they'd take care of details even if only they could see them. But it didn't make them slow, they didn't brag, they just did a bloody good job and got on with it.

I read a lot of psychology and philosophy books, don't know if it's wisdom, because wisdom for me at least comes mostly from experience. Knowledge on the other hand is something you can learn.

As a matter of fact I'm a big pro existentialism guy in philosophy other might prefer utilitarianism or a more binary evaluation of life in line with high idealistic principles.

So if I take your example and abstract it to work ethics, I got mine from working in a monastery: "if you fix it you better do it right, so you don't have to worry or redo it later on". But than there is always the business side or the social side of work where you have to compromise a lot.

So is there any wisdom in it ? i don't know! All I've experienced is that we live in constant chaos pretending to be in control and longing for security, hence constantly lying and justifying ourselves that we actually can control reality, which we obviously can't because at least at the moment we're stuck in 4 dimensions pretending to understand a universe which we probably always only see from the inside never able to verify the difference between confusing causation with correlation because there are no absolutes outside our self-defined frameworks.

If you take this in account that we're actually all just trying to coop with our realities and take away the absolutes of good and bad, at least I don't get that stressed anymore.

And even if i get in rage because I can have a temper and I tend to be anal about stuff, I always reflect about my issues first before blaming others because ... there is no absolute truth and maybe i overlooked something and only because things are important to me they don't have to be important to others.

That's kind of a non technical wisdom i guess ... wouldn't call wisdom in the end just a philosophy.

This isn't a specific story, but I remember slapping myself on the forehead the first time I heard the phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none." I used to want to learn everything, from web dev to drawing to cooking and beyond. That kind of enthusiasm is great, but it's so impractical.

The web evolves way too fast for any one person to be able to keep up with everything. Reluctantly, I've learned to accept that fact. I still occasionally fall into the habit of chasing the latest frameworks or tools, but I now put much more value on mastering whatever works for me. I'm pretty well dedicated to learning React at this point. I'm interested in Vue and curious what's going on with Angular, but there aren't enough hours in a day for me to give all of them the attention they deserve.

In the morning, when I'm reading through newsletters, I force myself to ignore anything that isn't related to what I'm currently learning or working on. Of course I want to know about Methods for Controlling Spacing in Web Typography, but it's probably more important for me to give my time and attention to Plain D3 Code and React Working Together.

Choices are important, and we have to be smart enough and confident enough to not choose everything.

Node can be debugged pretty efficiently with node inspector.