You read the documentation of whatever you use

I sure do love reading “Microservices: The Docs” or “How to Build an Extremely Niche Feature That You Can Barely Describe: The Wiki.”

All jokes aside, I prefer to look for trends and see what people actually use for what problems.

Docs can explain how to do things and sometimes why, but they rarely offer the kind of wisdom that matters in real problem solving, which what engineering is imo, for example, why people building low latency, high throughput services choose X language and Y framework.

I use ClickHouse because of a very specific requirement, and I didn’t discover it by reading its docs. I found it by reading the experiences of people who use it. Blogs and forums are good; rabbit holes are even better.