Ask HN: Get Better at Hacking?

How do i become a better hacker?

One year ago, I asked my professor this and they recommended contributing to open source. Which at the time seemed scary but I stuck with it and now I’m able to comfortably solve relatively contained problems.

I want to move onto complicated changes like core performance optimizations and fixing hard difficult bugs. I find that I’m often stuck and don’t know what to do when the problems are hidden in large codebases.

For example, I was trying to work on a memory leak which some issue was reporting. So I opened valgrind and it shows me where the allocation takes place. Ok great. This is allocated when the program is initializing and is supposed to be free’d at the very end. I look where the program exits and work back but I don’t know where freeing this memory would be appropriate.

how do i train myself to solve problems like these?