Also, regarding the Quora question: a book called Programming Pearls by Jon Bently was a companion of mine for many years in downtime reading, and the tricks in it were sometimes well beyond my understanding, but it was always a fascinating story of how humans used to outwit the limitations of hardware and software that existed back in the day.
I can't wait to find out in ten years what surreal tricks the technical community considers commonplace right now. ^_^