These aren’t things historians have had hundreds of years to document, but several thousand or more people have been on this space long before I was looking at it more intently than I could ever and I still come across things from time to time that weren’t known to exist.
Likewise, in the past month I’ve spent an unfortunate amount of time reading laws and board bylaws and it doesn’t take long to find long forgotten rules that are being actively violated. Even outside of code, documentation is hard.
> And then there's also a kind of notion that everything is there online when in point of fact lots of information about the past still only exists in archives
<https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alan-taylor/>
* of the audio version, that is; at that timestamp in the YouTube video, they're discussing the question "How will large language models change historical research"—interviewee's response: he doesn't know
There are many details to the craft that are hinted at in variety of formats, (youtube videos, blog entries, etc) but the clear truths are not clearly stated anywhere. These are stored in the minds and practices of artisans.
Without some specific clues, a real historian would not be looking for Bram Stoker stories in an 1890 issue of the Daily Express Dublin Edition. He'd be skimming through the archives of many of the newspapers & magazines published in an era and geographic region, cataloging authors & stories & poems. "Success" would be just compiling a well-done catalog. 15 minutes of fame in the popular press could equally well result from finding some unknown early work by James Joyce, or Winston Churchill, or George Bernard Shaw, or Oscar Wilde, or Yeats, or ...