> if you do it often enough it becomes very Matrix like, “blonde, brunette” but with ip packets and C structs

At one job I used to spend a lot of time looking at crash dumps from a game, and at some point I was able to pretty reliably identify various objects in the engine (models, textures, physics volumes..etc) just from how they looked in a hex view of the crash dumps.

If its a system you're familiar with enough, it really is Matrix-like as you say.