You aren't supposed to do it this way.  You are supposed to be in a sterile room, with no surprises, a thick plan, and a highly detailed map.  But web development is sometimes very different from developing indoors.  Often you are dealing with other people's oversights and follies, and since you can't just rewrite everything, you have to figure out ways to code around a thing rather than just burning the village down.  You are in the wild, stalking the ephemeral.

It is the high drama of a solitary person solving the seemingly unsolvable. You are alone, pushing through a blizzard of confusion.  You don't know how you got here, and you don't know how you are going to get out.  You have several options -- Google, your Safari bookshelf where you can get unlimited technical books, or you can field a question on one of your lists you participate in.  If the monster you are facing down is abstract enough, you can ask a mathematician.

Panic rises, you run ahead of it.  First you Google.  Luck is with you, you get a couple of good prospects.  You pick one, on a hunch.