Assuming I don't know shit yet (but that sometimes I do know something).
When I was younger, I hoped I knew pretty much everything I needed to know. Oh boy, that was hard. That effectively cut me off learning because if you don't admit you don't know something you can never learn anything. My learning was diverted to many impractical programming mindgames instead of bare hands-on programming.
Luckily, programming is a very binary thing. A program either works or it doesn't. If you don't know something or you don't understand something, you can't solve the problem. Enough of the cases where someone smarter had written code that I just couldn't have written the same way or as elegantly finally returned me back on my feet.
Then I dipped slightly to the other side of the axis. I assume I don't know anything about some problem or new piece of code until I study it enough to confirm that certain similarities to what I've seen before do exist. The downside is that it takes time until I find my confidence but eventually the magic will dissolve, I see how the program works, and I finally touch the code and start making modifications. But I remain very careful unless I'm really, really, really sure I know better to make a big modification.
While it is stressful to the ego, for me it's a much better way.
When I was younger, I hoped I knew pretty much everything I needed to know. Oh boy, that was hard. That effectively cut me off learning because if you don't admit you don't know something you can never learn anything. My learning was diverted to many impractical programming mindgames instead of bare hands-on programming.
Luckily, programming is a very binary thing. A program either works or it doesn't. If you don't know something or you don't understand something, you can't solve the problem. Enough of the cases where someone smarter had written code that I just couldn't have written the same way or as elegantly finally returned me back on my feet.
Then I dipped slightly to the other side of the axis. I assume I don't know anything about some problem or new piece of code until I study it enough to confirm that certain similarities to what I've seen before do exist. The downside is that it takes time until I find my confidence but eventually the magic will dissolve, I see how the program works, and I finally touch the code and start making modifications. But I remain very careful unless I'm really, really, really sure I know better to make a big modification.
While it is stressful to the ego, for me it's a much better way.