You also getting better at owning mistakes without making them sound like a big deal. You just say stuff like “that’s an interesting edge you’d only learn by querying a table with millions of rows” instead of anxiously shitting your pants in shame.
Last Friday learned that Postgres (and apparently MySQL) will effectively ignore an index in a column when combining “ORDER BY … LIMIT …” and “WHERE some_column IN some_array”. I had introduced a query that timed out on a critical prod table , fixed it by removing the limit, and turned it into a teaching moment to others who could have made the same mistake: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8909163/avoid-full-table...
This will have taken your younger self , twice or more to understand the problem and come up with solution