I'm amazed at my own programming progress over the past 10 years. I used to read these posts in awe of how people knew how to do such fascinating things that seemed so magical to me. 5 years ago I got myself a raspberry pi and an Arduino starter kit and just started playing around with them. I learned python by practicing on leetcode and other sites and I'm able to recognize a lot of libraries and patterns in his code. It's a bit less magical but I have a much more refined appreciation for posts like this.
Next step is realizing that most code is a liability and you will begin to loathe anything "smart". I'm at this step right now. I'm curious if any graybeard out there can share what the next step is.
This is extremely accurate in my experience (besides trusting only myself, I don’t even trust myself). In general, the engineers I work with are much less “techie” than a lot of people I know outside of work.