[knurdle]

Just to throw another comment in the pool. I've been playing around with computers and writing code now for about 25 years.

I've been playing with computers longer than some of the guys I've hired have been alive.

They are really smart guys, they are way smarter than I was at their age.

But it's just hard to beat experience and just being around means you've experienced a lot of different things. There's stuff I know where I didn't even realize I knew it until the context of that problem comes up and then all of a sudden, a little flicker goes off in my brain and it seems familiar to something I did x years ago and I can remember why it works like that.

This actually comes up all the time in debugging when something breaks. I've done it enough that the patterns are all familiar and I can pinpoint what broke a lot faster than someone more junior.