I’ve become worse at programming
If you&#x27;re an explorer and you live in a small valley, then you will slowly begin to believe yourself a better explorer as time goes on.  But one day you will get to the edge of the valley and look out onto a vast landscape and believe that you have become a worse explorer.<p>Checkout the volume of N-balls [1].  As the number of dimensions in a &quot;sphere&quot; become higher the &quot;volume&quot; of the sphere becomes smaller when you compare it to a hypercube of the same dimensional count.  This is another way to saying that as the number of dimensions increases the closer the &quot;halfway&quot; point of the volume of the N-ball gets to the edge of the N-ball.<p>Programming (and software engineering by extension) involves a lot of orthogonal issues.  We can imagine this so be a really high dimensional space.  My theory is that whenever you&#x27;re in situation that can be represented by a high dimensional space you will learn a bit of knowledge and think you know something.  Then you&#x27;ll learn a bit more and discover there&#x27;s more to learn.  The more you learn the farther the horizon moves away.  It will feel like you&#x27;re getting worse. Just like finding out you live in a valley.<p>What&#x27;s really happening though is that your increase in skill is allowing you to realize how small your world was all along.  Keep learning and trying and you&#x27;ll get better.  It will however, take a while.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Volume_of_an_n-ball#Low_dimensions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Volume_of_an_n-ball#Low_dimens...</a>