I’ve become worse at programming
If you'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 "sphere" become higher the "volume" 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 "halfway" 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'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'll learn a bit more and discover there's more to learn.  The more you learn the farther the horizon moves away.  It will feel like you're getting worse. Just like finding out you live in a valley.<p>What'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'll get better.  It will however, take a while.<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_of_an_n-ball#Low_dimensions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_of_an_n-ball#Low_dimens...</a>