... I'm still a dumbass...
I wonder... if after 10 years... will I stop being one after 20? 30?
But the feeling of being a dumbass may never leave you entirely. You will need to learn to control that some, and not always let on to everyone around you how dumb you feel at all times. But... honestly, the folks I've worked with who never ever admit to feeling dumb or doing dumb things - they STILL make the same mistakes, often more, and seem to have no capacity for self-reflection or skills improvement. So... understand your "I'm a dumbass" feeling may just be part of you pointing out that you can get better, and help you find opportunities to improve.
As you say, self reflection and skill improvement.
I honestly think it's why I'm a good programmer...
That... and being lazy. I'll work for weeks to make processes easier. IE: a release process that used to be manual and fraught with mistakes is now, more or less, button clicks and powershell scripts.
I hope you find that place in your life too. It's a lot of relief when it happens
While that may be true, you're less of a dumbass now, thanks to experiences. If you were to guide a junior developer now, you'd probably walk them back from a dozen sharp edges, thanks to your experience, but we tend to discount that.
This will have taken your younger self , twice or more to understand the problem and come up with solution
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...