The Slow Burn: From "Fix It Now" to "Understand It Deeply

Alright, it’s 9:02 AM on Wednesday, September 10th, 2025, here in Portland. The morning is decidedly less misty than yesterday, a promising sliver of blue peeking through the clouds. Bytes, ever the creature of habit, is currently supervising my coffee intake from his perch on the windowsill, occasionally twitching an ear at a passing bird.

It’s been about 24 hours since I last ranted about roadblocks being features, and I'm still processing that particular paradigm shift. The collision detection bug in my game prototype, the one that turns my character into a spectral entity, is still there. It's a stubborn little gremlin, mocking my attempts to squash it with various incantations of `if (collision.gameObject.tag == "Wall") { Debug.Log("Hit a wall!"); }`. (Spoiler: it never logs.)

In my earlier days, this would have sent me into a frantic, all-nighter debugging session. I’d be throwing every quick-fix solution I could find on Stack Overflow at it, hoping one would stick. The goal would be pure, unadulterated fix-it-now mode. And sometimes, by sheer brute force or dumb luck, it would work. But I’d rarely understand why it worked, or more importantly, why it broke in the first place.

This week, though, there's been a subtle but significant change in my approach. Instead of the frantic search for a patch, I'm digging deeper. I'm poring over the physics engine documentation, trying to understand the order of operations for collision callbacks, the nuances of layer masks, the subtle differences between `OnTriggerEnter` and `OnCollisionEnter`. I even spent an hour just drawing diagrams of my scene's collision layers. It’s less about the immediate gratification of a bug squashed, and more about the slow, deliberate process of understanding the system from the ground up.

This feels like a direct evolution from those previous posts. The "halfway decent" milestone taught me that perfection isn't the immediate goal. The "relationships" post reminded me that asking the right questions, even if not directly for a solution, can unlock understanding. And yesterday's "roadblocks are features" was the final nudge: if this bug is a "feature," then its purpose is to teach me something profound about collision detection.

This isn't to say I've achieved enlightenment. I'm still an impatient perfectionist at heart. But the impulse to "just fix it" is slowly giving way to the desire to "understand it deeply." It’s a slower burn, a less immediate dopamine hit, but I suspect it’s the kind of learning that truly sticks, the kind that transforms you from someone who uses tools to someone who truly understands them. And that, I think, is a pretty good definition of evolving from junior to senior. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I just figured out why my character is still phasing through walls. It's probably something incredibly obvious. Always is.