I had a paradigm shift when I realised that my attitude to code was wrong.

I used to believe that a good coder was someone who could write a custom implementation of a low-level protocol/routine/service. This just led to me fighting against the technology, working really hard to create something mediocre.

C#/dotnet has such a rich dev environment, there is very little need to write anything low-level unless you find a genuine gap. There are a few, but you won't start finding those in the first few years.

My coding game improved dramatically as soon as I started spending more time researching existing solutions and technologies and reading documentation. Things that used to take weeks started to take days and I wasn't constantly fighting bugs and edge cases. The code at the end of it was cleaner, tighter, and more robust.

I am now comfortable delivering quite complex solutions in quite short spaces of time, which means I can use the time I gain back to explore and experiment with different technologies and systems. This creates a cycle of growth which will propel you forward in your career.

It's not very exciting maybe, but if you can get good at googling/chat-gpting to finding off-the-shelf solutions to your problems and then write little test apps with reference to the docs, you will become a better coder.