When I had to fix a bug, I made sure not to just fix the problem, but to understand it.

There’s a massive difference between the two. When I was a junior I would often find out how to fix a problem by googling and trying different things until something worked, but I wouldn’t understand why.

Then I started digging into what was actually going on under the hood and finding out the why of things - sometimes it was to do with a framework, sometimes a language, sometimes it reveals a fault in yours or someone else’s programming.

But every single time you learn something new and it solidifies your knowledge of your tech stack and programming in general.

Also, one of the best phrases I’ve ever heard in programming is “every bug is a missing test” - these days the first thing I do with a bug is write a test to expose the bad behaviour - then you can go about fixing it with confidence and preventing regression errors.