I think in your case there is an incredibly specific and practical way to solve this problem. Books and online courses. You already have great hands on skills

I think in your case there is an incredibly specific and practical way to solve this problem. Books and online courses. You already have great hands on skills. If you have the attention span for it you can improve your overall model of the system by reading books like Designing Data Intensive Applications. A good place to start for a reading list would be https://teachyourselfcs.com/ https://teachyourselfcs.com/. When you have an aptitude for something there are sort of two natural directions you can go. It's possible to settle into a sort of "expert beginner" stage where you stop at a local maximum. The other option is to take the leverage that you already have and lever up again, hard. Those obscure and really useful programming tricks that you like, read some books on those too. See if you can find a conference talk where someone describes one. You probably know everything they're going to say anyway...except maybe one more trick that you can glean from that talk. This is the path to Mastery. You can also dig into some of the more academic content on youtube like MIT's algorithm courses stuff like that. But really I'd recommend just scratching your own itch. In a lot of cases the answer to imposter's syndrome is "hey yeah, we all get it. Perfectly normal." In this instance though I suspect doing some reading will go a long way towards making you more comfortable.