I'm 38 and I started programming when I was 10, and I still sometimes cringe when looking at code I wrote a year ago. This is the natural state of things as lo

I'm 38 and I started programming when I was 10, and I still sometimes cringe when looking at code I wrote a year ago. This is the natural state of things as long as you keep improving. You should only panic when this stops happening. See also: John Carmack's recent QuakeCon speech where he talks about basically the same thing in the context of looking back at the Doom3 era id code compared to the Rage era code.