There are absolutely things I was better at back then, mostly because then I spent all my time doing nothing but programming and now a lot of time goes to other activities (meetings, planning, writing, etc).

Well, yeah, good point. I guess I should temper that with if you're still a full time professional software engineer. I wouldn't expect it to apply to someone that moves partially of fully to a different type of job or activity.

It isn't as simple as better skilled or not. Many times having more understanding about the problem may open your eyes to better / simpler design, or you now don't have any rushing matter that fuel bad design in the past.

I disagree with this perspective. You of yesteryear is in many ways just another programmer you have to work with; if that makes you cringe, you may be taking a bit too much pride in your work.

> You of yesteryear is in many ways just another programmer you have to work with

Taking that idea to the extreme of not having any feeling of ownership or pride (or lack thereof) in your past work seems rather silly to me. It wasn't just some other programmer, it was you.

I'm not saying you should cringe because the code is bad, but because you should have a sense of "well, I could have saved myself some trouble or made this cleaner/more obvious if I only knew then what I know now."

Or maybe you cringe at your old 'good' code because you spent too much time on things that ultimately didn't matter.