An honest list. I've removed nothing.

• how to center a div
• tar extract specific file
• why is my container exit code 137
• is it ok to leave fan on all night
• difference between COPY and ADD dockerfile
• how long do cats live indoors
• git undo last commit keep changes
• regex match balanced parentheses
• how to tell if a cat likes you
• postgres on conflict do update syntax
• what does OOMKilled mean
• bangalore rain forecast week
• javascript array sort stable or not
• how to say no to a meeting politely
• git log search for string in history

The one that gets a reaction

"How to center a div," obviously. Nine years of writing software.

I've stopped being embarrassed by this, and not because of the usual reassurance. It's because of what I noticed about which things I look up.

The pattern

Everything I searched falls into one of two groups.

Syntax I use rarely. tar flags, ON CONFLICT, the COPY/ADD distinction. There's no value in holding these. They're cheap to look up, unambiguous when found, and the cost of a wrong guess is a confusing error.

Concepts I actually needed to understand. "What does OOMKilled mean" wasn't really a search for a definition. It was the start of understanding how the kernel kills processes under memory pressure, what exit code 137 encodes, and why the restart loop looked the way it did.

The first group is lookup. The second is learning. They feel identical in a search bar and they are not remotely the same activity.

What expertise turned out to be

Not a bigger cache of memorised syntax.

It's knowing which group a question belongs to. Knowing that "why is my container exit code 137" has a short answer and a long one, and which you need right now. Knowing that "regex match balanced parentheses" has a real answer and also a "you probably shouldn't" answer, and being able to tell which applies.

Juniors and seniors search roughly the same amount, in my experience. What differs is how fast they recognise a bad answer.

And the cat ones

Four cat-adjacent searches in one week, for a cat I do not own.

I'm aware of what this looks like.